Texts: Leviticus 16:20-22; Mark 4:30-34; Colossians 2:13-15
Speaker: Joel Miller
Maybe you’ve seen one of those posters or bumper stickers with the symbols of the major world religions side by side.
There is the cresent moon and star – Islam. There’s the six-pointed Star of David, or the seven-candled Menorah, Judaism. There’s the dharma wheel with the eight spokes, each representing one aspect of the noble path: Buddhism. There is the balance and interconnectedness of the Yin and Yang symbol of Taoism. There is the AUM symbol of Hinduism that looks kind of like a letter or letters but represents the primal vibration of the universe.
Stars and lights and circles and interconnectedness and unity. Oh, and also, among the others, there is an instrument of public humiliation, torture, and capital punishment. The Latin Cross. Christianity.
What’s that sesame street game? One of these things is not like the others…
For better or for worse, of all the images that could have come to represent the community that formed around Jesus of Nazareth, it’s the cross that prevailed.
I’m wearing one right now.
We aren’t big cross people in our worship space, but there is one front and center each Sunday, even if it is a bit understated.
I’ve come to think of the cross as the ultimate parable of Jesus.
In Mark chapter 4 Jesus tells a series of parables, including the one about the kingdom of God being like the smallest of all seeds – the mustard seed. You can barely see it, but then it grows into a great shrub where all the birds can nest.
That would have been a cool symbol for Christianity. You just put a little dot on the page and that’s all you need, right there.
After this, Mark says, “With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables.”
Parables aren’t a formula to be explained or a puzzle to be solved. They are more a story to be lived within, dense with meaning. A seed is dense with meaning, dense with life. The Parable of the Good Samaritan and Prodigal Son are stories to be lived within. The Parable of the Cross is a dense story that we are living within. And like all parables, there are different interpretations.
Today is the first Sunday of an extended series on peace. We’re asking a big question: What might it mean to live a “courageous peace witness?” So I thought we could start by naming something we have to deal with as Christian people. Something foundational. Something that ought to be a perpetual shock every time anyone sees it. Which is this: The symbol of our tradition is violent. It puts the human story of domination and cruelty front and center. That’s what crosses were for. Crosses were for preserving power by publicly broadcasting the suffering and humiliation of those who challenge the order that power maintains.
That’s not a parable. That’s just brute fact. That was the function, the job description, of the cross.
Historians have spilled a lot of ink over what the historical Jesus may or may not have said or done, but something they pretty much all agree on is that he was one of the many 1st century folks who died on a Roman cross. But the meaning of that event is – and probably always will be – up for grabs.
Like a parable.
The writers of the New Testament start to unpack its density. They use the frameworks of their time and they don’t speak with one voice. Church history has included sublime articulations of the love of God expressed through the outpouring of infinite love and solidarity with human suffering through Christ on the cross. And it has included times when the church has looked a lot like Rome, inflicting crosses on others. The prevailing theology of American evangelicalism sees God as requiring a violent sacrifice of his son in order to forgive sinful humanity. If I follow the argument, it seems to be saying Jesus, on the cross, essentially saves us – from God.
The parable of the cross includes awful violence. And, it contains the seed for subverting the very story of violence and domination and cruelty for which the cross stood. It offers a way of being human, a way of understanding God, oriented toward life and mercy and transformation toward beloved community. What if the Parable of the Cross of Jesus means no more crosses?
This interpretation has been around a long time. The problem of violence – which is really a problem of misguided power – is presented as foundational to scripture itself.
The intuition of Genesis, from the beginning, is that violence is baked into the emergence of these hairless primates, fresh on the scene of creation. The first human death is not someone dying peacefully in their old age, but a murder. There’s one human family, and Cain kills his brother Abel.
Cain is afraid he’ll be murdered right back, so God pledges that anyone who kills Cain will be avenged 7 times – not just them but 7 of their family members will be taken out. A couple generations later a guy named Lamech pledges that if anyone hurts him, he will be avenged 77 times.
Things escalate so quickly that just a few chapters later it says the earth was filled with violence. And we’re only 6 chapters into Genesis. God tells Noah to build an ark to save his family and some animals because God is going to destroy the earth with a flood and essentially reboot this creation project.
You don’t have to believe these stories literally happened to get the message. The Parable of the Founding Family suggests all violence is committed against one’s own kindred. The characters of Cain and Lamech show the logic of escalating violence and misguided power. The Parable of the Flood raises the question of Divine violence. Is this how God counters human violence? Is this how God saves the world? Can you wash away violence by being the most violent? Is this what Divine power looks like? And are we impressed?
The law of Exodus tries to stop the escalation of violence by limiting it to one eye for one eye. A tooth for a tooth. It sounds bad, but one for one is a big improvement on 7 for 1, or 77 for 1.
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus isn’t exactly a handbook for nonviolence, but it does have one of the most fascinating ancient rituals for practicing forgiveness and maintaining social harmony. Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest would take a live goat, and put both hands on its head. He would recite over the goat all the sins of the people of Israel from the past year. All the hurts, all the wrongs committed, all the trespasses, all the evils. All those sins would be transferred onto the goat, which means they were released from the people. Then the priest would send the goat away into the wilderness. It was encouraged to escape. It was the scapegoat.
Maybe not a great job for the goat. But it was allowed to live. There was no angry God demanding its sacrifice. No animals were harmed in this ritual.
This ritual recognized something that has been explored pretty in depth with psychology and sociology. When tension builds up in a group, when the threat of all-against-all rises, one of the ways to hold the group together is to focus all that anxiety on a common object, or person, or group – usually an outsider, or the most vulnerable, or you could blame the king for everything that’s gone wrong and get a new one. The key is that everyone agrees that the king or the immigrant, or the gays, or the communists, are indeed the cause of all the problems. And because it actually does unite the group, with righteous energy, it seems to work. Scapegoating is a powerful social force for a certain kind of peace.
Unless of course you’re the goat, or the immigrant. Unless you’re the one absorbing the sins of the whole group, in which case, you very well might end up cast out of the community, into the wilderness. You very well might end up on a cross. Bearing all those sins in your body.
This doesn’t actually address the underlying work of reconciliation and peacemaking and forgiveness. It just temporarily releases the tension of the group, to start the cycle all over again, to create another cross.
Peter once asked Jesus if he should forgive someone seven times. Jesus replied he should forgive 77 times. He wasn’t just pulling numbers out of the air. In light of the escalating violence that Genesis illuminates – Cain’s 7 times vengeance, Lamech’s 77 times – Jesus is suggesting a program of deescalation, disarming human desire. Or better yet, he’s suggesting something like reverse revenge. The energy and multiplication of violence is met with the energy and multiplication of transformative love. This is power. This, the Christian tradition suggests is Divine power.
When Jesus goes to the cross, he occupies the space of the scapegoat. Not because God needs a blood sacrifice, but because we have always needed to sacrifice others to keep ourselves feeling righteous. And Jesus exposes this, bears the sins of misguided power, undermines its logic, and offers another way. Even though the cross was intended to make a public spectacle of the person on the cross through its violence, Colossians says that Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.” (2:15).
The cross disarms. Which, in one way of seeing is a ludicrous contradiction. And in another way of seeing is a revolutionary transformation.
And so we are saved not just from personal wrongdoings, but we are saved from this whole way of building a false peace. We are saved from needing to cast out anyone. We are saved from scapegoating. We are saved from building crosses and preserving our own power by putting others on them. As the apostle Paul wrote over and over again, it is something within us that needs to be crucified, so we can stop projecting it onto someone else. And it is through that death of the old way of being that we are raised with Christ and become part of a new creation. A new Genesis. This is the work of the Holy Spirit.
At least that’s one way of interpreting the parable of the cross. It’s a way that has the peacefulness of Divine Love at its center, with no need for a vengeful God. It’s a way that exposes human sin. It’s a solid foundation for a religion seeking to be a courageous peace witness in a world still making scapegoats, still making crosses.
Maybe the Spirit of Christ give us courage.