The Crucified God

August 28, 2005; 15th Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 17, Year A; Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Matthew 16:21-28) – From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you." But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

Then Jesus told his disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? "For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."

 

Last week we heard Jesus' challenging question: "Who do you think the Son of Man is?" And Peter exclaims in a moment of triumphant intuition: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!" Jesus commends him, "Blessed are you." You got it, Peter. Then Jesus gives him the keys to the kingdom and the power to bind and loose. It's a heady moment.

This week we hear Jesus sketching a little more detail about the kind of Messiah he is. This Messiah, he says, must undergo great suffering. This Son of the living God must be killed. "God forbid it, Lord!" cried Peter. "This must never happen to you." You didn't get it, did you Peter?

Peter's head was full of the conventional images of the Messiah. The Messiah would be the one God would send to restore power to Israel. The Messiah would throw out the oppressive Romans and right the wrongs of a cruel world. Peter's head was full of triumph and glory, and maybe even a bit of vengeance. After all, that's what everyone thought about the Messiah. It's in your Bible. The last thing anyone expected from a Messiah was suffering and death.

It's also one of the last things most people would think about God. God is supposed to be powerful and perfect, God's realm is where there is no suffering or death. Ultimate power. Eternal life. A crucified God seems impossible to imagine. If God can die how can that be God? Even worse -- to die on a cross. The cross was the most degrading form of capital punishment Rome could devise. Decent people did not even speak of it; it was obscene. The whole idea of someone worshiping a crucified God was so scandalous and absurd that it was regarded as ridiculous. There is a surviving early drawing showing Christ crucified with the head of a donkey. That's what intelligent people thought about a God who could be crucified.

But that is our message. We say that on the cross of Jesus, God suffered and died. God suffered pain. God experienced death. As scandalous as that message is, many of us have found it to be comforting. Frances Young says,

It is only because I can see God entering the darkness of human suffering and evil in his creation, recognizing it for what it really is, meeting it and conquering it, that I can accept a religious view of the world. Without the religious dimension, life would be senseless, and endurance of its cruelty pointless; yet without the cross it would be impossible to believe in God.¹

We see God entering into the depths of human suffering and experiencing its darkest evil in Jesus. God endures the pain and returns only love. God accepts the cruelty and gives back forgiveness. God absorbs our rebellion and offers only reconciliation. This is the way of the cross that Jesus invites us to walk, "for those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."

One theologian says that if we walk the way of the cross, we will be seeking "a crucified mind." He contrasts that with a crusading mind. A crucified mind is a mind marked by "self-denial, by loving service, by brokenness and gentle but fierce love. The crusading mind is rooted in intolerance, and its ultimate end is destruction of its opposition. The crucified mind is rooted in the love which grows deeper through pain, and which seeks its end through what may seem a harsh and dreadful love, but whose aim is the transformation of its opponents."²

Maybe you remember Martin Luther King's words from 1963, the words of one with a crucified mind:

We must say to our white brothers all over the South who try to keep us down: We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you. And yet we cannot in all good conscience obey your evil laws. Do to us what you will. Threaten our children and we will still love you... Say that we're too low, that we're too degraded, yet we will still love you. Bomb our homes and go by our churches early in the morning and bomb them if you please, and we will still love you. We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. In winning the victory we will not only win our freedom. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process.³

I met a retired Presbyterian pastor in Austin recently, Bob Lively. He gave me a copy of his book, Waiting for Bluebonnets: Letters to My Daughter About God's Love. There's a story he tells from when he was four years old. He discovered that his grandmother's doorbell sounded exactly like her telephone. That was a temptation. He could stand on the front porch of her house, ring the doorbell, and then watch her answer the telephone with a pleasing Mississippi drawl. "Good mawnin'," she would say to the dial tone before he scampered away to hide in a hedge for the next several minutes.

On his fourth attempt at playing this trick, he sensed an ominous shadow come upon him from behind as he pointed his small finder toward the doorbell. He whirled about to see his grandmother standing above him and smiling. Without a word, she picked him up and carried him into the living room, where she placed him in her lap as she sat in a rocker for what felt like an eternity. He figured he deserved any punishment she chose to mete out, including a swift swat to his backside.

But no spanking arrived to bring him into line. She only rocked and hummed what he would years later come to recognize as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." After she decided that he had been calmed sufficiently by her soothing hymn, she lifted him again with great effort, and carried him all the way to the kitchen. There she placed him on a wooden counter and raised her arms to a high shelf. She retrieved a large crock filled with more sugar cookies than he knew existed in the whole world. She walked to the icebox, from which she lifted a half-gallon jug of cold milk from a shelf. After filling a glass, she handed it to him along with two cookies and said something like, "Take, eat, this is for you."

In that moment, his grandmother taught him more about the true nature of God than anyone had in the first four years of life, or for that matter, Bob says, anyone has in the ensuing decades. When he was finished with the last bite of cookie followed by the final drop of milk, she squeezed him gently in her lap and said, "Now, Bobby, don't go ringing my doorbell anymore." He calls that his first communion.⁴ Archbishop Rowan Williams would call that the disarming power of the cross.

Jesus ends our gospel today with this: "For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done." Some people imagine that day with militant images like those that were in Peter's head that when he recognized the Messiah, and some imagine that day as one with violent and dreaded swats to the backside like haunted little Bobby. I don't. I think it is the same crucified Jesus who returns. Who endures pain and returns only love; who accepts the cruelty and gives back forgiveness; who absorbs our rebellion and offers only reconciliation; who embraces us in all our selfishness and sin, and says, "Take, eat. This is for you."

 

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