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Resurrection Without the Cross?
Galatians 6:14 But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
For those who have been in this church a long time, you may recall that our former pastor Chris became quite incensed at the thought that a local church was refusing to display crosses in their building. The importance of this issue, the cross, jumped out at me once again recently. I had been reading a theologian, a contemporary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was also jailed by the Nazis, and, when released, drafted into Hitler's army Ernst Käsemann. He was captured and survived the war in an allied prison camp. Käsemann made this statement that caught my eye:
“…a theology of the resurrection which takes precedence over, and is isolated from, a theology of the cross leads to a Christian variation of a religious philosophy in which the imitation of Jesus and the lordship of Christ lose all concrete meaning. (Käsemann, Perspective on Paul, 57).
Two years ago, I found myself in a controversy over a book which appeared to elevate grace above all other aspects of the gospel, including the cross. I was frustrated that I could not articulate adequately the importance of a balanced theology. Käsemann's statement seems to drive at this problem. Resurrection happens on the basis that Jesus Christ sacrificed his life on the cross. Without the cross, there is no resurrection. In the same way, our rebirth happens on the basis of our baptism into that death. No baptism, no death, no rebirth. I am not referring to controversies over sprinkling vs. full emersion, or adult baptism vs. child baptism. The baptism I am referring to is a self-emptying, a death to self in favor of Jesus, an opening that allows the Holy Spirit access to our soul.
Matthew 16:24-25 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
Jesus is speaking of a figurative death here. If you are really dead, you cannot deny yourself. If you have lost your mind, as the left accuses, you no longer have control over your choices, so again you cannot deny yourself. Jesus is speaking of a kneeling down before God, whereby I lay aside my desires and ambitions to seek God's desire for me.
Psalm 92:12-15
12The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
13They are planted in the house of the LORD; they flourish in the courts of our God.
14They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green,
15to declare that the LORD is upright; he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.
In front of my house stands a very large sycamore tree. This is a photo of my house from the bay side. As you can see, the sycamore, which stands next to the left corner, is at least three times the height of my two story house. In other words, it is about sixty or seventy feet tall. In the summer, this tree shades my house from the summer sun, dramatically lowering my cooling costs. While in the winter, the sycamore looses most of its leaves, allowing the sun to shine through and lowering my heating costs. The squirrels and the birds like my tree too. God knows how to design a great system.
The sycamore is unique in that in a very wet year, such as we had this spring, it gets a growth spurt and it sheds its bark. As a result, the upper reaches of the tree tend to present a smooth white trunk.
Towards the bottom, where the trunk is old and fixed, the tree doesn't change as much. As a result, the old craggy bark remains.
You will notice something else in this photo. It's a yellow-bellied sap-sucker. This is a type of woodpecker that likes to winter in our area. This one likes my tree. He has been drilling holes through the bark for years. The entire lower portion of my tree is ringed with holes, which means there are bugs attacking the tree, and my friend the sap-sucker is attacking the bugs.
I believe the sap-sucker is doing more good than harm. I cannot say the same for the bugs that he is after. I don't know if the tree can feel the bugs or the woodpecker pecking. There was a book that came out in the seventies The Secret Life of Plants that purported that experiments had revealed that plants do have feeling.
As I was watching my red-headed friend, it occurred to me that the sycamore is an excellent allegory for the Christian life. When the life-giving waters are plentiful, (i.e. the Holy Spirit is flowing), we grow rapidly, shedding our old skin so-to-speak. The result is a new radiance and purity. At the same time, there can be parts of our lives that are so old and set in their ways that they resist change. That is where our red-headed friend, pastor Bo, or other good Christian friends come into the picture, poking holes in our thickened hide. It is like going to the dentist, we don't like it at the time, but we are glad that we got the work done afterwards.
“In the most compelling and commanding tone, He [the Lord] said, ‘contend! It is time to take a strong, unshakable stand!’” (Bobby Conner, Living in God's Light, 49).
Sometimes, our Christian walk is as easy as “Let Go and Let God!” But most of us know, that is not always the case. Think about it, if God was always shielding us from the devil, who would fight the devil. Would there even be a body for Christ to manifest in. Fighting the devil is part of being “in Christ”. Psalm 86 is a psalm of David, in which he is in a great deal of difficulty. Let's see how he deals with the devil:
Psalm 86:14-16 O God, insolent men have risen up against me; a band of ruthless men seeks my life, and they do not set you before them. But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Turn to me and be gracious to me; give your strength to your servant, and save the son of your maidservant.
For us, we may be faced with sickness, junk from our past, people, memories, desires for things we are trying to eliminate from our life. I have one friend who had gotten off of crack cocaine, only to run into an old dealer. This dealer tracked her down, and moved into her neighborhood simply so he could get her hooked again. She had to start her rehabilitation process all over again. The devil does not play fair.
So we get on our knees and pray to God. “You, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Turn to me and be gracious to me; give your strength to your servant, and save me.” Sometimes we get really serious and fast or commit to some other discipline. Why? There are times when we need to prove to God, and to ourselves, that we are really serious. Sometimes the trials we face have little or nothing to do with our crusty past or our character flaws. In fact, we may simply be irritating the devils. Regardless, getting on our knees before God is best course of action when you have no solution of your own.
James 1:2-4 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
James is giving us good advice taken straight out of the Psalms. Notice that although David tells God the problem, he doesn't simply wring his hands saying, “Help me God.” He takes time to forget his issues and drink in who God is. In essence, David is priming the pump so that the spiritual waters can flow freely. David is getting happy in the midst of difficult circumstances.
Psalm 86:12 I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify your name forever.
In my current writing, I am reading a lot of material based on circumstances that did not turn around the way the believers hoped: C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed; Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son; Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy; and Alan Berger, Children of Job, about the children of Holocaust survivors. The common thread in so much of this is the war-time prayers that were never answered. War-time prayers are those fervent prayers made in dire circumstances, as when our own pastor Chris was dying of cancer. How far does our faith carry us? Can we get happy in God when the jack-boot is on our neck? What about when we have had to release our loved ones into God's hands?
“We can't take cities and nations for God because He already possesses them.” (Bill Johnson, Strengthen Yourself in the Lord, 142).
The one aspect of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology which attracts me the most, is to see how thoroughly he believed that Jesus is Lord. He didn't simply believe that Jesus is Lord of those who bow the knee. He believed that Jesus was Lord over Adolf Hitler. This isn't to suggest that Jesus was directing Hitler, but that the authority of the resurrected Jesus extends over every aspect of the cosmos. So when Bonhoeffer mounted the scaffold stripped naked, knowing that his body would be thrown on the pile of bodies in the courtyard outside, he was completely calm. He accepted that this, his cross, was for God's good purpose. Sometimes God's will appears to be a paradox.
When I read older books, such as Calvin or Augustine, the word “holocaust” appears. The meaning is a sacrifice meant to be burned completely. So, Abraham was intending to offer Isaac as a ‘holocaust’. The world after Hitler has a completely new meaning for the word. I don't know who first referred to the genocidal murder of millions of Jews as a holocaust, as if it were some sort of offering to please God. Perhaps the thought was that submission was some sort of holy martyrdom. Jews often prefer the term “Shoah”, a Hebrew word meaning catastrophe, to indicate the Holocaust.
Alan Berger in his book Children of Job reviews several works of post-Holocaust Jewish theology. It struck me that at the center of the issue for Jewish theology was the idea of “choseness”. When Israel left Egypt, they spoiled the Egyptians, taking their wealth, while God destroyed the pursuing army. Israel was preferred over the most powerful nation on the planet at the time. The death of six million Jews during the Holocaust has erased the sense of special protection under God's hand. Auschwitz humbled Israel, but not in a good way. It seems that for most of Judaism, they no longer feel themselves to be God's special people, just a special people. God is written out of the equation for many of the post-Holocaust Jews. Listen to this from Berger's book:
“Richard Rubenstein shocked the Jewish world in announcing over three decades ago that his theological findings led inexorably to the conclusion that ‘God is Dead.’ The correlative of this view is the abrogation of covenant. Rubenstein's assertion, widely misunderstood at the time, referred to a cultural fact. It was more a statement about man than about God. Rubenstein reached his decisive position in a dramatic encounter with Dean Heinrich Grüber, a Protestant churchman who had risked his life to help Jews during the Holocaust. In Grüber's view, which was based on biblical and rabbinic assumptions about the relationship between sin and punishment, the Shoah was God's punishment of the Jewish people. Responding to this assertion of ‘holy history,’ Rubenstein said it would require him to accept the notion that Hitler was God's instrument for punishing the Jewish people. Rubenstein writes: ‘Unfortunately, I could not affirm both the justice of God and the innocence of the victims.’” (Berger, Children of Job, 31-32).
Let me say up front, I don't think that God was trying to punish the Jewish people. Grüber, sounding very much like one of Job's friends, took an unfortunate theological position, which Rubenstein countered with an extreme position negating the covenant of Sinai. Grüber believed that God's providence required some good reason for this evil. I say, “No!” Evil is an Adamic legacy. Sickness, death, sexual immorality, back-biting, and definitely not the Holocaust… none of these things are God's desire.
God sent Jesus to change this world. Jesus, on the cross, received all authority in heaven and on earth. You and I are the body of Christ, and we are here to change the world. Win or loose, our every effort to achieve God's will is a pleasing aroma to God. It sometimes appears that there are more crosses than there are shoulders to carry them. But carry we must. That means that we pray for the sick, we remember the victims, we feed the homeless, and we bring peace where there is no peace.
Matthew 10:38 And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
Let me add my own pet peeve. We live in a world of evangelism, whether it is for soap, adult diapers, shots, or for the free expression of sexual perversion. Christians recoil from evangelism just as strongly as anyone else. We need to be Jesus to the world, not an ad campaign.
Luke 14:27 Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.
Do you want resurrection power? The power of the resurrection is in the sacrifice of the cross. Sacrifice yourself for Jesus. Be Jesus to a world that so badly needs Jesus.
Acts 1:8 you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
And Now:
Numbers 6:24-26 The LORD bless you and keep you;
the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.