Although we understand that the cross is central to Christianity, we tend to avoid the disturbing questions which this raises in practice. Kenneth Leech explores and exposes these questions and shows that they are what gives Christianity its real bite.
102pp, Darton, Longman and Todd, 2006. If you wish to purchase this book online, go to www.darton-longman-todd.co.uk
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
References
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Review |
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CHAPTER ONE – FOOLISHNESS TO THE GREEKS
For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:22-24)
Strange memory
Thousands of people were crucified during the sixty-five years from the time that Judea became a Roman province until the end of the Jewish War. Almost all of them are now forgotten: they have become part of the immense historical mass of the anonymous dead. Such a loss of identity is hardly surprising in the aftermath of this most degrading and dehumanising form of punishment in which, according to Cicero, even the name of the victim should be removed. The rotting corpses were often left for vultures and animals to devour. It is this form of punishment, reserved mainly for the lower classes, particularly for slaves, violent criminals and instigators of revolt, which provides the location for these reflections on the work of our salvation.
Among the crucified people, Jesus of Nazarath alone is remembered. But he is not only remembered, he is remembered by his followers as the crucified God. The accounts of his death in the gospels are the longest and most detailed accounts of crucifixion in the whole of ancient literature, and the event itself is supported by evidence which is better than that for any similar event in the ancient world. Within the gospels themselves the accounts of the passion (suffering) and death of Jesus take up the largest single sections: indeed the gospels have been described as passion narratives with extended introductions. Clearly this crucifixion is seen as being exceptionally important, at least by some people.
Within the community of his followers, Jesus is remembered – in the most literal sense, re-membered. Week by week, day by day, in the eucharistic offering, in the exposition of the word and in other ways, there is a ritual re-enactment, an anamnesis, of the dying and rising of Jesus. It is the Eucharist or Mass – that regular act in which Christians claim to ‘eat the flesh’ and ‘drink the blood’ of Christ – which most dramatically manifests and makes present the mystery of the cross and resurrection. This ritual or liturgy is central to Christian consciousness and to the nurturing and sustaining of Christian identity. ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ stands at the heart of Christian worship. Yet it is a strange act and seems to the outsider to be a foolish one. For here Christians not only retell the ancient stories, they claim to re-enact the Last Supper, relive the sacrifice of Calvary and of heaven, and remember their own broken body through solidarity with the broken and glorious body of Jesus Christ. This ‘unbloody sacrifice’ of the Mass is strange, mysterious, fascinating and impenetrable, and, for all the attempts to dispense with its mystery and reduce it to a crude one-dimensional fellowship meal, the complexity of the mystery keeps returning. In the mystery of the Mass we are, as it were, present at Calvary and at the resurrection. It is a strange event rooted in a strange memory.
While most Anglican eucharistic prayers use ‘remembrance’, the English versions of the Roman Mass use the weaker word ‘memory’. However, while memory is often seen as a looking back to past and finished events, in recent years there has been a renewed emphasis on corporate memory, the memory which recovers lost traditions and suppressed histories, the memory which nourishes and strengthens movements and struggles. Memory is of the greatest importance in the lives of Christians. Without memory there can be no forgiveness, no healing of the hurts and pain of the past. And forgiveness and healing are central to Christian existence. The trouble is that our memory is often blocked. Past hurts and sufferings are too painful to remember, so we blot them out of consciousness. We often justify this organised amnesia by saying that we ‘live for the present’. But living for the present can easily be an evasion of the reality of our past. It is this evasion which must be undermined, lovingly yet deliberately, by the Christian community. For to live within a community of faith is to live within a community of memory, and the Christian community is shaped by what J. B. Metz calls ‘the dangerous memory of the passion of Christ’. It is a community with a history. T. S. Eliot in ‘Little Gidding’ tells us that a people without history is not redeemed from time, and, in Christian thought, redemption takes place both within time and from the captivity of time.
However, the word ‘remember’ brings out the present dynamic in the past events. To re-member is to put together again. And this is what happens among the disciples of Jesus. Week by week, day by day, the Christian community celebrates the mystery of his dying, breaking bread in his memory, and in that fragmentation, that brokenness, celebrates its own unity as ‘one body in Christ’. The term ‘body of Christ’ is used in Paul to mean both the Eucharist and the people. This continual memorial or anamnesis is more than an act of nostalgia. It is a putting together again of the body of Christ which was broken and given for the life of the world. There is something immensely powerful and energising about this movement, and yet we must admit that it is very odd, very strange – indeed, on the surface, utterly absurd. For one would have thought that the event of Calvary would have marked the end of what we call ‘Christology’, thinking about Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah: it would seem to mark the disastrous failure of a project. Yet this seems not to be so. Christ was broken and crushed, and yet it is when we are broken and crushed that we know him. Christ was a failure and it is in the midst of our failure that we know him, not as another failure but as a source of life and power.
In fact the original Calvary experience was, for the disciples, one of failure. It was later, on the road to Emmaus, and on similar subsequent encounters, that the reality of the cross and of the crucified one became a living reality. It was on the first Pentecost after the death of Jesus that, as a result of Peter’s preaching, they were ‘cut to the heart’ (Acts 2:37). It was as a result of the preaching of the gospel of the crucified Christ that people were brought to faith and discipleship.
And so it has been through all the succeeding centuries. Although evidence suggests that friendship and the witness and examples of friends is the most important single factor in leading people to Christian faith, there is a power in preaching which is not dependent on the preacher’s own ability or personal strength. We may be chained in various ways but the word of God is not chained (2 Timothy 2:3). There is liberating and healing power in the word. So the Letter to the Hebrews says that the word of God ‘is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow’ (Hebrews 4:12). Similarly the Baptist preacher C. H. Spurgeon, when he was asked ‘Why do you defend the Bible?’, replied, ‘I do not defend the Bible. The Bible is a lion. Set it free and it defends itself.’ In preaching, we are seeking not so much to draw attention to ourselves or our rhetorical and dramatic ability as to set free, to liberate, the word so that it does its own (or rather God’s) strange work (Isaiah 28:21, King James Version).
God’s strange work: life through the cross
For his followers Jesus is the exact opposite of Humpty Dumpty. Not only is his broken life put together again in the resurrection, but each celebration of the Christian community is a re-membering of Christ, a putting together of the Christ who was broken and smashed. But in this re-membering, we become his members, his body, the extension of his incarnation and passion into human history. It is in this social experience that salvation is found. For salvation involves a participation in a new history, becoming members of a new community. We are not redeemed in isolation but as part of a redeemed community, a community brought into being by God’s strange work. When Christians meet together to break bread and share wine in his memory, they are taking part in an act which helps them to live. Through this act the distant figure from first-century Galilee and Jerusalem becomes a living presence and source of life.
The re-membering of Christ, the movement of his passion into human history, is one of the most striking, most baffling and yet most clear features of the human story. For when people contemplate this crucified figure, they do so not as a solitary and tragic martyr but as a source of strength and grace, and as a way of deepening solidarity in pain and struggle. To remember Christ in his dying is to become his members, his limbs and organs, to be his body crucified and risen. It is to reawaken his memory as a contemporary source of strength and illumination. Or so Christians claim.
So in contemplating the passion, we look back to the event of Christ’s death, not only as a historical memory, but as a source of life, of freedom, of nourishment, of renewal. In that crushed and broken victim, we see our hope, our only hope, in a world which continues to crush and break the children of God.
Good Friday: The Feast of Fools
Christians commemorate Christ’s death on that paradoxical day called Good, a paradox which has been reinforced twice in recent years by its coincidence with April Fools’ Day. It is a coincidence with deep meaning. On Good Friday we celebrate the fact that ‘God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross’ (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). It is the feast of the divine folly. Indeed in the New Testament the cross is seen, and its proclamation is seen, as an act of folly. St Paul puts it like this:
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart… Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified. .. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:18-25)
Paul goes on to say that God has chosen what is foolish in the world to confound the wise (1:27). And so if anyone claims to be wise in this age, that person must become a fool in order to become wise (3:18). The cross is described as moria, insanity (1 Corinthians 1:18f.) and as ‘God’s foolishness’ (1:25). We need to become fools in order to become wise because the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God (3:18).
It is essential to grasp the importance of this idea of folly in sharing the mystery of the cross and in following the way of the cross. One of the earliest crucifixes shows Jesus with the head of an ass, an image which no doubt was derived from Paul’s portrayal of the cross as folly. But we could say that the entire life of Jesus was an act of folly. There is no sense in it by worldly conventional standards: his solidarity with outcasts, his extreme demands, his polemic against the rich and devout, all culminating in his death as a rebel and criminal. It is quite unreasonable. Christ is a fool, a symbol of contradiction, of the foolishness of God. And those who follow his way become sharers in his folly. They become ‘fools for the sake of Christ’ (1 Corinthians 4:10).
Sadly it is only in the Eastern Orthodox tradition (and particularly in the Russian tradition) that the status of the holy fool is recognised liturgically and that folly for Christ’s sake is seen as an integral part of spirituality, consciously celebrated and revered. The first saint to be recognised as a fool was St Simeon Salos, a Palestinian monk who died at the end of the sixth century. He threw nuts at the candles during the liturgy and ate sausages publicly on Good Friday. St Andrew the Fool walked naked through the streets of Constantinople and behaved as a beggar. The fools reappeared in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Russia. The most famous of the fools of Russia, St Basil the Blessed who lived during the sixteenth century, made Tsar Ivan the Terrible eat raw meat, consorted with prostitutes, threw stones at the houses of respectable people and stole from dishonest traders. He too ate sausages on Good Friday and walked naked through the streets of Moscow. The fools were often nomads and pilgrims, always figures of the absurd. They appeared particularly during periods of complacency in Church and society. Essentially the holy fools kept alive the scandal of the naked, accursed saviour who was killed outside the camp.
In the west, the Cistercians maintained the tradition of folly for Christ’s sake. William of St Thierry (1085-1148), in his book The Mirror of Faith, says that Christ’s wisdom is mad and that Christians are called to ‘holy madness’ (sancta . . . amoris insania). Francis of Assisi was called to be a ‘new fool’ in the world, while Irish tradition is filled with accounts of wild and strange men who were possessed of deep perception and insight. Nor are the holy fools extinct. On Good Friday 1994 – also April Fools’ Day – Father Carl Kabat, dressed as a clown, hammered on a Minuteman III missile in North Dakota, for which he was sentenced to five years in prison.
John Saward, whose work Perfect Fools (1) is the authoritative study of folly for Christ’s sake in east and west, argues that the holiness of the fools shows itself most in their solidarity with the outcasts of society. They are not content with ‘social work’ but identify completely with the wretched of the earth. They see Christ present in beggars, lepers and prisoners, and particularly in moral and mental outcasts, whose behaviour makes them intolerable in conventional society and among the comfortably devout and pious. But the fool belongs also to the tradition of prophecy, and points to the madness and evil of a world system organised apart from Christ, apart from love and mercy. So the fool stands in all ages as a scandal and an offence to respectable religion, stands as a constant and disturbing reminder of the Christ who was crucified outside the gate (Hebrews 13:12).
I believe that in some way we are all called to be fools for Christ’s sake, and that the word of the cross will not make sense apart from this willingness to take the form of a fool. We come always before the cross as fools, as disciples of that messianic fool who entered Jerusalem on an ass and died in apparent failure as an act of supreme folly. Religion goes disastrously astray when it ceases to be a sign of contradiction and becomes the cement for social conformity. The foolishness of God is then replaced by capitulation to the values of the world. A Church which owes its origins to the cross cannot, if it is to be true to its nature, be the slave of worldly norms and stereotypes. Conformity to the world is the betrayal of its foundation in folly and contradiction, and of its necessary role as a community of contrast and of dissent.
So we are urged to be transformed, not conformed (Romans 12:2), an injunction which the Church seems constantly to be in danger of reading in reverse! The temptation to conformity and to ‘rationality’ recurs in every generation in different forms. The Church is urged to adjust, to ‘come to terms with’, the values and assumptions of the dominant culture instead of challenging and critiquing them in the name of the Jesus who came to bring a krisis to the world and its systems (John 12:31). The temptation to conformity must be resisted if the scandal of the Church under the cross is to be sustained.
The scandal of incarnation and passion
There are many theories about how the saving work of Christ takes effect but none of them is quite satisfactory. None approaches the heart of the mystery which is best embodied in symbol and sacrament. The symbol of the dying Christ is both tragic and comic, terrible and, by conventional standards, ridiculous. It represents failure and foolishness. Yet out of this foolishness comes a strength and a source of wisdom which is beyond secular reason to comprehend. I do not mean by this that Christianity is fundamentally irrational. Clearly in order to take the step of faith in Christ at all one must believe that it is, in some sense, a ‘reasonable’ step to take. But as one moves closer to that which draws us and transforms us, it is mystery, not rationality, which takes over. In the end, it is faith and love, not thought, which attracts us to this strange figure on the cross.
And, in any case, we need to ask; whose rationality? There is no independent, ‘objective’ standard of reason which hovers conveniently over the world. Rationality emerges from and is embodied in particular traditions. In order to understand the power of the crucified Christ, we need to remember what it is that Christians, those who stand within this particular tradition, believe about him. Christian faith is not a reasonable set of beliefs for adults which suddenly goes mad and regresses to fantasy when it comes to the death on the cross. At the very core of the faith is the absurdity of the Word made flesh, God made small. As one Christmas carol expresses it:
O wonder of wonders, which none can unfold:
The Ancient of Days is an hour or two old;
The maker of all things is made of the earth,
Man is worshipped by angels, and God comes to birth.
So scandalous and so amazing is this truth that it is conventionally banished to the safe world of the Christmas card or crib. Christ is enclosed within the manger where he can be controlled: he does not grow up, teach, suffer, or die, or rise again in this Peter Pan theology. Yet until we recover the scandal and mystery, as well as the redemptive direction, of Christmas, we will not make much sense of Good Friday and Easter. Christ, Paul tells us, emptied (ekenosen) himself and took the form of a slave. This theme of the ’emptying’ (kenosis) of Jesus is normally used as a way of talking about the incarnation. But Paul immediately says that he then humbled himself in obedience to this most extreme form of death (Philippians 2:7). He endured crucifixion as one who was in the form of God. So Christians have dared to say that God was crucified. It was God who hung there. If this is so, then in our relationship to the cross, we are entering into something very close to the mystery of God’s being. All Christian claims must have their focal point in the crucified Christ, in this love-directed journey of God into the land of human brokenness.
The idea of a crucified Messiah, a Christos estauromenos (1 Corinthians 1:23), was not known to earlier Jewish theology. It would have been viewed as barbaric and mad by most of those who listened to the message. Yet the Christian claim was, and is, that our situation was so dark, so hopeless, that God himself must enter it in order to transform it into light and liberation. ‘God with us’ in Christian understanding means the entry of God in the most specific and concrete way into human history. Bethlehem and Calvary, crib and cross, stand together. It is the Word made flesh who hangs on the tree. In the words of St Gregory Nazianzen: ‘We needed a God made flesh, a God put to death, that we might live again.’ Without this central gospel truth of God revealed in human flesh, the passion of Christ is meaningless. And yet this truth is not known by reason. It is grasped by an act of daring, of folly, of holy madness. It is an absurd and strange claim: that God poured himself out, became insignificant and small. And it is in the very strangeness, the insignificance and smallness, that we enounter the holy.
George Herbert in his poem ‘The Sacrifice’ brings out the ambiguity of the cross of Christ by his curious comparison of Jesus with a boy climbing a tree to steal fruit.
O all ye who pass by, behold and see
Man stole the fruit but I must climb the tree,
The tree of life to all, but only me:
Was ever grief like mine. (2)
Christ incarnate, Christ crucified, hangs before us as a perpetual sign of the absurd, of the divine foolishness, a sign of contradiction in a world of ‘sanity’. And all our theology, all our prayer and life, must begin with amazement, horror and wonder at the absurd mystery of the crucified God. Here the terrible gulf between humanity and God is experienced as a gulf within God. And that is the point of revelation. ‘When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realise that I am he’ (John 8:28).
So it is the task of the preacher to hold up Christ as a symbol of folly and scandal, a sign of contradiction, and so to bring about that krisis, that turbulence and upheaval in the soul which opens it to the word which is the power of salvation. At the core of the preaching of the cross is the sense of paradox. It is more important that the preacher has prayed, has been pierced by the word of God, and has become open to the activity of the Spirit, than that she has made elaborate and tidy preparation. None of us knows how God is going to use us, and we should not be too ‘ready’.
So, in the face of reductionism and attempts to draw the boundaries of rationality at the current scientific perimeter, the gospel of the cross points to a knowledge rooted in an inescapable strangeness and mystery. It is towards this knowledge that the holy season of Lent calls us. It is intended to be a time of insight and of revelation through trial and contradiction.
Lent as a time of trial and contradiction
The season of Lent begins with the memory of finitude and mortality, the symbolism of dust. On Ash Wednesday, Christians are marked with the sign of the man of dust. Looking foolish, with ashes on our foreheads, we confront our own mortality in the midst of a culture which tries to deny death’s reality. The mark of dust identifies us as foolish. Yet the sign is also the sign of the cross of the crucified and risen Christ, and so it speaks also of glory. Here too there is contradiction and contrast.
As Lent begins, the temptations of Jesus are set before us in the liturgy. Jesus goes into the wilderness, the place of desolation, of struggle, of trial. He enters not only the actual physical waste land but also the wilderness tradition of Israel, the world of temptation and trial, of Massah and Meribah, of murmuring and infidelity. The exodus of Jesus begins in the wilderness. And this too exposes the folly of his life. How much easier it would have been to succumb to those classic temptations. Jesus is shown as a human figure, one who wept and was tired, who hungered and thirsted. Yet the temptations are a microcosm not only of those which occurred throughout his life, relating to alternative understandings of God and of his vocation, but also of temptations which occur constantly in the life of Christ’s disciples.
First, there is the temptation to turn stones into bread. Jesus is confronted by the temptation to acquire economic power, to choose the path of an economic provider, one who satisfies the demand for food and material provision. People would turn to him as the great provider. Against this he insists that human beings do not live by bread alone but by the word of God. The second temptation is to cast himself down, to perform a miracle, to assert spiritual power, using his spiritual resources to attract support and devotion and to manipulate people, to be a wonder worker. In response to this, he insists that spirituality is not about testing God but rather about testing our motives. Thirdly, Jesus confronts the temptation to acquire political power in exchange for idolatrous worship. He could become a political autocrat. Against this he asserts the absolute claim of the transcendent God. Each temptation is a call to accept power.
Jesus recognises that power and rejects it as a personal possession. Instead he offers that power to a community, the community which is to be Christ spread abroad and disseminated, a community which will be a source of nourishment, a site for miracles, and a political force in the world. And in fact this is precisely what the Church became within a short time: a storehouse of both spiritual and material food; a place where great and mighty wonders were seen; and a subversive force which was to undermine the power of the Roman imperium. So instead of turning stones into bread, Jesus created a eucharistic community which offered bread for the world. Instead of performing a miracle, a spectacular display of power, he created a community of spiritual power. And instead of seeking a dictatorial imperialism, he created a community committed to values of equality and sharing to work as a subversive and transforming force within the structures of worldly power.
Each of these temptations remains as a temptation for us today. The Church has, over centuries, become a storehouse of material things, a centre for distribution of food, clothing and material help for people in need. There have been attempts by various Christian communities to recover something of the koinonia or common life of the Early Church. It is right that the Church should take its role as material provider seriously, and in order to do this we need to recognise both the importance of bread to human life and also the principle of ‘not by bread alone’. We need, particularly in the present climate of market-led capitalism, to beware of the danger of separating bread from justice and equality, and becoming no more than a welfare Church, exercising a soup kitchen and food pantry ministry, the flip side of consumerism. We cannot offer bread and then add a commitment to justice at a later stage. The provision of bread alone can produce a Church which colludes with the culture of possessive individualism. The Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev reminded us: ‘Bread for myself is a material question; bread for my neighbour is a spiritual question.’ (3)
The Church is easily seduced by the kingdoms of the world so that it takes on their image, becomes an imperium, a power structure, whose institutional form is shaped by the prevailing secular hierarchical and bureaucratic models and not by the gospel. Power and stability come to matter more than truth. When power is primary and the Church is seen as an end in itself, the road to some kind of fascism is wide open.
The temptation to worship false gods is also an abiding one. Lent is a time for scrutiny, for unmasking the flawed consciousness which leads to idolatry. The mark of dust is a reminder to us of the call to lowliness and to the foolishness of the God whom the powers of Church and State combined to crucify.
The foolishness of God
The crucified God: it is either the most extraordinary and wondrous truth, or the most bizarre blasphemy. When Sydney Carter wrote his song ‘Friday Morning’, with its refrain ‘It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me’, it was shunned by the BBC as anti-religious! The song consists of words put into the mouth of one of the thieves crucified with Jesus.
It was on a Friday morning
That they took me from the cell,
And 1 saw they had a carpenter
To crucify as well.You can blame it onto Pilate,
You can blame it on the Jews,
You can blame it on the devil
It’s God 1 accuse.“It’s God they ought to crucify
instead of you and me”,
I said to the carpenter
a hanging on the tree.
The song ends:
“To hell with Jehovah!”,
To the carpenter I said,
“I wish that a carpenter
Had made the world instead. . . .”
It is a song of holy folly, a song of contradiction. But it expresses in simple words the theology of the crucified God. Good Friday, April Fools’ Day. Christ dies as a fool, as a cursed one, one made to be sin for us. And we can only sit amazed. Only as fools for Christ’s sake can we dare to call this Friday good.
Christian preaching and testimony is rooted in the apparent absurdity, the foolishness of God, the foolishness of the cross. This preaching is not a controlled rational account of moral norms or theological propositions so much as a dangerous attempt to convey something of an experience of power and liberating grace flowing out of the heart of desolation and darkness. It is a proclamation, a lifting up, of the crucified Jesus as saviour and conqueror. Its power is inseparable from its paradoxical character. It is a mistake to try to eliminate, reduce or explain away the scandal and the offensive character of the cross. In the same way there is a paradoxical character about committed Christians, a strange and attractive combination of calm and unpredictability, of stability and surprise. Christian life is never a routine of foregone conclusions but is always open to the strange and the unexpected. As the fool disrupts the monotony of life, so the grace of God is subversive and destabilising in its strange work. Martin Luther King once described Christian people as ‘creatively maladjusted’, transformed nonconformists. Our task as holy fools for Christ’s sake, creatively maladjusted to the wisdom of the world, is to hold fast to the folly of the crucified one, knowing that it is in his foolishness that our wholeness lies.
1. John Saward, Perfect Fools (Oxford University Press,1980).
2. This is the argument of William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Penguin, 1962 edition, first published 1930), pp. 226-33, and, although his interpretation of Herbert has been questioned, I find it convincing.
3. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modem World (SCM Press, 1935), p. 124.
REFERENCES
