Reflections on the Cross

Mark 15: 25 – 39

 

A couple of weeks ago, in a magazine about current events in churches, a photograph grabbed my attention.  It was a picture of the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Paul in downtown Boston, near Boston Common.  The church building has a new symbol on the front.  It’s in a place above the front door that architects call a pediment.  It’s a large sculpture of a seashell.  The sculpture is gleaming aluminum on a bright blue background.  If you look carefully, you’ll see that it’s a cross section of a chambered nautilus.

 

Religious people have had mixed reactions to the chambered nautilus sculpture.  Seashells are not traditional Christian symbols.  Some people say that decorating a church with a seashell is “theologically squishy.”  But others say that the graceful sculpture makes the building look more inviting, more welcoming to people who don’t know much about Christianity.  A lot of students and professionals live in the area around the church.  Many of them have no religious affiliation.  Church leaders at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Paul hope that the chambered nautilus will show the beauty of God’s creation.  They hope that the beautiful shell will represent the God we Christians worship in a fresh way.  They hope it will help convey our message better than a traditional symbol like a cross (The Christian Century, 3/19/14, p. 17).

 

For most of my life, I’ve been immersed in the Christian faith.  I was baptized as a baby, went to Sunday School faithfully, got confirmed without hesitation, and was active in the high school youth group.  So it’s hard for me to imagine how someone who doesn’t know much about our faith might look at a church.  But I wonder, what would a seashell say to someone walking by that church building?  Would that beautiful shell invite them to come in, to seek more beauty inside?

 

What about our more traditional symbol, the cross?  What does the cross say to someone walking by?  What does the cross say about what we believe as Christians?  What does the cross say about who God is for us, about how God works, in the world and in our lives?  We have a particular understanding of God and of who we are as God’s people.  For me, the cross expresses that better than any other symbol we might use.

 

Other religions use different symbols.  The symbol of Judaism is a six pointed star; for Islam, it’s a crescent.  A common symbol for Buddhism is the lotus.  All of these are images of beauty.  But the traditional symbol for Christianity is  the cross.  The cross is not an image of beauty.  The cross evokes darkness; it reminds us of the darkest day of all: the day Jesus died.

 

The cross is a symbol of execution.  In the heyday of the Roman Empire, the cross was the horrible, humiliating punishment reserved for the most despised criminals.  The cross is a reminder of brutality and pain.  To me, though, the cross also reminds us that God is always with us, even in the midst of brutality and pain.

 

This morning I’d like to reflect with you on the cross, on what it means for us.  There are different ways of looking at the cross.  One way says that  Jesus’ death on the cross is God’s judgment on a sinful world.  Some Christians understand Jesus’ death on the cross as the price that had to be paid for human sin.

According to this idea, God created human beings to be perfect and we messed it up.  This idea says that God is very angry with us and demands that something be done.  A price has to be paid and the price is Jesus’ death.  Theologians call this substitutionary atonement.

 

For some Christians, it may be satisfying, but for me it raises some questions.  For one thing, this idea requires a very angry God: a God who would be so angry at his creation that he would demand the death of his own Son.  This is a God who uses violence.  That’s not who God is for me.  For me, the God who created us has great hopes for us.  Yes God is disappointed when we don’t live in the way God created us to live.  But God does not demand that some kind of price be paid.  God does not demand that blood be shed as some kind of “eye for an eye” retribution.  The God I worship is not a God of violence, but a God of infinite love.

 

As I see it, Jesus’ death was not the will of an angry God.  Jesus’ death was the result of his confrontation with the evil of the world.  Because of who Jesus was and what he did, he came into conflict with the authorities.  He came into conflict with the religious authorities because for them being faithful meant following every detail of the law.  For Jesus, faithfulness was more about loving our neighbors than following the law.  So he came into conflict with the religious authorities.  Jesus had conflict with the Roman authorities because they wanted to maintain at all costs their power over the people of Palestine.  Jesus was a threat to their hold on power because he proclaimed a new reality where the first would be last, and the one who was a servant of all would be first in God’s Kingdom.

 

Because of who Jesus was and what he did, the authorities – both religious and political – were out to get him.  They arrested, tried him, and put him to death.  In our gospel passage for today, Mark gives a vivid description of this.  It’s a story of pain and loss.  It’s a difficult story to hear, especially for people in our world today.  It’s a story of something bad happening to a good person.

 

We live in a world that doesn’t know what to do when bad things happen.  We live in a world that doesn’t want to even admit that bad things happen.  In our world, people want to change the subject when something bad happens.  We see this in our personal lives.  If we’re going through a loss, the people we know – except maybe our really good friends – don’t want to hear much about it.  They might feel uncomfortable because they don’t know what to say when the news isn’t good. They don’t know what to say when the doctors tell us there’s nothing more they can do.

 

Of course friends try to be helpful.  They speak with the best intentions.  Sometimes, when the news isn’t good, they try to find some divine purpose in the midst of all that misery.

 

So maybe, in the face of a terrible loss, a friend might tell you, “Don’t worry – God never gives us more than we can handle.”  But I’m not sure I could say that.  I’m not sure I could go along with the statement that God never gives us more than we can handle.  It seems to me that sometimes life throws things at us that are more than we can handle.  I wouldn’t say those things are gifts from God.

 

Life is tough at times and in our lives, we can get to a place where we feel completely overwhelmed.  When we’re at the end of our rope, does it help to hear that God never gives us more than we can handle?  I don’t think so.    It’s like saying that we should be able to handle whatever suffering comes our way.  But some situations do feel like too much to handle: sometimes we might feel as if God has abandoned us.

 

We see in our gospel passage that Jesus knew what it was like to feel abandoned. On the cross, he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”  It’s the cry of someone utterly forsaken.  Jesus knows the anguish of feeling abandoned by God.  Jesus, who had been filled with the presence of God, now feels nothing but the absence of God, a great emptiness.  It’s something like you and I might experience, at our darkest moments, moments when we are overwhelmed by pain and loss.  We might ask, where is God in all this misery?

 

For Jesus, the cross was a moment of deep despair.  This deep despair, though, painful as it was, was central to his purpose among us.  He went through the anguish of the cross to show us the nature of the God he called Father.  Jesus had friends, like Peter, who would have been just as glad to see him skip the cross.  Peter didn’t want his Lord to go through something so horrible.   He would have been happy to live with Jesus to a ripe old age.

 

But if Jesus had gone along with Peter’s wishes, he wouldn’t have fulfilled God’s purpose.  If he had avoided the cross, he would have shown that there is a limit to God’s love; that there is a line beyond which that love will not go.  He would have shown that God’s love does not go all the way to the cross; that God’s love stops short of death; that some things are just too horrible to endure, and when it comes to those horrible things we’re on our own.

 

But on the cross, Jesus went the whole way.  He went through the worst that life could throw at him.  He went beyond any limits that might be placed on God’s love.  He showed that no situation is beyond the reach of that love.  Nothing, not even death on a cross, is too much for that love to bear.  Jesus showed that God is with us, even in the worst of times.

 

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin served as chaplain of Yale University, as well as pastor of Riverside Church in New York City.  Coffin suffered a terrible loss when his young adult son, Alex, was killed one night, when the car he was driving plunged into the waters of Boston Harbor.  For many of Coffin’s friends, it raised painful questions about God.

 

Coffin preached a sermon about Alex’s death.  He said, “The night after Alex died, I was sitting in the living room of my sister’s house outside Boston.  The front door opened and in came a nice looking, middle aged woman carrying about eighteen [casseroles].  When she saw me, she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen.  Over her shoulder, she said sadly, ‘I just don’t understand the will of God.’  Coffin says, “Instantly I was up and in hot pursuit, swarming all over her.  ‘I’ll say you don’t,’” [he said].

 

Coffin goes on, “The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is, ‘It is the will of God.’  Never do we know enough to say that.  My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first to break.  [God’s tears were the first of all of our tears to fall].”

 

For me, the cross is not about God’s exacting a price from a sinful world.  For me, the cross says that God is with us even in the most horrific times.  Because of the cross, we know that nothing the world can throw at us will separate us from God’s love.  In God’s hands an instrument of death becomes an instrument of hope: hope in a God who is always with us, hope strong enough to raise Jesus from the dead, hope in a God who is always working to bring about resurrection.

 

Author Ted Loder puts it this way:

“As Christians, we believe that God was, in some mysterious way, in or with Jesus as he was crucified.  Since we believe that God was with him, then we can also believe that God is with us when our own suffering comes, and that God is in some way able to bring a kind of resurrection out of it”  (Loder, Loaves, Fishes, and Leftovers, p. 42).

 

On the cross, Jesus went the whole way.  He went through the worst that life could throw at him.  He went beyond any limits that might be placed on God’s love, to show that no situation is beyond the reach of that love.  Nothing, not even death on a cross, is too much for that love to bear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rev. Elva Merry Pawle

April 7, 2019

Lent 5