August 31 - “CROSS PURPOSES” (Matthew 16:21-28)

Today’s question (you know, we’ve been preaching on questions supplied by members of the church this summer) is a goodie, I think. Very interesting. And it’s a “What if” question, which can be fun, since it calls for some speculation. And this is it: “What if Pontius Pilate had set Jesus free instead of condemning him to death, and Jesus would have been able to live to a ripe old age preaching and teaching?”  What if??    Pastor David Hamilton

Well, I can tell you one thing for sure – we would have a much thinner hymnbook if that had happened! No more “Lift High the Cross.” No more “In the Cross of Christ I Glory” or “Beneath the Cross of Jesus.” No more “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.” The entire sections of Lent, and probably Easter, too, gone from the pages. And the front walls of a lot of churches, and the tops of steeples, too, would sure look a lot different. And what would so many people wear around their necks instead?

But I suspect that the question is meant to drive us a little bit deeper than that. What if Jesus hadn’t died on the cross? Would Christianity even be possible without his death? What is the meaning of the cross for what we believe?

Someone said Christianity without the cross leaves us with something more like Buddhism – a wise teacher and a spiritual path to follow. And I guess we could speculate as to whether that would be better or worse than what we’ve got. But the truth of the matter is, that the cross was a controversial element of Christianity right from the very beginning. How does one explain that your innocent and righteous Spiritual Leader so ticked off the other spiritual and political leaders of the day, that they felt the need to violently get rid of him – and that God would allow that to happen? Especially if you’ve got in your religious tradition a belief that dying a death like that would leave one so religiously unclean as to be cursed by God. How could the cross have been Jesus’ fate? One of the very first things the followers of Jesus had to do was come to terms with the terms of his death – how could such a terrible thing have happened to such a wonderful teacher?

The cross, of course, is still controversial. Jews don’t quite see that the promised Messiah would be a suffering sort of figure. Muslims can’t accept the possibility that one who was the Son of God would allow himself to die a wretched death like that. Some modern Christian theologies find the cross all too violent an image with which to speak about redemption. The Apostle Paul, writing some twenty or thirty years after the fact of the crucifixion, acknowledged that to most of the world the idea of Jesus’ death on the cross was seen as either scandalous or foolishness.

But the cross, for most of Christian history, has been seen as standing at the center of the story; not just as an important element of our faith, but as an indispensable element of our faith. The cross says something that nothing else says quite as well.

It’s clear in the Bible that Jesus talked to quite a few people – I mean, within the narrow confines of first-century Palestine. And the result of his teaching was consistently that some people were attracted by what he said, and other people rejected it. In fact, there’s some evidence in John’s gospel that the longer Jesus talked, the more people decided that what he was saying just wasn’t for them. In fact, at one point late in the story, it seems like it’s back to just Jesus and his twelve closest friends – everybody else has heard enough and moved on. So who knows, if Jesus had lived to a ripe old age and continued to go around teaching for forty or fifty years more, instead of three, maybe by the end he would have been just talking to himself. It seems unlikely, anyway, based upon the evidence of the gospels, that a longer preaching career would have resulted in any greater number of converts to his cause.

So without the cross maybe we just have some moral and spiritual lessons that any good teacher could have taught. But with the cross we have foolishness and scandal. And I don’t want to make too light of that, because over two thousand years the cross has been used in many foolish and scandalous ways - as a symbol of conquest and oppression and violence all too often. Maybe we can blame it on the Emperor Constantine, who in the early part of the fourth century claimed to have had a vision in which he was told to put the sign of the cross on his battle shields and he would be guaranteed victory. And so he did, and he won an important battle; and soon thereafter he decreed that all the Roman world would now become the Christian world. And the cross took on a whole new meaning as a military symbol, an accompaniment to the violence of empire that hasn’t changed much now in seventeen hundred years. Inquisitions; pogroms; forced conversions; crusades – way too much violence done in the name of the cross. And so some Christian theologians have asked, Has the violence of a simplistic theology of atonement that sees an angry God being placated by the death of an innocent son led to greater violence in the name of that God – or has it just been a convenient excuse for the worst inclinations of a violent humanity? Maybe if Jesus had lived to a ripe old age and died in his sleep instead, we would be a kinder and gentler people who better understand and better live by the teachings of peace and forgiveness and love that were, after all, at the heart of what Jesus was all about in his life. Maybe…

But let’s admit the obvious – we can ask “What if” but it doesn’t change history. Pontius Pilate did condemn Jesus to death, and he was crucified, and the cross has been a powerful symbol of the Christian faith, for better and for worse, ever since.

Now, we can legitimately make the claim, I think, that where the cross has been used as an excuse for violence – that is, where Christianity itself has been used as an excuse for violence – that the cross and the faith have in fact been misused. Misunderstood. - that it was never the intent when Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me,” that the cross should ever be used as a weapon or a club.

But the cross is there at the center of our faith – and I want to spend these last couple of minutes just reminding us what it means there.

The cross, at its most basic level, is a reflection of commitment. When Jesus says to his disciples, “Take up your cross and follow me,” it’s a way of saying that the cause that is being pursued is one that will necessitate commitment. It never fails to amaze me when I think of the number of people who think that they can be part-time Christians. Follow Jesus at their own convenience. Use prayer as a way of telling God what to do, instead of as a way of seeking God’s will for themselves. Worship when they feel like it. Give out of the leftovers. There was nothing halfway about Jesus’ commitment to his cause. Maybe it’s what happened to him that scares us off. I guess that’s for you to figure out for yourself. But the cross stands as the sign of Jesus’ willingness to give his all for that which was important to him. We might say it was for the sake of “The Kingdom,” which seems to have been Jesus’ way of talking about the values and the priorities of God’s way in the world. The cross is a reminder that faith has its cost. There was a cost for Jesus, and there will be a cost for us, too; a cost for living out the way of Jesus – the way of forgiveness and compassion and love and service and peace. Forgiveness and compassion and peace aren’t really all that popular in the world, not now any more than in Jesus’ day. They are qualities that tend to stir up opposition.

The cross speaks of the commitment called for; it also speaks of the struggle that’s sure to be found along the way.

But of course, it wasn’t just to some “Cause” that Jesus was committed. It was more than that, according to the story. It was a commitment to us, to all humanity, to all creation. It’s not just that Jesus was being faithful to some principle – he was being faithful to a promise – a promise that God would never turn away from this world in its need. The worst the world might throw in God’s face would not keep God from being true, would not get in the way of God’s love. The worst that you can do, in your willfulness and your stubbornness and your ignorance, will not keep God from loving you. That’s what the cross says. That’s the commitment that Jesus was keeping.

Jesus once said, shortly before his death, “There is no greater love than to give up your life for your friends.” And so he did. We are the cause – the friends - worth dying for. We and all the world. The cross is an expression of that holy divine love and of God’s commitment to all humanity, and nothing – no amount of words – could ever speak as eloquently as that. “For God so loved the world…”

So I don’t have an answer this morning about what would have happened if Pontius Pilate had set Jesus free. I’m sure God wouldn’t have let a little thing like that get in the way of ultimately getting the message across, one way or another. But the cross, in its starkness, gives us a view of the world from God’s perspective – human sin and human worth - and the length to which God is willing to go to show us what faithfulness and commitment and love and forgiveness and grace look like, and to prove that even death itself cannot and will not stop God from saving you and all creation.

Amen.