Easter II: It was traumatic….

I’ve been thinking about death recently. No, I’m not depressed (at least not yet), but there’s a lot of it about. I mentioned that my dad died just a few weeks ago. And we’ve had rather a lot of funerals at Church just recently (with another one coming shortly). All that is close to home. But one doesn’t have to look very far to find death further afield. How quickly the thousands killed in Gaza disappear from the media spotlight as the World’s attention (along with its cameras) turns to a new war in the Middle East. Mercifully(!) the death toll there is probably only in the hundreds (at least currently), but the number is tragically growing daily. And that’s not to mention the “old” war in Ukraine, with a death toll in the tens of thousands (at the very least). Easy enough to write, not difficult to total, but so many of these deaths are an utter disaster to those intimately involved with them. The kind of traumatising disaster from which folk never fully recover.

Although for the most part in modern life we do what we can to distance ourselves from it, death is part and parcel of life. Although (outside of war and major incidents) we sanitise it, even ignore it, it is in reality inescapable and unavoidable – at least eventually. In that sense it is not a choice. But imagine if it were. Imagine if it was not inevitable. The obvious question is what would you give to avoid it? Presumably anything short of life itself (that would be self-defeating). But such a question is so hypothetical they it is not worth spending time on. Except that death, even in this fallen world, is not inevitable for everyone. God doesn’t die. You might argue that He is so far removed from death anyway that this hardly counts. He is not “one of us”, so how would this change anything? Except that the Christian claim is that He became one of us. Further, that He became one of us precisely to die. I’ve already discussed that in the person of Jesus He lived as one of us aware that he was heading inexorably toward His death. And there is very good reason to think that he knew about His impending death in detail that went beyond even what He told His first followers ahead of it happening. What kind of death was it to be? The worst imaginable.

The human imagination is a powerful thing. But it is part of our fallen lot that it has so often spawned really horrible ways of bringing about death. There’s no need to list them. But in terms of intensity of pain, degradation and humiliation, crucifixion must be near the top of the list. It was designed to be. We have even managed to sanitise the cross by turning it (even with a body attached) into an item of jewellery. But in Jesus’ world, everyone understood whatwas involved in crucifixion. And on the first Good Friday, they (or those who wanted to) actually observed what was involved. That this was the type of death that Jesus had chosen seems so implausible that multiple theories have been advanced as to why His death was variously an accident or miscalculation. All of these are speculative, and none of them is consistent with what we actually know of Jesus’ intentions. But the stuff that we can imagine, and in that sense can enter into and understand, is as nothing compared to what was unique about the particular death that Jesus elected to endure.

From His perspective what was really difficult, and the thing that in His humanity He appears to have struggled with, was that he was going “to be made sin”. That’s not speculation, that’s how the Apostle Paul described what is going on as Jesus hangs on the centre cross on the first Good Friday. Not that He becomes a sinner, but that He becomes sin and a sacrifice for it. The sin in question is mine and yours and therefore in a sense has to be at one remove from Him. Nevertheless the idea is that He becomes what we naturally are, and as such God Himself vents His justified and just anger on Him, so that it might be both exhausted and turned away from us. Again, this is so appalling, and from a certain perspective so unjust, that many theories have been advanced to explain what is happening on the cross in a different way. But the wonder of it is in part that He knowingly and willingly goes to the cross in the full knowledge of what is going to transpire. In the full knowledge of a kind and extent of anguish that you and I can’t imagine. But also in the full knowledge of what this is going to achieve.

As an aside, there is another aspect that we often forget. In a way that is probably impossible for us to fathom, Jesus’ humanity is never divorced from His divinity (He is God incarnate). What that must mean is that He always knows that He has the power to call a halt to proceedings, or in some sense divinely rescue His humanity and lessen the impact of what frail, pathetic creatures are seeking to inflict on their Creator. Yet he does not. He surrenders His human will to the divine will, and suffers as one of us, but also representative of all of us. That second aspect is precisely why it has to be Him, and not merely a man who happens to be a very good and exemplary prophet or moral superstar.

Meanwhile, what of the effect of the death of this particular person in this particular manner, on those closest to Him at the time? No every death is tragic (although most are in their way). Not every death is traumatic. It is genuinely difficult to think of the death of a Hitler, Mao or Stalin as anything other than justified. In my own case, my observation of my own father’s death was that while it brought us the pain of bereavement (which is always a complicated experience) it was neither unexpected nor traumatic. I realise that this is not always the case, but that’s how it was for me. Dad’s time had come; there was little element of choice. It was in many ways a relief. And it was transformed by what Jesus accomplished. But at the time of Jesus death, to those first followers, to those who were bereaved on that Friday, it was so unexpected (even if it shouldn’t have been), counter to their expectation and just plain horrible, that the trauma for them is difficult to imagine. And for them to see much beyond the events of that day, is surely too much to expect. We know the whole story, they did not. It is to their credit that they inform us about how devastated they actually were. My suspicion is that I would have been just as devastated and traumatised.

In the normal course of events this story should probably have ended with their trauma, or perhaps some moral they derived from it. If that were really the case we probably would never have heard of any of them, or any of their story. That you are reading this is a small piece of evidence that this is not where the story in fact ends. Fortunately it’s really difficult to miss what happens next.

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.

Life in the pandemic III: The ultimate act of self-isolation.

So much that might once have seemed strange now seems normal. I used to work in an office in a building in the middle of a busy city centre University campus. For the last few weeks I have been going to work in my dining room. In previous years, we would have gathered on the morning of Good Friday with about three hundred other people, in Bridge Chapel, to reflect on a pivotal event in the history of humanity – the death by crucifixion of Jesus 2000-ish years ago. Yesterday we sat in our front room, viewing prayers, songs and talks on the interweb. Today, a bright, warm, spring day, we might well have headed off somewhere to have a meal or a walk. We actually spent it at home, only going out for our one-hour, Government-mandated exercise (cycle ride for me, walk for my wife). We are of course “self-isolating”, our contribution in the fight against the Covid19 pandemic.

Self-isolation for us is far from intolerable. There are three of us in a large, comfortable house in a pleasant street in a quiet neighbourhood. And as there are three of us, we’re not that isolated. We see other folk from time to time walking past, and when we’re out and about for our walks or bike-rides. We’re in contact with our family and friends by means of the wonders of modern technology. We are safe, and well fed and watered. Solitary confinement this is not. I realise these are not the happy circumstances of everyone. Calls to the National Domestic Abuse helpline have increased 25% since the start of the lockdown, prompting the Government to announce today an extra £2M for domestic abuse services. Staying at home for some does not equate to being in a place of safety. For the old person living on their own, self-isolation might well be more like solitary confinement, particularly if they have no family or neighbours to keep an eye on them. Never-the-less the experience for many of us, at least in the short term, while trying, is far from tough. And of course it serves a purpose.

We have all become used to the mantra of “stay at home, save the NHS, save lives”; that’s the UK version, but it has its equivalents across the globe. The aim is to stop the transmission of the virus, so that fewer get infected at any one time, fewer are hospitalised, fewer need access to intensive care, and the whole system copes. My inconvenience makes a small, but I hope, tangible contribution to the overall effort. It seems incomparably insignificant to the efforts being made by so many on our behalf on the healthcare frontline. But the message is clear: isolation (even if it turns out not to be that isolating) saves lives.

Isolation is, of course, the central point of what transpired on that first Easter, and is one of its more controversial aspects. Easter really has not got a lot to do with pastel outfits, chocolate eggs (and the hunting thereof), and roast lamb rather than beef for Sunday lunch. Much as tinsel and trees obscure the meaning of Christmas, the aforementioned distract us from a supreme act of self-isolation that saves lives.

There are four accounts of the death of Jesus to be found in the Gospels and all of them repay close attention. Among many things that are striking about them, one is that they are all relatively matter-of-fact about the detail of what was done to Jesus at the cross – you won’t find much blood and gore. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, the original readers of the Gospels were familiar with crucifixion; they needed no reminder of the suffering endured by those condemned to die in this fashion. It was a cruel punishment, certainly; unusual it was not. But secondly, brutal as the physical suffering of Jesus was, in and of itself this could achieve little. If this was simply about the untimely albeit brutal death of a man for some political or religious but ultimately human cause, it would have been then, and would remain now, obscure. Far from unique. But the key to what was going on, and what makes it unique, was not what could be seen. It was something that was unseen, but was evidenced by that most desperate and devastating of all the statements that Jesus made during His suffering. After three hours of darkness, lasting from noon until 3pm, He is recorded as crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”. A cry of dereliction; a cry of isolation.

There is much about the mechanics of what transpired in those hours of darkness that I’m not capable of understanding. But this much is clear, in the darkness something fundamental changed. Just a few hours previously, Jesus had prayed in Gethsemane, addressing God as His Father, His Abba. But now, that relationship is broken; He can no longer address God as Father, but only as God. With the help of the rest of Scripture, we can reconstruct what has happened, and it is breathtaking. “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us” is how Paul puts it in 2 Cor 5:21. As such, He is cut off, abandoned, isolated.

This state of affairs could have been avoided, and could not have been imposed. As you track through the events that preceded Jesus’ death on the cross, all the way from His arrest in the garden where he had prayed, via His show-trial and abuse, to the cross were he suffered, it’s clear that He is not being driven by events, but that He is driving events. His arrest, His trial, the procession out to Calvary, perhaps right to the very point of His isolation, a halt could have been called. So this was something He did and to that extent His isolation was self-isolation.

 Just as His suffering was qualitatively and quantitatively, breathtakingly, different from mine, so also is what was won by it.  His being isolated from God, His being cut-off, and as sin-bearer also bearing the answering anger of God for sin, wins for me the end of an isolation that is naturally mine. In my natural state I am isolated from the God I was made to know, with all the consequences that flow from that isolation. But that isolation was ended the moment I came into the good of His sacrifice for me. Does sin make God angry? You bet. And I was a target of that anger, until a great transfer took place – my sin to Him, His righteousness to me (that’s the other half of 2 Cor 5:21).

Our self-isolation in the great pandemic is endurable, partly because of that greater act of self-isolation that restores me to the most basic relationship I was created to be in. And the best bit? Have to wait for Sunday for that.