Of course we can’t. Understand the death of Christ, I mean. Just as our limited human minds cannot understand God, they can never encompass something as mysterious and boggling as God in human form dying. Augustine said, “If I think I have understood God, then what I have understood is not God.”
We could as easily say, “If I think I have understood the cross, then what I have understood is not the cross.”
Our limited understanding of mystery—of God, of the death of Christ—can lead us in a couple directions. One popular option is to shake our heads and walk away. Another is to try to pin the meaning down to some limited perspective, so that it feels safe and clear.
I believe a better way is one we Episcopalians call the middle way—we admit how little we can fully understand and bow before the Mystery. We confess that Truth may be less like a scientific proof or a legal contract and more like a bicycle wheel— the many spokes being different understandings that must be held together.
Following are some ways the death of Christ has been “understood.” (I’m guessing most of us will find some of these we really like and some which press some buttons!)
The death of Christ means that those who suffer are never alone.
Jesus died to show us our calling as the people of God, so that suffering becomes one of the signs of the true church.
Jesus died to deliver us from all kinds of bondage.
The crucifixion shows a great paradox: to save our lives we must lose them; to be made whole we must be broken.
Christ died to defeat the powers of evil/darkness.
The cross is what happens when a really good person stands up for the voiceless to those who are in power.
The cross shows us that there is no place where God is not.
Just as in the Old Testament, temple sacrifice cleansed a person’s sin, so Jesus’ sacrifice cleanses us from sin.
Through the cross, death has lost its power, so we need not fear death.
Jesus’ death overturns the world’s ideas of power and give us a new view of God, whose glory is most fully shown in selfsurrender and human vulnerability to friend and enemy.
The cross offers us an example of self-less love—like a good shepherd or a parent giving life for a child.
Christ died so his wounds could bring healing.
Christ’s death was a creative, artistic act, as he reworked traditional Israelite religion into a more universal faith.
In the cross, God shows ultimate solidarity with the poor and oppressed.
Jesus’ crucifixion ties into a universal cosmic idea of dying to one life and being born to another, part of the heroic cycle of death and return in all great religions.
Jesus’ death reminds us of our sin—our selfishness and egocentricity.
Jesus died so that he would no longer be bound to one geographical time and place but could be universally present to the world.
The death of Christ is the central point of human history, as all human pain and suffering met in one time and place.
In the cross, the original turning of humankind toward sin is redeemed and God initiates a whole new pattern for human/ God relationships.
In the cross we see that good cannot be ultimately defeated.
Without the darkness of the cross, there could be no brightness of resurrection.
Those earliest Christians struggled to figure this out— what could the cross mean when they knew it to be a curse according to Leviticus? When they knew it to be an instrument of torture of the hated Roman occupiers?
Paul and others grappled not only to understand Jesus’ death, but also to understand their experience of Christ risen, and the Spirit’s presence in their lives: the New Testament records the struggle to come to terms with these questions.
And down the years, different denominations, groups, and individuals have responded to the cross in different ways. African Americans felt great solidarity with one who suffered, and hope that Easter deliverance was on the way. In a German prison cell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew the cross to be a token of the high cost of following the way of God. Novelist Graham Greene embraced the cross because it met the depths of his sense of shame; activist, theologian and mystic Dorothee Soelle saw the cross as a place where suffering could become meaningful.
During our lives, various aspects of the cross will be more profound to us. Leaning too hard on a few, like riding a bicycle with just a few spokes, leads to imbalance.
I challenge you, as I challenge myself, to participate in this Mystery—to look for glimpses of it in life. I love the way theologian Walter Wink puts it: “Killing Jesus was like trying to destroy a dandelion head by blowing on it, like shattering a sun into a million fragments of light.”
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s s contributor is Mary Ellen Ashcroft, Vicar of Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church.
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