The Hope of the Cross

Ignorance of major world religions comes in many forms today, but Lawrence Swaim's particular version is still stunning. It is almost as if Swaim skimmed pop or even comic books on Christian theology and early church history and fashioned a reckless rant from their raw materials. Of the many historically and argumentatively strange things in his essay, his call for Christians to get rid of the symbol of the cross is the most bizarre. Getting rid of the cross is tantamount to getting rid of Jesus—which is to say, of Christianity itself. Many self-proclaimed progressives may want Christianity to go away, but realists know that this will not happen anytime soon. So, for the time being, let at least this much be understood: If Christianity is here at all, it will have to do with Jesus of Nazareth. And if it has to do with Jesus of Nazareth, it will have to do with the symbol of the cross.

Serious historians dispute many things about Jesus's life, but the one thing they all acknowledge is that he was killed on a Roman cross. Even the ancient Roman historian Tacitus knew this. The founder of the abominable Christians, said Tacitus, "suffered the extreme penalty . . . under one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate." As Tacitus knows, the cross of Jesus is a historical fact. Banishing it from our understanding of Christianity falsifies the truth of history and thereby ruptures the continuity with Jesus of Nazareth as he really lived and died. Jesus without a cross is, quite frankly, someone else. No more could we speak truly of Abraham Lincoln or his legacy without mentioning his assassination. On this point, the past is not so pliable as our contemporary sensibilities may wish: no cross, no Jesus. To talk meaningfully about Jesus at all is to speak clearly of his earthly end—execution on the cross.

In Christian understanding, however, this does not mean that God sadistically punished Jesus. In fact, a major burden of the New Testament and later Christian thought is to say something quite the opposite. The point the early Christians made is precisely that God does not punish someone else for humanity's crimes, but that he takes such judgment upon himself. The New Testament speaks of Jesus's legal innocence together with his refusal to deal violently with those who come to kill him, as well as his self-determination to follow through with his mission even unto his unjust death. Later Christian thinkers developed the implications of this language with the doctrines of the Trinity (that the one God exists in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and the Incarnation (that God the Son became flesh in the person of Jesus).

For many theologians, the cross is a symbol not of blood redemption, but of hope even amid suffering. C. Kavin Rowe warns that excising the symbol of the cross would decimate the "specifically Christian impetus to work with and for those who are being bruised and crushed."

In fact, these doctrines can be read as the culmination of Christian reflection on the cross. Taken together, they affirm that Christians see on the cross not only the innocent Jesus but also God. In the enfleshed person of God the Son—Jesus of Nazareth—God refuses to deal with violence by violence and instead exposes himself to the gravest violence and injustice humans can perpetrate. In so doing, God absorbs human pain and waywardness into his own divine life for the purpose of healing. The cross, that is, is God's own ingestion of the world's refuse. Far from disclosing a strange, violent God, the cross of Jesus actually discloses God's humility and desire to repair the world at his own expense.

Finally—and here we come more directly to the issues that concern readers of Tikkun—the cross is not simply a symbol of defeat. It is, rather, simultaneously the image of suffering and of hope, the symbol within the Christian drama of the essential unity of complete devastation with the hope for...