Life in the pandemic XXIII: Easter Reflections – No offense, but……

I recently mentioned my liking for reading history (at the time I was reading McGrath on reformation thought). I am happy to report that I progressed from reading about the Reformation specifically, to reading about just about everything else. Well, not quite. I’ve been reading Tom Holland’s “Dominion” (reviewed here in "The Critic") which covers from about 500BC to the modern day. His mission is to answer a question:

 “How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world?” 

Interesting as it is, this is Holland’s question and I don’t want to answer here. You can, after all, read his book (which I recommend). But particularly given that Easter has come round again, it is worth contemplating the particular execution that Holland mentions - the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth by the Roman administration in Jerusalem, around 30AD. As Holland goes to some lengths to explain, there is no doubt that this was viewed in a particular way by those who witnessed and heard about it originally. But today it is viewed completely differently (even by many followers of Jesus). And in that change we’ve lost something. Because, to many in the first century and for some time thereafter, the mere idea of crucifixion was utterly offensive. Today we’ve somehow reduced the cross to a silver trinket.

Crucifixion wasn’t invented by the Romans, but it was developed and honed by them, and then employed particularly for the execution of slaves and rebels. While it was occasionally used on an industrial scale, its use in peacetime was more targeted. Besides being a particularly painful and unpleasant way of dying (hence “excruciating”), it was associated with humiliation, and was specifically designed to be so. So if you had wanted to invent a religion that would be attractive in a world dominated by Rome, having crucifixion at the heart of it would not be a very bright move. As Holland says, it “….could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.” That anyone would follow a leader who had been crucified was preposterous. To claim that the leader in question was a god was beyond preposterous. The mere idea was an insult to the Roman intelligence and offensive in itself.

There was one other group that was likely to be even more outraged at the idea of a crucified God than the Romans. Apparently plotting and then successfully driving Jesus towards crucifixion was the Jewish religious leadership of the day. Their apparent enthusiasm for the crucifixion of Jesus (as opposed to His stoning or some other form of death) was perhaps because it would provide the most obvious evidence that Jesus claim to be God was a complete and odious fiction. The idea that the eternal God could die was a contradiction in the first place. But crucifixion would provide the most brutal demonstration of Jesus’ folly. How, after that, would anyone be able to claim that Jesus was anything other than an attention-seeking fake of the worst kind, with no sense of religious, cultural or civic decency.   

However, as it transpired, the followers of this Jesus had the temerity not just to claim that Jesus was God, but that this most horrifying of deaths had some central role to play in God’s dealings with men and women. They preached not just Christ, but Christ crucified. You could not come up with any proposition more likely to offend the ancient mind, whether Jew and Gentile. And the offense was somehow made worse by the idea that there was some necessity to Jesus dying in this way, and that salvation was to be found by valuing what He was claimed to be accomplishing on a cross of all things. This was to pile offense on offense. And the early Christians knew it (see 1 Cor 1:23).

And yet, time changes things. Holland plots how it took about 400 years before the cross began to appear in art. And over the centuries, rather than something to be appalled at, it became something to be contemplated, even admired. Emotions of revulsion, moved through compassion to even attraction. I well remember visiting Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, where Dali’s “Christ of Saint John of the Cross” hangs; according The Guardian’s art critic “probably the most enduring vision of the crucifixion painted in the 20^th century”. No blood, no gore, no pain and definitely no offense.

But we lose something important when we lose that original sense of offense. It alerts us to something. It alerts us to an offended God, whose justice and holiness demand a response, a reckoning, for the outrage of creaturely rebellion. How is the scale of such offense to be communicated? How is its magnitude to be answered? God’s answer to both is the cross. But there is a sort of counter-offense in the idea that I need the cross. What has it got to do with me? How dare I be accused of rebellion, and have some demand placed upon me. And for that demand to involve my personal response to, or dependence upon, a man dying on a cross? Again, offense upon offense. It all sounds as crazy now, as it did in the first century. And it should strike us as offensive.

But my natural protestations spring from the great lie that Paul talks about it in Romans (1:25). The real offense is God’s not mine, and the answer to it has to be His too. Such great offense required a response greater than any that humanity individually or collectively was capable of. So the answer is found within the Godhead, and the Father requires a price of the Son, who is glad to return it to the Father. And it is returned by way of His death on a cross. There is a compelling logic to all of this that some continue to find offensive. Nietzsche, of all people, summed it up as “the horrific paradox of the ‘crucified God’”. But Spurgeon was clear that “..true ministry should be, and must be — a holding forth of the Cross of Christ to the multitude as the only trust of sinners. Jesus Christ must be set forth evidently crucified among them.”

Religious offense of one sort or another is often in the news. But if there’s one religious group that really has no place to protest about offense it’s Christians. Because right at the heart of Easter is the most offensive event to occur in history. That is rather the point.