Cross theologies (week 2)...or, Too Much To Write About

This week I continued slogging through Stricken By God: Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ.  My readings this week were:

• "The Reasons For Jesus' Crucifixion" by N.T. Wright
• "God's Self-Substitution and Sacrificial Inversion" by James Alison
• "God Is Not To Blame: The Servant's Atoning Suffering According to the LXX of Isaiah 53" by E. Robert Ekblad
• "The Forgiveness of Sins: Hosea 11:1-9; Matthew 18:23-25" by Rowan Williams with comments by Mark D. Baker
• "The Repetition of Reconciliation: Satisfying Justice, Mercy and Forgiveness" by Sharon Baker

My reflections here will be centered on N.T. Wright's chapter, but I hope to bring some themes from the other essays into consideration as well.  

N.T. Wright's chapter from Stricken By God is in fact just a chapter from his pivotal work, Jesus and the Victory of God.  Wright's previous contributions to my own theological perspective cannot be downplayed.  His books, Surprised by Hope, After You Believe, and What St. Paul Really Said have been hugely impactful on not only my understanding of the Bible, but my conception of what Christianity is all about.  That said, I've not read Jesus and the Victory of God, so this chapter was mostly new material.  

The first major point (which really shouldn't even have to be said) Wright makes is that "it is worse than futile to try to separate theology from politics" (Stricken 79).  While my personal interests center on systematic theology, biblical studies have continued to center my attention on the socio-religio-political contexts of the Bible.  I would offer that common conceptions of Christian atonement theology are unhelpful particularly in their de-historicized nature. The concern to communicate a universally intelligible gospel is not wrongheaded, but it's priority in theology has done violence to the narrative of scripture.  Wright's chapter does a nice job putting the story of Jesus crucifixion back into a historical context.  He does this by examining the three major players in the narrative: the Jews, the Romans, and Jesus himself.  

Wright's analysis of the Roman and Jewish charges against Jesus are helpful, but for my purposes, his analysis of Jesus' intentions are critical.  Wright begins with the question that must be asked, "Did Jesus intend to die in something like the manner he did, and if so why?" (Stricken 91).  Some would answer with a resounding, "No!" Those answering negatively would want to either paint Jesus' death as a tragedy that cut short the life of a great man, or at least insist that Jesus didn't have to die (i.e. it was not a requirement of his divine vocation).  Wright wants to argue that Jesus' "own decisions...were themselves necessary, though insufficient, causes of his own death" (Stricken 90).

Wright's case stems from his interpretation of the Last Supper as a Passover meal.  In the upper room, Jesus "fused this great story [Passover] together with another one: the story of Jesus' own life, and of his coming death" (Stricken 92).  The Passover meal was the Jewish remembrance of God's delivery of the Hebrews from tyranny, and also looked forward to their eventual return from exile.  If Wright is correct in his interpretation of the "forgiveness of sins" as YHWH's deliverance and vindication of his exiled people, then the overarching story of the Bible would look something like this:

1. YHWH calls Abraham to become a people through whom YHWH will bless all the families of the earth; that is, set to right what was broken at the fall (Genesis 12:3).
2. Israel resists God's intentions and becomes more like the pagan nations around them.  This leads to Israel's exile.
3. Jesus comes on the scene as YHWH's messiah, acting as the true Israel to accomplish God's purposes.

The Last Supper as a Passover celebration points to the fact that, "the new exodus, and all that it meant, was happening in and through Jesus himself" (Stricken 95). 

Skipping ahead in the chapter, Wright (as usual) insists that Jesus' actions cannot be interpreted outside of their eschatological significance.  Jesus was acting out of the conviction that the focal point of Israel's history had come and the end of the exile was nigh.  Because of this Jesus took up the yoke of the prophets declaring Israel, Jerusalem, and the Temple to be under judgement.  Israel had again and again been warned about what would happen if she continued compromising with paganism and pagan politics, and Jesus-seeing the coming annihilation of Jerusalem at the hand of Rome-again declares God's judgment.  However, Wright points out that, "the divine reaction...was not capricious or malevolent.  Rather, the prophets, and the Messiah, had been trying to tell the people that there was a way of peace, a way to escape.  They were extending a lifeline" (Stricken 132-133).  

What is so refreshing about Wright's analysis is the holistic understanding of Israel's iniquity.  Israel's failure is not a moral failure, but a vocational failure.  Even as they did strive to be the Kingdom of God, the fought the battle "with the enemy's weapons," (Stricken 133) causing them to lose in principle as they would soon lose in practice; that is, in 70 CE.  Wright does see Jesus' death as substitutionary in the sense that he takes upon himself the wrath, that is "hostile military action," "which was coming upon Israel because she had compromised with paganism and was suffering exile" (Stricken 134). Furthermore, Jesus takes upon himself the consequences of Israel's refusing his way of peace.  

Again skipping ahead, in discussing how Jesus' death related to the sacrificial cult, Wright helpfully notes that, "The controlling metaphor that he [Jesus] chose for his crucial symbol was not the Day of Atonement, but Passover: the one-off moment of freedom in Israel's past, now to be translated into the one-off moment which would inaugurate Israel's future" (Stricken 143).  This is an enormously helpful observation as the Day of Atonement paradigm has dominated and continues to dominate Christian theology.  If Jesus is the paschal lamb, he is so for the purpose of bringing an end to the exile.  I would offer that many Christians read Exodus 12 through the lens of Leviticus 23 and Numbers 29 instead of the other way around.  Passover clearly looks forward to the end of exile, perhaps the Day of Atonement looks forward to the Jubilee: 

Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the day of atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. (Leviticus 25:9-10) 

  That is just an uneducated musing, but I think there is potential with that train of thought.  The point being that Jesus does not see the Day of Atonement as the defining symbol of his death, but rather Passover.  Therefore, our hermeneutical paradigm should be Passover.  At this point, James Alison's essay on "God's Self-Substitution and Sacrificial Inversion" make an interesting conversation partner.  Alison writes that, "The rite of atonement was about the Lord himself, the Creator, emerging from the Holy of Holies so as to set the people free from their impurities and sins and transgressions" (Stricken 168).  Rather than seeing ritual atonement as being perfectly inline with pagan sacrificial systems, Alison would insist that it marks a break from the need to placate the deity.  For Alison, the most important move in the liturgy is the priest coming out from behind the veil.  He notes, "The movement is not inwards towards the Holy of Holies; the movement is outwards from the Holy of Holies" (Stricken 169).  

Alison asserts that even the Hebrew sacrificial system was "both remembering and covering up...human sacrifice" (Stricken 173).  Jesus inserts himself into the sacrificial system in an effort "to make it clear that this is simply murder" (Stricken 173).  I think I am not misreading Alison to insist that the liturgical system of sacrifice was itself the undergirding for all forms of sacrifice.  Sacrifice offered pagans, and probably Jews, justification for dominating and killing others.  Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection breaks the system once and for all.  

Even if Alison's assessment is not completely accurate (which I am certainly not qualified to evaluate), it does lead us in the right direction.  The more we interpret Jesus' death in the paradigm of pagan sacrificial institutions, the more we will miss the point.  Alison ends his essay with a really striking analysis:

"That is the really difficult thing for us to imagine.  We can imagine retaliation, we can imagine protection; but we find it awfully difficult to imagine someone we despised, and were awfully glad not to be like -- whom we would rather cast out so as to keep ourselves going -- we find it awfully difficult to imagine that person generously irrupting into our midst so as to set us free to enable something quite new to open up for us.  But being empowered to imagine all that generosity is what atonement is all about; and that is what we are asked to live liturgically as Christians." (Stricken 179)

I think this is what Wright has in mind when he insists that Jesus "saw as a pagan corruption the very desire to fight paganism itself" (Stricken 134).  The defeat of Israel's oppressors was at the heart of Jesus' actions, but such a victory would be achieved on YHWH's terms. Jesus already had stated his rules of engagement: "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 16:25 NRSV).  For this reason Jesus declared judgment on Israel for seeking to resist Rome by force.  Wright insists that, "This judgment was not arbitrary; it was the necessary consequence of Israel's determination to follow the path of confrontation with Rome" (Stricken 146).

If Jesus' cross is going to be seen as a victory, it might be helpful to understand whom the victory is going to be over.  Wright helpfully writes:

"This, then, was how Jesus envisaged the messianic victory over the real enemy.  The satan had taken up residence in Jerusalem, not merely in Rome, and was seeking to pervert the chosen nation and the holy place into becoming a parody of themselves, a pseudo-chosen people intent on defeating the world with the world's methods, a pseudo-holy place seeking to defend itself against the world rather than to be the city set on a hill, shining its light on the world. One time: this does not mean that Jesus rejected the concept of chosen nation and holy place.  The whole point is that he embraced them; that he discerned, and tried to communicate, what the chosenness, in its scriptural roots, actually meant; and that, discovering the nation as a whole deaf and blind to his plea, he determined to go, himself to the holy place, and there to do what the chosen people ought to do.  He would act on behalf of, and in the place of, Israel, that was failing to be what she was called to be.  He would himself be the light of the world.  He would be the salt of the earth.  He would be set on a hill, unable to be hidden." (Stricken 147)

I have much more I could say about the significance of this narrative, but I will use this as a place to wrap up my reflections.  What I think must be said is that this placement of Jesus' crucifixion in the greater story of Israel fills two voids often present in Christian theology.  First, this understanding bridges the chasm between soteriology and Christian ethics.  Wright remarks that the symbol of the cross was not the symbol of Caesar's victory, but rather, "It would become the symbol, because it would be the means, of the victory of God" (Stricken 148). That said, I think Wright would agree with John Howard Yoder that, "The cross is not a detour or a hurdle on the way to the kingdom, nor is it even the way to the kingdom; it is the kingdom come" (The Politics of Jesus 51).  In other words, Jesus ushers in God's kingdom and defeats the kingdoms of the world with kingdom practices.  The second void Wright's answers the question posed by Michael Hardin earlier in the book, "How do the Testaments relate to one another?" (Stricken 63).  In fact, Wright's work makes this question sound somewhat absurd as you cannot understand Jesus' vocation as messiah without the Hebrew Bible.

There is much more to say, but for now this will have to suffice.