You can see a video of this sermon at this link.
What are the ideas that come to mind as you look at it?
Pause.
It’s a beautiful cross. We have a similar one over our main entrance, reflected in the window behind it, another on the outer wall of this sanctuary facing Gorham Street.
Clearly, it is not only a beautiful cross, but also an important symbol of this congregation. And the cross – in whatever shape – is one of the identifying symbols of Christianity throughout the world.
Among the things I think about when I look at a cross is a simple question: Why did Jesus have to die on a cross? If only the answer were as simple as the question.
Last week, Pastor Jessica in her sermon invited us to go ice skating with Jesus on Lake Mendota. So today I am going to go ice skating with Jesus -- on the thin ice out there. Trying to make sense of what the crucifixion was all about has been one of the great controversies in the history of Christianity.
As a kid, I learned a simple – and perhaps the most common - explanation. Jesus died for my sins. He was my redeemer. And just to make sure that I understood that I had something to do with this, every time I sinned – whatever that meant as an eight-year old – I was pounding one of those nails a little farther into Jesus’ hand. But, thank goodness, he suffered so that God would not hold my sins against me.
Thank you, Jesus!
In theological terms, this whole issue is called atonement. As luck would have it, I wrote my thesis for my theology degree about atonement. Don’t worry – I am not going to read my thesis here for you today. (If you are up for reading 75 pages about atonement, I’d be happy to email it to you.)
What I would like to do, though, is suggest that there are many ways to think about why Jesus died on the cross. How we think about that can actually affect how we live our lives as followers of Jesus.
Even though the phrasing “Jesus died for our sins” is one of the most common explanations, it is hardly the only one. Yes, it is woven through familiar hymns and prayers.
Think about that classic hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross.”
“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,” it begins.
And the second verse says:
“In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,
A wondrous beauty I see,
For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died,
To pardon and sanctify me.”
All of this comes out of a time when people put Jesus’ death into a model of transactions – maybe calming an angry god with a sacrifice or settling a debt in court.
Spiritual guide and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr described this as “the strange idea that before God could love us God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for our sin-drenched humanity.”
We talk a lot in our time, in this congregation, about God’s love and God’s grace, saying that God loves us, no matter what. No matter what, God loves us. God did not need Jesus to be killed to make things right with humanity.
So I’m back to my question. Why did Jesus have to be killed on a cross?
There are the very concrete realities he faced. His teachings, the way he lived challenged both the religious and political establishments of his time. The Temple leaders and the Roman occupiers held power and they were threatened by this wandering rabbi.
We know all too well what can happen when power is challenged, especially if that power thinks it is impervious to the will of the people or to the basic rights of humanity.
We have seen that play out over and over around the world – in the massacres of the indigenous people here, in the colonizers in Africa and Asia and Latin America, in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, in the beatings and murders of people seeking a more just society.
We have witnessed that abuse of power once again in the last few days with the horrifying videos of five Memphis police officers pummeling Tyre Nichols to death, apparently as a way of using brutally to show that they had power.
Yes, we live in a world where people are killed for challenging power. That’s what happened to Jesus.
The earliest Christians struggled with that, as we heard in that letter from Paul to the people of Corinth that was our scripture reading for today.
“The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God… we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ (is) the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Their leader had not only been tortured and killed, but all this had happened in the most public and humiliating way. Clearly a crucified leader was a stumbling block for those who might consider joining his followers. Those followers – and those they were talking to – would have to make that leap of faith to the Resurrection for the crucifixion to make any sense.
Having said all this, I don’t want to diminish the importance for some folks of their commitment to the idea that Jesus died on their behalf. That is a belief that clearly has deep roots in Christian history, even in the Gospels themselves.
There was the time Jesus was talking under the cover of darkness with Nicodemus when he said one of the most quoted sentences from the Gospels: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” That’s the verse – John 3:16 – you sometimes see on signs at sporting events and other places where Christians choose to publicly proclaim one manifestation of God’s love.
Jesus talked about himself as the Good Shepherd who would lay down his life for his sheep. John in his Gospel uses the image of the Lamb of God, connecting Jesus to the lamb sacrificed for the Jewish Passover meal, although in Judaism, that is not done as an atonement for sin but as a remembrance of the Exodus journey to freedom from slavery.
In the Gospel according to Matthew – but only in that Gospel – Jesus says as he gives the cup of wine to his closest followers, “this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
That idea that Jesus died to save us – that Jesus is our Redeemer – can give us a degree of confidence in the way we live our lives, can be an invitation to gratitude for the life and death of Jesus.
For me, though, it is also an understanding that has problems – as do all of the understandings of why Jesus died on the cross. I’m uncomfortable with the idea that God chose to send his son to die. I’m not convinced that each mistake I make is another hammer blow to those nails. As I said at the beginning, it’s a simple question with complicated answers.
Let me offer just a few other ideas about all this.
One comes from two contemporary writers – Will Willimon, a retired Methodist bishop, and Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian who has taught at Duke and Notre Dame among other places. They wrote about the role sin played in the execution of Jesus.
They describe those sins as religious and government leaders lining up to protect their powers, allies abandoning him, bystanders mocking him. Violence is used to try to solve a “problem.” Yet on the cross, Jesus asks God to forgive those who are doing this to him.
That, Willimon and Hauerwas say, “throws a monkey wrench in to the eternal wheel of retribution and vengeance.”
I don’t think a monkey wrench hanging over our sanctuary would be quite as beautiful as our cross, but it is a neat image of how Jesus’ actions as he was dying offered a very different way to respond to violence. This does not let violence have the last word. And the resurrection does not let death have the last word either. From that, I can draw hope as I navigate the realities of our world today.
Another idea comes from Richard Rohr, who I mentioned earlier. He summarized the teaching of one of his theological heroes named John Duns Scotus this way: “Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.”
Instead of counting sins, weighting guilt, punishing people, Jesus offered a new world where, in Rohr’s words, “God's abundance has made any economy of merit, sacrifice, reparation, or atonement both unhelpful and unnecessary.”
When we change the trajectory from what we and others do wrong to what God’s love offers all, then we can be reconciled to each other and to God. And reconciliation to God is really at the heart of all of this.
One more way I like to think about all of this.
It seems to me one of the continuing themes of Jesus’ life was about forgiveness. When we say the prayer each Sunday – and other times as well – that Jesus taught his followers, we say, depending on our backgrounds, forgives us our debts – or our trespasses – or our sins – as we forgive others.
We can say that knowing how Jesus assured us that God forgives us as well, knowing that Jesus forgave even those who tortured and killed, who abandoned and mocked him.
That’s a transformation – not a transaction.
For that, I give thanks to God.
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