More than once I have heard the suggestion that Jesus’ trip to the cross is somehow cheapened by the prior knowledge he had of the resurrection. We know he had this prior knowledge because he told his disciples about it before the events took place. On form of this came upon Voices with one person noting this was raised in a small group. “If Jesus got his body back, what did he lose? What did he sacrifice?”
Here was my first response:
I usually turn this question around. If you believe you are getting your body back, or rather getting it seriously upgraded, why are you still clinging to the one you have rather than living in loving recklessness in the relational polarity of the age to come? For example, if you knew the crash of 08 was coming, how fast would you spend down your citibank stock? Why do you cling to your confederate money? The point of the gospel is not to imagine that Jesus’ time on the cross is cheap, but rather to recalibrate our time on the cross.
My second response:
And I’d suggest we have firmer evidence of the truth of the cruciform passage of which jesus was our pioneer so again we have to ask ourselves what our problem is. Jesus was tempted to bypass the cross but gained fellowship with us through it. We hesitate to also pass through because we don’t want fellowship with him that much.
And my third and more lengthy, theological response, incorporating the vocabulary of “age of decay”, and “relational polarity”
The New Testament church saw the resurrection in fact as evidence. NT Wright’s “The Resurrection and the Son of God” basically asserts that the only reasonable explanation for the shape and existence of the New Testament church community was witness to the resurrection. This man Jesus rose again. It was not a resuscitation. He was Jesus, but he was different in a remarkable way and given the backdrop of the Scriptures the explanation for this resurrected Jesus was that he was the first fruits of the general resurrection, that this had begun, that the new age had begun in him.
What the resurrected Jesus then does is ask us to follow him, through the cruciform path of the age of decay. The cruciform path of the age of decay is a result of living the life of God, the relational polarity of the kingdom of God (your wellbeing at my expense, the self-giving dance) within the context of the relational polarity of of the age of decay (my wellbeing at your expense, survival of the fittest, dog eat dog, etc). The motivation for following him is in fact union with God. We were united with him in our baptism, in his death and so we are united with him in his resurrection and exaltation.
When we look at Jesus and say “it’s a cheat because he knew God would raise him” we have to say “yes he knew it” but “no it wasn’t a cheat.”. Jesus faced the judgment of God (the Day of the LORD) on that day on the cross. We can associate that with both active retribution and isolation/abandonment. He was the sacrificial lamb but the only sacrificial lamb who submitted itself willingly because he was the only sacrificial lamb who could understand the value of his sacrifice. Only this unique sacrificial lamb could perceive what he sacrifice would gain, unlike every other sacrificial lamb. That sacrificial lamb was also unique because he understood the “deep magic”, the deep reality of the humility of the creator God himself who understands and embodies love from which the universe was created and is destined for.
The gospel is the revelation of that love and the invitation into its dance. From our perspective of the age of decay it looks queer, backwards, foolish, non-sense. When we look at Jesus and say “oh, he knew that by dying that way he would in fact receive far more than he lost. That cheapens the death.” I think Jesus says “no”. We tell our young people all the time “the path to accomplishment is sacrifice for a greater goal” and if they follow that advice we don’t say “well you only sacrificed in order to gain that prize, that’s cheap!” we say “you were wise, listened to good advice about the way things are and followed it.” Now Jesus comes to us, losing everything in the age of decay and says “follow me, I’ll show you the way out!”. We sit back and don’t follow. Why? Because we don’t believe him. Because we don’t fully trust that he trail-blazed the way out of the age of decay and in fact created the path to the life of God. While he was teaching he explained it all, he laid it all out. On the cross and in the resurrection, he revealed the path and demonstrated it to us, but we still don’t believe him.
Let’s imagine a mountain climber. He says “this is how I’ll climb. you watch. I’ll reach the summit, drop you down the rope, you follow after me. You’ll see that I’ve done it, you’ll see how I did it, and in fact I won’t let you fall.”
So now we’ve watched him but we’re standing down around the face of the rock wall saying “I’m not so sure. You’re only telling us to follow because you made it. You knew you’d make it, that cheapens it.”
To that I ask, “but then why don’t we in fact climb behind him? Do we not want to make it to the summit?” I think our answer is that we don’t 1. want to get to the summit as much as we say we do, 2. we don’t trust he won’t let us fall 3. we’re not sure he’s even really up there so instead of following his path to the summit we try to find other approaches on our own, approaches which from the bottom look promising but which usually wind up in dead ends. When we get to those dead ends then we call out to him and ask him to rescue us, to which he generally repeats himself “follow my approach. I showed you that it ‘works’ in my own resurrected flesh. I won’t let you fall. Follow me! All other approaches are dead ends…” pvk
The Conventional Wisdom god
I’m doing 1 Samuel 4 this Sunday for my adult Sunday school class. Samuel is an incredible book. It is so deep and nuanced in its story telling. At this point in the story we know that things are very bad in Israel. The whole cultic operation has been corrupted by Eli’s sons and Eli is blind to their transgressions only responding to what he hears third hand. The spiritual malaise has been slumbering beneath the surface, clear to Yhwh but unseen by the people and with the rise of the Philistine threat once more their poverty will be revealed.
The Philistines organize themselves for war and Israel, implied here to be hapless loses the first battle. The elders in their performance review credit God for their loss. Their plan to change the performance of their armies involves changing their god-management strategy. Hophni and Phinehas have of course now taken full control of the god-management division of Israel and are called upon to manage this god and get him to up his performance. God was a bit distant from the last battle. Maybe he wasn’t paying attention. Maybe he was distracted. If they get his throne/footstool out front and center then maybe he’ll be roused and the Philistines can be their slaves instead of the other way around.
When the ark comes into the Israelite camp the army gets pumped up for battle and a shout goes out. The Philistines hearing this shout get scared. They heard what the god of Israel did to the Egyptians and they don’t want that to happen to them, so they do just like Pharaoh did, they harden their hearts and steel themselves for the battle and off the go. This time, however, the outcome is not what we saw with superpower Egypt.
One of the reasons I love the book of Samuel is because it is so multi-layered. Part of the art in this incredibly economic narrative is the view of the world through eyes of the elders of Israel as well as through the eyes of the Philistines. We know that common culture/conventional wisdom of the time had a variety of basic beliefs about what gods were, what they were like, how they should be managed and how life could be managed with respect to them. Gods were certainly central to the operations of the world. Gods were involved in every area of life from how many sons the wife pumps out, to the crops in the field, the goats in the flock and the armies on the battle field. What we see here is the there is little difference between the elders of Israel and the Philistine men. When it came to dealing with the gods they were all on the same page.
I’m reading John H. Walton’s book “Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament” where there are helpful seconds on the culture of the time and region. He notes there that the gods were not necessarily better than people, they were just stronger than people. We tend to be more familiar with Greek mythology and not much reflection will note that this is illustrated by their stories countless times.
The gut-check moment of the story naturally follows the “good idea” of Israel’s elders. In the first battle, the performance they were attempting to remedy, they only lost 4,000 men. The second was a rout that made the first look mild. It was a total catastrophe. The narrative progresses of course through the perspective of the family of Eli and the strangeness of the fact that they mourn the loss of the ark more than the mourn the loss of his rotten boys. The climax of the story is the last verse where even the reception of a son, Ichabod cannot comfort his dying mother. God is in exile from Israel!
As readers of the story know, what follows will be God undoing the conventional wisdom on the care and feeding of the gods both for the Philistines and more importantly the elders of Israel. God will use the conventional wisdom of the region against itself by stepping out of the roles they have forced him into. This God cannot be managed. Even when the ark returns Yhwh will show them (as he showed the Philistines) that he does what he wants and their imaginations about his limitations are simply foolish.
The most amazing consequence of human rebellion seems to be the way we imagine we can somehow outsmart God. The gods can be managed. They have to carted along like some blind, overweight Eli out to the battle and have the noise rouse them to say “oh my, I think I’ll kill some Philistines today. I didn’t know they were bothering the people who bring those nice tasty lambs to the BBQ!”
What strikes me is how often we do this today. We imagine God doesn’t know all kinds of things or that this or that problem is really too much for him so we have to take matters into our own hands.
Nearly every conventional wisdom corruption of God diminishes God in some way and leaves us on the state as the principle actors of history. I think about the scene in the movie Avatar when the bad army dudes are coming in to kill the Navi spirit tree and the hero and heroine have to somehow rouse the great pantheistic nature god into action. What kind of a god do you have if it doesn’t even know that the army dudes are there digging their stupid little ore? Sheesh. Again, the gods of these stories are all somehow at our disposal and somehow need our management like an elderly person who can no longer see how dirty the flatware is.
The Bible is commonly panned for being from a different place and time. Its heroes were killers and slave owners. One way its helpful to us is precisely because it speaks to us from a different time. It is not subject to our conventional god wisdom that suggest to us that power and opportunity are available to those who have learned to manage, feed and seduce the gods whether they be being or some universal spirit or the physics of the natural world. If we can get beyond the chronological sneer of imagining the people today somehow are wiser than people of the past, we just might learn something. pvk