Bystanders at the Cross

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Bystanders at the Cross

Coventry Cathedral Lent Talks 2012

The Place of Meeting: Romans 3.21-26

Each week we have been exploring the particular perspective of a different writer within the New Testament on the cross. We began with Mark’s Gospel, the first account of the life of Jesus to be written, and his vision of the cross as a place of desolation. Then we looked at Matthew’s account of the crucifixion, giving particular attention to how he presents the cross as a place of hope by ‘flash-forwarding’ to the resurrection of Jesus. Third, we saw how Luke’s Gospel portrays the cross as a place of forgiveness. Last week we considered John’s Gospel, and how there Jesus’ death on the cross is portrayed as a sacrifice; and how according to John’s time scheme, Jesus’ sacrifice is given deeper emphasis by his death occurring at the exact same moment on the eve of Passover that the lambs in the temple were sacrificed before the evening meal.

Tonight we reach the end of the journey, and look at what Paul the Apostle has to say. In a sense this is moving backwards, for Paul’s letters were written before the first of the Gospels was completed. Yet Paul is also coming from a different angle. He is not concerned with the story of Jesus’ death, as the Gospel writers are. Rather, he wants to explain not how but why Jesus died, and what the effects are. Filling in the story perhaps came later for him. For him the cross is the meeting place of heaven and earth, humanity and God.

Each week we are also looking at a piece of art which reflects the themes of the text we’re exploring. So far we have stayed with images from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but tonight’s image brings us to a time only sixty years ago. It is Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross, painted by the Spanish surrealist in 1951 and bought a year later by the Glasgow Art Gallery, where it has remained ever since. It’s a well-known image, which calls forth extreme reactions. To some it’s a sublime piece, and it is apparently not unusual to find those viewing it quietly weeping. To others (including the man who badly slashed it with a piece of glass ten years after its first exhibition) it is a terrible piece, and certainly Dali, who loved to trick and tease his audience, perhaps enjoyed most the reactions of those who hated it. Revealingly in the context of our own exploration of the cross and the artistic representations that accompany it, Dali wrote that ‘I want to paint a Christ that is the absolute opposite of Grunewald’s materialistic savagely anti-mystical one.’ (Catalogue p.200) (Image available at )

Prayer

Paul, as we know, was not at first captivated by the cross of Jesus. Quite the reverse. For four or five years after the crucifixion, he was one of the most active and outspoken opponents of the followers of Jesus who, despite the shameful death of their leader, insisted on claiming that this condemned outlaw had risen from the dead, and in doing so revealed himself as the Messiah, the chosen one of God. Paul nowhere in his writings claims to have met Jesus during his life. But, as is well known, everything changed for him one day on the road to Damascus. Paul’s zealous mission seems to have been a bit of private enterprise, heading outside the boundaries of Israel into Syria, armed only with letters from the high priest and intending to kidnap as many Christians as he could find and bring them back to Jerusalem. Close to Damascus he received a vision of Jesus. And not just any vision, but a vision of the suffering Jesus who asked him why he was persecuting him. Stunned and blinded, Paul went on his way to Damascus but once there his sight was restored through a Christian disciple named Ananias. Immediately, according to Acts, Paul began to proclaim Jesus as the Son of God (Acts 9.1-22). We can perhapsglean two key things from this story of Paul’s conversion which are significant for grasping his understanding of the cross. First, that he was very quickly able to re-form his theology to incorporate the view that Jesus was the Son of God. In other words it looks as if the hurdle which Paul leaped to become a Christian was not primarily intellectual. He already had a pretty good understanding of the theology of the Messiah; his main problem seems to have been in identifying Jesus with that figure. Once he met Jesus on the Damascus Road the difficulties melted away. The second thing is the role of Ananias, bravely (foolishly?!) obedient to the call of God to go and minister practically to the arch-persecutor. Ananias actually remonstrates with God, according to Acts, pointing out (in case the Lord hasn’t heard) what a dangerous man Paul is. But he goes anyway, and very graphically puts into action the command of Jesus to love your enemies, and bless those who persecute you. From his later behaviour and teaching it seems to me that while Paul probably had the intellectual aspects of faith sorted, the real challenge to him was practical. What on earth would persuade a man like Ananias to reach out in love towards someone he had absolutely no reason to trust? Paul knew that this was not how human beings normally behave. He must have pondered long and hard on what it was that had made the difference to Ananias.

What made the difference? Paul came back to the same issue about 20 years later, as he sat in Corinth composing a letter to the Christians in Rome. By this time he had become the Apostle to the Gentiles, and had founded churches right across Turkey and Greece. His next target was to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth – Spain – and to do that he needed a base and support. The church in Rome, already well-established, was the place to do it from. But the Romans may have heard all sorts of things about Paul, such as that he was a renegade Jew who did not observe the Law properly and had some crazy ideas about Jesus that they wouldn’t agree with. He therefore needed to introduce himself to them and outline what he believed. The result was the letter to the Romans, the closest thing to a systematic presentation of the Christian faith that Paul ever produced. From it we are able to see the role of the cross as the meeting place.

Paul opens Romans with a lengthy presentation of what’s wrong with the world, revealing what he calls God’s wrath, to which the whole world is subject. Paul’s point is that the world is stuck in sin, and for that reason is utterly opposed to the holiness of God. Some people react very negatively to the idea of the wrath of God, but the important point about it is that Paul is not talking of the very imperfect emotion that we experience as anger and bad temper. He is upholding an understanding of God which recognises the utter purity and holiness, the otherness, of God. This is what he calls God’s righteousness.

(Indiana Jones) Don’t come close – you’ll get burned.

And in the first two and a bit chapters of Romans Paul is at pains to prove that every human being suffers from being unable to stand before the presence of God’s holiness. Some may be more sinful than others, but none are righteous. There is no special place even for Law-observant Jews, God;’s chosen people. They too fall short. It is a bleak analysis of a runaway world immersed in sin. He concludes, in a patchwork of OT texts:

Rom. 3. 10-18

‘There is no one who is righteous, not even one;
11there is no one who has understanding,
there is no one who seeks God.
12 All have turned aside, together they have become worthless;
there is no one who shows kindness,
there is not even one.’
13 ‘Their throats are opened graves;
they use their tongues to deceive.’
‘The venom of vipers is under theirlips.’
14‘Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.’
15 ‘Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16ruin and misery are in their paths,
17 and the way of peace they have notknown.’
18‘There is no fear of God before their eyes.’

So now Paul is ready to show the solution to the problem which he has graphically and at length described. It comes in Romans 3.21-26, a short passage which is nonetheless, the heart of all Paul’s theology.

Righteousness through Faith

21But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, 22the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ* for all who believe. For there is no distinction, 23since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement* by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; 26it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.*

Now says Paul, with a flourish, now. At long last there is a way to change behaviour, to be delivered from the chronic syndrome of sin, and be accepted into God’s presence. How is this done? The initiative had to come from God himself. Paul has already established that no amount of reaching up to God will have any effect. Instead God has to reveal (disclose) his righteousness to us by his own gracious act. He is God, so no true limit can be put upon him. He has, says Paul, found a way through which will deal with sin and allow humans access to a relationship with God. It is Christ Jesus, he says, ‘whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.’

Though Paul elsewhere speaks of the cross, this is the key passage about it. It’s very short, and from that fact and the strong possibility that Paul is quoting an already well-known formula here it seems likely that what Paul was saying here was not new or controversial, but actually the widespread belief of the early church. His analysis of sin and its importance showed the Romans why the cross was important; but that it was important they did not doubt at all. The first key thing to see is the absolute insistence that in Jesus God was acting: God put him forward. He put him forward as ‘a sacrifice of atonement’; the word Paul uses here is hilasterion, a notoriously difficult word to translate. Its primary use in the context of sacrifice was the ‘mercy-seat’ in the Temple in Jerusalem, where each year the atonement sacrifice was made at the Festival of Yom Kippur. Unlike other festivals, this one was a fast in which all the people were commanded to participate, not simply by abstaining from food, but also from washing, anointing, wearing sandals, and sex (Sanders p.141). On the day itself the high priest would choose a bull and two goats for sacrifice. After the sacrifice of the bull, the two goats were brought. One was slaughtered, while on the other the high priest laid his hands and confessed the sins of himself and his people. This scape-goat was then taken out in to the wilderness and set free to wander. As it was taken from the temple the people cried out ‘Bear [our sins] and be gone!’ (Sanders p.142). Paul seems to be drawing the parallel between Jesus and the sacrificial goats.

The priest laid hands on the animal to identify with it or show that it represented him (cf. Lev. 16.21) The two goats were ‘two portrayals of the one reality’ (Dunn p.220) – one died, while the other physically removed the sins to the wilderness so they were taken away. The unblemished nature of the animal shows that its death is not its own – it is the sinless dying for the sinful. The sacrifice represented the death of the sinner (cf. Rom. 6.6). The ritual with the blood was simply to demonstrate that the life (and therefore the sin) was wholly gone. James Dunn comments that ‘The picture is of Jesus’ death as the destruction of sin, of sin as a cancer cut out from the body of humankind, or as a kind of radioactive waste removed from the camp, taken far away and destroyed’ (Romans PBC p.48).

Therefore, for Paul in this passage, Jesus is the bridge between heaven and earth. At the ‘mercy-seat’ peace is established between God and humanity and a way to God provided. The picture Paul drew at the beginning of the letter of the unbridgeable gulf between the runaway world and its gracious creator is now miraculously set aside as he shows that Jesus is able to bring both sides together. For, ‘while we were still sick, when the time was right’ Jesus died ‘on behalf of the ungodly’ (Rom. 5.6); ‘while we were still sinners Christ died on our behalf’ (Rom. 5.8); ‘being enemies we were reconciled to God’ (Rom. 5.10).

Paul is trying to express the reality of what happened on the cross. But it is not easy to do so in rational or logical terms. His language is metaphorical, and he uses other metaphors to try to grasp after the meaning of the cross, describing it at different times as sacrifice, the death of the beloved son, the curse of the law, redemption from slavery, reconciliation, the conquest of the powers of evil. Notice how, even in this short passage, he packs in the idea of redemption (v.24) just before sacrifice. We do well, therefore, to tread carefully in our understanding of the cross. Paul’s metaphors show him struggling and straining to put into words a spiritual reality which is fundamentally beyond human rationality to grasp. That’s why in 1 Corinthians Paul speaks of the folly of the cross and the foolishness of God, which are wiser than the wisdom of humans. His array of metaphors seem to be saying to us that here is a reality which can be felt and known rather than understood as some mechanical process. Dunn once again helpfully comments that all these metaphors would hardly have been effective ‘had they not corresponded to experiences of conscience set at rest, of release and liberation, of reconciliation, and so on. From the beginning, we may well infer, the doctrine of atonement was not independent of the experience of atonement. From the first, Christ was known by his benefits.’ (Theology p.232) Perhaps above all the use of sacrificial imagery reminds us that it is God who provides the sacrifice. In the OT God is never appeased or satisfied: he is never the object of the verb kipper – the point is the removal of sin from the sinner(s). God takes it away by means of the sacrifice. And this is something which Paul himself must have experienced practically through the mercy of Ananias, all those years before in Damascus.

The other passages we have looked at in this series have looked at the cross from the ground up, as it were, seeing the human perspective even if from different angles. Paul has done something different, and tried to show us in Romans how things look to God. Dali attempted something similar in this painting. It is far more realistic than most of his other surrealist compositions, which feature melting clocks for example. What is most striking about it is how it manages to offer two perspectives: one from the bottom up, the other from the top down. From the bottom up we see the coastal village of Port Ligat, which was Dali’s home, though the fishing boats remind us of LakeGalilee too. From the top down we see in a sense a God’s eye view on the crucifixion, untethered to the ground and perhaps therefore invoking a timeless eternity. The perspective is drawn from a sketch by the 16th century mystic St John of the Cross (hence the painting’s title). Dali said that ‘My aesthetic ambition…was completely the opposite of all the Christs painted by most of the modern painters, who have all interpreted him in the expressionistic and contortionistic sense, thus obtaining emotion through ugliness. My principal preoccupation was that my Christ would be beautiful as the God that he is.’ (1952 Catalogue p.198) This is an image of a God who sacrifices himself in order that his world should go free. Dali has sometimes been criticised for not including nails or a crown of thorns. Is this Christ suffering? Here perhaps he was pointing to the writings of another Spanish mystic, Catherine of Siena, from the 14th century, who famously observed that ‘Nails were not enough to hold God-and-man nailed and fastened on the Cross, had not love held Him there.’

And there in the perspective of eternity is perhaps the place to leave our journey around the cross, as bystanders at the crucifixion. At different times we perhaps need to hear different stories of the cross. In suffering and pain, Mark’s place of desolation may comfort us, as we recognise that we are not alone and that Jesus has more than shared our situation. In that place of darkness, too, we may also find hope in Matthew’s hints of resurrection, like the first streaks of dawn before the sunrise. Luke’s compassionate cross reminds us that it is a place of forgiveness, that the arms of Jesus on the cross are always open to welcome back those who turn to him. John’s sacrificial lamb draws us deeper into the mystery. For Paul the cross is the meeting place, where God and humanity are reconciled and the world is healed. And the bystanders are drawn into action, bearing ourselves the suffering of Christ into a world that needs not just to hear but above all to experience the truth of God’s loving sacrifice of himself for the world.