Good News

For the message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,

But to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

-1 Corinthians 1: 18 (NRSV)

The farther along my own faith journey I go, the more the truth of Paul's observation seems to be both unquestionably true, and fundamentally problematic.  Of all the things that have changed over the course of 2000 years of history, the message of the Cross remains foolishness to most people, even a great many people who call themselves Christians and consider themselves among the "saved."  Let's engage in a little bit of deconstructing the mythos that has surrounded Jesus and look at the historical facts, I mean the ones that are more or less indisputable.  There was a man named Jesus who came from a town called Nazareth which was in the region of Galilee, part of the northern kingdom of Israel under Roman rule.  Jesus of Nazareth was executed by the Roman government by crucifixion outside of Jerusalem.  Crucifixion was a method of execution reserved for political leaders and revolutionaries.  It was designed to be brutal and incite fear in anyone who dared defy Caesar's Empire.

This is about all that you could possibly know about Jesus if you didn't have the Christian Scriptures.  It's admittedly not very much, which is as the Romans and the Hebrew power structure very strongly hoped it would be.  The reason they designed crucifixion as they did was that it was a complete humiliation AND destruction of people who challenged their authority.  Often the crucified were not even given a proper burial, their identity was to be totally expunged from history.  They were turned from human beings to grisly reminders of what happened to people who defied Rome.

If early Christians like Paul had some kind of glorious story of defiance and human will to tell, it would have made their job a lot easier.  But they didn't, they only had Jesus being slaughtered. No revenge, no uprising in response, not even any evidence that he was able to inspire others as a martyr.  If we assume that the resurrection is actually some sort of hoax, it becomes very difficult to explain why Jesus wasn't very quickly forgotten.  There is no way that the parts of the story that can be "proved," would inspire people to carry on the work that Jesus started, given the danger that it obviously entailed.  There is no way that people insistently using the "name of Jesus," would happen when the most fearsome powers and principalities were clearly invested in making him utterly disappear.

The message of the Cross is indeed foolishness to anyone who takes a perfectly reasonable approach to it.  It is not reasonable, it is not logically how you triumph in this world.  In the worst analysis it is an apex symbol of human brutality and political savagery.  Even in the best analysis it is a stunning defeat to justice, as an innocent man was killed for something of which he was not guilty.  If you allow further evidence, this time from the Gospels, back into the picture; still excluding the truly supernatural, like miracles and fulfilling prophecy, you find that the injustice of the crucifixion was horrific.  Here was a man who preached forgiveness, love, and mercy.  His parables and his vision of the Kingdom of God reached out and included marginalized people.  He challenged us to love our enemies rather than destroying them, he encourages us to lay down our lives to follow him on this way of peace and truth.

Given the results he got, this does seem foolish indeed.  Except for the fact that it works.  Laying down your life is actually the way to freedom.  Forgiveness is actually the path to peace.  Kindness is actually the path to justice.  You can't really see that from the perspective that most of us live within.  It is truth that we see only with the help of the Spirit and the gift of contemplative sight.  From what Jesus taught, salvation is the province of God alone, we don't earn it, we are given salvation as a gift.  We are called God's children not because we deserve to be, but because God loves us that much.

This should give us confidence to lay down all those things we think are so very important, the things we would kill and destroy to control.  But this is very difficult to accept. This foolishness of surrender and trust, surely can't be what the Kingdom of God is about, right? 

But it is, and that is Good News indeed.