Crossed-Up: Subjective - Mark 15:16-23
There
are some things that once you see them, you can’t “unsee” them. They become part of who you are and how you
experience life from that point forward.
One that Davey introduced to me was the “Fed-Ex” arrow. How many of you see the arrow in the Fed-Ex
logo between the “E” and “x”? Once you
see it for the first time, the arrow takes a predominate place in the logo and
you can’t not see it anymore. How about
the “g”/”face” combo in the Goodwill symbol? The “31” in Baskins Robins? Or the fact that Amazon claims to have
everything from “A” to “Z” for sale on their website?
There
are other things that are not so pleasant that folks have trouble
unseeing? Maybe it is a visit to a
poverty stricken country where families scour dumps to survive from day to
day? Maybe it is a city in the wake of a
natural disaster? Maybe it is a crime
scene? Maybe it is discovering a loved
one deceased? Maybe it is a terrorist
attack? Those horrific events that we
see, they become etched in our memories, and not only can we not “unsee” them,
they begin shaping who we are altogether.
Last
week we acknowledged that there are many in our culture, including some
churches, that have an aversion to the cross of Christ, so much so that there
are churches that have removed the cross from their sanctuary, or new churches
which choose not to place a cross in the church, because it might turn folks
off—it is seen as a negative. Now don’t
get me wrong, and I didn’t acknowledge this last week, having a cross in the
sanctuary does not make a church a church.
You can have the most ornate cross ever imagined, or a crucifix that is
true in every detail to what Jesus’ crucifixion actually looked like, but if
there are no lives changed, truly changed, by what happened on the cross, the
all the ornamentation and all the details, don’t amount for anything. Likewise, you can have a sanctuary that does
not have a cross visible, but has the cross preached from the pulpit, and you
have lives that are changed through an encounter with the God-incarnate person
of Jesus who died on the cross and was raised from dead, then what’s decorating
the sanctuary doesn’t matter. It is not
about worshipping a golden or wooden idol placed in where we gather for worship,
it is about the centrality of the theology of the cross, the centrality of the atonement,
which unites us as brothers and sisters in God’s Church.
We
also came to understand last week that the cross and the atonement, the
reconciliation between God and humanity, that comes through the cross is not
one or even two-dimensional, but as Mark Driscoal and Adam Hamilton put it,
respectively, the cross is a “multi-faceted jewel”[i]
and the multiple theories of what God does on the cross offer us a “powerful
and profound picture of the significance of Jesus’ suffering and death for us.”[ii]
There
are many theories of the atonement, and one of them by themselves really leaves
us lacking in our understanding of the cross and close to heresy if we deiced
to lift that one theory up as the only truth about what happened. Of the four that we are going to consider in
this “Crossed-Up” series, two of them focus on what Jesus’ death does to
satisfy God, in his Holy and Just nature—those being the Substitutive theory
from last week, understanding that Christ died in our place, receiving the
punishment that we deserved for the sins that we have committed; and the theory
we are going to consider two weeks from today, the Sacrificial theory of
atonement. Here, between those two we
come to an understanding and theory of atonement that is not about God being
appeased and changing God’s view of us, but it is about how we see the cross
and how it affects us. This theory of
the atonement is called the Subjective or Moral Influence Theory of Atonement.
The
Subjective or Moral Influence theory takes us back to seeing something that we
are no longer able to “unsee.” It
suggests that as we come to look upon the brutality of the crucifixion that we
are changed. The harsh violence of the
crucifixion is mean to slap us in the face, forcing us to realize just how
sinful we are because it is not the Jews who are to blame for the suffering of
Jesus upon the cross, it is not the Romans who are at fault for crucifying
Jesus, it is us…it is our sin that put Jesus to death.
We
may want to argue that we had nothing to do with the crucifixion. It was millennia ago, we weren’t there. However, we look back and we see that we are
not very different from those who were there.
If
we pick up the scene after the Passover meal and the institution of the meal we
now call Holy Communion, we find the disciples falling asleep in the garden as
Jesus prays, although Jesus has charged them with staying awake and being on
watch. How often have we fallen asleep
or grown weary and failed to stay on the tasks to which Jesus has charged
us? You know the times where we just
say, “I’m tired, I’ve tried, I just give up.”
“We’ve tried reaching out to those in our community, we haven’t gotten
any response, there’s no use in trying any more.”
We’re
like those who fled the scene when Jesus was betrayed. When we hear a racist comment or see
injustice being carried out and we choose to remain quiet because we don’t want
to be called a “n-lover” or be ostracized for taking up for those who won’t
even learn our language, we have fled the scene. When we see child abuse or spousal abuse or
elder abuse and we don’t want to get involved, and maybe even argue that is
none of our business, we have taken cover.
When we are unwilling to reach out a helping hand to the homeless, help
an addict, or minister to someone with AIDS because we are afraid we might
catch something, we have runaway in fear like all the disciples in the garden.
When
we won’t hold hands in a public restaurant as we say grace because folks might
look at us funny or refuse to speak up in a public forum where people of faith
are being ignored or even put down because we don’t want to be seen as a
fanatic, we are like Peter, denying Jesus.
When
we think to ourselves that “Yeah, I know what Jesus says, but this is what I am
going to do,” we are like the Sanhedrin who wanted to get rid of Jesus because
He was getting in their way of doing things.
When we choose violence as our preferred method of dealing with problems
over love, then we are like the crowds who choose Barabbas over Jesus. When we decide that popular decision is
preferred over doing the right thing we are not much different from Pilate
giving in to the demands of the crowds.
When we treat others as less than us because of their skin color, their
ethnicity, their gender, their age, their education, their social standing,
their choice of lifestyle, then we are no different that the soldiers who
treated Jesus as less than human in how they tortured him.
We
are meant to see the cross and its bloody agony and all the sin that surrounded
it and be confronted with our own complicity and realize that we have to be
different. We have to change. We have to repent of our sin and return to
God. We have to be less like who we’ve
been and more like the one hanging on the cross. The One who placed those who were in need,
all of humanity, before his own preservation.
The One who could have tried to make everyone happy, by going along with
the Pharisees and keeping in what how they taught and lived, by ignoring the
corruption the Temple and leaving the moneychangers alone, by making the people
happy and starting an uprising against Rome, but stayed true to God’s calling. The One who refused to call for violence
against those who were crucifying him and instead offered forgiveness.
My
brothers and sisters, we must look upon the cross of Christ and be
changed. We cannot “unsee” it. We cannot truly see the cross and remain
unaffected and unchanged. It is a mirror
held up for us to see ourselves as we are now and a portrait of who we are to
become. Look at the cross. What do we see? “[Jesus] called the crowd with his disciples,
and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves
and take up their cross and follow me.
For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose
their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
In
the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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