You Just Wait!

The cross and the Crucified Christ are central elements of Christianity. But despite this, the faith has never come to a complete consensus on exactly what the cross means or how it "works." Scholars and writers are still offering their takes on the meaning of Jesus' crucifixion.

But at the moment, I'm not thinking about whether I prefer ransom, satisfaction, penal substitution, or some other atonement theory.  As I read today's gospel - Matthew's account of the crucifixion - I found myself fixated on the taunts hurled Jesus' way.  "Save yourself... He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him." Even the two criminals beside him get in on the act. (You have to go to Luke to find the one criminal who is sympathetic to Jesus.)

Much as happened during his trial, Jesus remains silent.  He suffer the abuses and taunts without a reply. There is no comeback, no "Just wait; you'll see."  Not that we don't sometimes provide that for Jesus after the fact.

It strikes me that we sometimes minimize the cross into a difficulty on the way to something great.  Jesus still turns the tables on those who taunt him, only later.  They still get theirs and Jesus gets his vindication.  In the gaudier versions of this, King Jesus comes back with a sword and settles old scores, and the cross was simply a cosmic version of "no pain, no gain."

The cross still perplexes and confounds us.  And so we try to fit it into models of victory that we do understand, where the bad guys still get their due, and Jesus wasn't a wimp after all.  He just knew that holding his tongue would make the victory sweeter when the time came.

Yet presumably Jesus dies for the very folks who taunt him.  And the biblical picture of Jesus doesn't speak much of an avenging warrior who returns saying, "You had your chance, but now you're really gonna be sorry."  Instead Paul speaks of God's power being made perfect in weakness.  And, in what I think one of the more remarkable images in the Bible, we meet King Jesus in John's Revelation. 

The typical expectations of a great king are there in Revelation 5.  He is "the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David," and he has "conquered."  But then John sees him, a "Lamb standing as if he had been slaughtered." We may want the Lamb on the cross to transform into a Lion, like a 98 pound weakling who bulks up and turns the tables on the bullies, but the Lion remains a Lamb that has been slaughtered.  And "conquer" takes on a whole new meaning.

I wonder what Christianity would look like if we really took the cross seriously, and if we took seriously Jesus' call to take up our own crosses, to embrace our own willingness to suffer for the sake of the other, even if that other hates us.

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