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So, on Easter Sunday afternoon, while surfing through YouTube, I happened on a MSNBC segment (I’m not sure which show) where the three people on camera were discussing some of the implications of Donald Trump hawking Bibles (over-priced ones, at that). I don’t recall who the host was, but one of the speakers was the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis.
I’d never encountered her before and knew nothing about her background or general approach to theology. Something she said in passing caught my attention, and I’m not sure I understood her correctly, because what I thought I heard her say threw me off the track of the discussion. It seemed to me that she had said she did not talk about Jesus’ crucifixion in the context of redeeming sins. She quickly moved on to focus on the Resurrection, because, she said, it was about Love; how the Love of God endures, rises again, lives on. How Love is how we should respond to each other totally, not being divisive, or hateful, or rejecting others.
Now, it’s not that I object to this focus in the general sense. It is certainly true that God is Love and that He desires us to reach for the ability to love each other as He loves us. But I am troubled by the implied bypassing of the point of the crucifixion and the sacrifice of Jesus.
My thoughts on her passing comment were mingling in my mind with some comments made by another YouTuber who on Saturday had done a podlet segment about Trump’s bible-hawking. He began by making clear that although he no longer believed in the faith he had been raised in (a very conservative, strictly scripturally guided denomination, by his description), he respects that others did believe it, and he respects the Christian principles. He said what had put him off Christianity is that God would let His own son die the horrible death on the cross: he made it clear that he understood that the Roman practice of crucifixion is one of the more horrible tortures humans have come up with. So, the idea that God would let his son die that way — in fact, require it — put him off not just Christianity, but also believing in God. Basically: what kind of God would do that?
Encountering these ideas close together made me consider two main things that seem to have settled into social thinking — or at least American social thinking — about Christianity. The first is about the humanity of Christ: most people seem quite accepting of that, even to the point of agreeing that even if they are atheists, they find the teachings of Jesus to be, for the most part, worthy of being considered as ethical guidelines. In fact, they frequently point out how poorly professing Christians fail to live up to those guidelines.
But for so many, the concept of the humanity of Jesus is completely disconnected from the idea that Jesus IS GOD; God With Us. “The Son of God” is an idea they can sort of grasp, even if they find it weird to believe in (How does a non-physical deity inseminate a physical woman?). The Son is, in their minds, a separate entity from the Divine Father. Now, of course, this has always been a difficult concept and Jesus knew as much! Even those who saw Him face to face in the flesh and saw the miracles He performed, found His statements that He and the Father are One very, very difficult to accept. Dorothy L. Sayers speculated that when the people asked Jesus on the steps of the Temple if He was the Messiah, they asked it in Aramaic, and that when Jesus answered, “I am,” He said it in Hebrew. The people then wanted to stone Him for blasphemy, because He said the Name of God (I AM THAT I AM) out loud, which was considered sacrilegious.
But not only was He going against custom of not saying aloud the very Name of God, He was using the Hebrew to grammatically answer the question in the affirmative. Those two elements of His response were enough to enrage the seriously religious people in the crowd He was speaking to.
So, socially speaking, we have been getting lax about acknowledging that Jesus and God the Father are indeed One.
And this is the answer to the question “What kind of God sends His Son to be killed in the most horrible way?” The answer being: The kind of God who does not ask anything that He will not do Himself.
The Almighty did not send a “separate entity” to die on the cross: He came amongst us and did it Himself.
Which leads me to the matter of why I feel Rev. Dr. Lewis shied away from the crucifixion. It’s not just that it isn’t dealing with the Son of God being sent to die, but why it was deemed necessary.
And that why is the Holiness of God.
We have lost our sense of holiness, of sacredness.
Do we even understand what the essence of holiness is anymore? What is the physical manifestation of holiness? Do we even think about that? We seem to no longer have much sense of “holy places” – or at least, the general society does not. This leads to a lack of understanding why the general society does not comprehend the nature of indigenous tribes to their sacred lands. To most of us, the land is just the land; it is mundane, and of value for its merely physical nature. We do not have a sense of it as a sacred place, endued with an essence of holiness. We may be willing to “respect their beliefs”, but rarely do we succeed in feeling the sacredness of the place.
Even in our churches, we have drifted away from the sense of the actual sanctity of the sanctuary. The altar (if there is one) has been reduced to a place where we set emblems of our faith: candles, perhaps a cross and/or an open Bible. It no longer speaks to us as the place where we submit our sacrifices to the Almighty.
As I was growing up, my father was an usher in the church we attended. During the offertory, the collection plates where passed where the congregation’s offerings were collected. At the end of that, the ushers would carry the plates to the front of the sanctuary (while the congregation would sing the “Gloria Patria.” The plates would be placed on the altar and remain there for the rest of the service. That ritual served as the reminder that we were offering sacrifices.
Years later, I also served as an usher for several years in the church I attended in Los Angeles. We also did the job of collecting the offering; but instead of the collection dishes being taken to the altar afterward, we took everything back to the church office and locked up everything collected so the church treasurer would attend to it the next day. Of course, it was a Presbyterian church and did not even have an altar in the chancel of the sanctuary. The central cross was a large one hung over the choir loft, and remained a center of focus, but even so … not a specific spot representing the holy presence of the Lord God at a humanly accessible point.
Anyways, the point of this digression into “holy spaces” is to point to our detachment from the physical aspect of holy things. I’m using it to lead into what the Holy Presence of the Lord God must be like. The holiness of Omnipotence must be of such great intensity that I cannot imagine that we would be able to endure it. How could we become so perfect that we would not be utterly destroyed as His presence burns away all our remaining imperfections?
That is why He came among us as Jesus: that we could learn of His love (Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis is correct about that). But also, the sacrifice of Jesus upon the cross is to put forward the offering upon the altar of the world in order to enable us to come into the direct presence of the Almighty. Jesus pays the price for all the wrongs we commit against the holiness of God. By taking Jesus upon ourselves in earnest, we take on some of the very essence of God (since Jesus IS God), which allows us into the Presence of Ultimate Holiness.
So that is the answer to the atheist gentleman who asked, “What kind of God would send His own son to die such a death?” The answer is that He did not send a separate entity: He came Himself, and died Himself, to enable us, His children, His creations, to draw near to Him, even into His very Presence.
This is what Easter is about.
