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.