Chaos and the Cross
New Testament writers never smooth off the ragged edges of the cross. They give us insights into its meaning but it always remains jagged and offensive. That's part of its power as it subverts our smooth talk and tame analysis of the world.
Accustomed to hearing the truth that in some way the cross of Christ atones for the sins of the world, that in some way the life of the world is gained through the cross--because we're used to hearing that truth and because it's such unfathomable good news, we've forgotten what they meant when they spoke of "the cross".
Because it has made sense of so much, we're no longer shaken by its bizarre nature. Because we're often awed and silent at the thought of it, we lose touch with the bedlam and screaming and public nature of it. Because of the love we've come to recognize in it it's difficult to keep in mind the utter savagery and mindless, lunatic cruelty of it.
We see in it the holy obedience of Christ offered to the eternal Father but when we're told "there they crucified him," we're apt to miss the fact that Jesus Christ was shrewdly lynched by a self-serving governor and a religious hierarchy who knew how to use the mob.
The cross of Christ always retains a jaggedness, an aspect of pointlessness, something that shouldn't have happened but did. If only Pilate hadn't folded, if people hadn't lied, if the religious hierarchy hadn't been afraid, if the populace had risen up to oppose it, etc., etc. It wouldn't have happened.
Sin is something that never should have happened. There was no eternal necessity that it should. If this is true and the cross (whatever else it does it) atones for sin, then there's a sense in which the crucifixion of Christ is a contingent event. No sin--no need for the cross to atone for it.
Whatever is to be learned from Auschwitz or Treblinka, what happened at these places can't and shouldn't be "smoothed out". They mustn't be reduced to "the things we learn" from them. They are events which beggar description and defy full explanation. The Christian senses that same thing about the hill outside Jerusalem where One who represented both the holy Father and a teeming humanity was murdered. Golgotha is the inner meaning (and more) of what was spelled out in obscenely large, bold-faced print in the death-camps.
Surely the Nazi death camps with their fathomless depths of depravity and their tormented millions tower over the little hill outside Jerusalem. Without faith in Christ that way of thinking makes sense to me. But if the one who died on that central cross was who Christians think he was and if what he was doing there had galactic ramifications maybe Dachau and the Archiapeligo gulags were taken up in that event at Golgotha. Maybe the Golgotha event gives a meaning and depth to the horrors of all that evil and hurt that even the poor tortured people couldn't know; a meaning more stupendous than even the agony-filled survivors of such places know.
And in turn, such places of horror give us insight into the meaning and necessity of the crucifixion of God's own Son. If even Christians are led to wonder, "Why was such a sacrifice necessary if the world is to be forgiven and gain life?" maybe Haiti under Papa Doc and Cambodia under Pol Pot tell us why.
Maybe Golgotha enables us to look at Auschwitz with even more horrified wonder. True these places and what happened there drive us even at this late date to speechlessness, but Golgotha would not make less of them, it would want to make more of them. It would say all that any poor wretched and forever-scarred soul would groan out, and then it would say even more. "Yes, it was that. All that. Nothing less than that. But it was more. It was a moment when the world was given a mirror and it saw itself. It was a moment when the monster that is in humanity sprang into view and showed itself for what it is. It was a time when what God in Jesus Christ said the world had to be redeemed from was demonstrated. Auschwitz was not the denial of God it was the most awful vindication of God's claim and God's deed and God's self-sacrifice outside Jerusalem.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.