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| Jerusalem - some believe this is Golgotha |
(C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, referred to the birth of Christ as "The Great Invasion.")
Jesus died on a cross. He died as he lived; viz., below the bottom rung of the honor-shame ladder.
Jesus died on a cross. He died as he lived; viz., below the bottom rung of the honor-shame ladder.
Jesus, the Supreme Somebody, was viewed as a nobody, and crucified as a nothing.
"Jesus was
executed in the manner regularly reserved for insurrectionists."
- N.T.Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 148)
The crucified Jesus,
wrote philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams, is the horror-bearer. (Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God)
God identified with the abandoned and godforsaken because Jesus the Son was executed in a manner regularly reserved for such people. The Word became expendable flesh and died as one of us. Tim Keller writes:
God identified with the abandoned and godforsaken because Jesus the Son was executed in a manner regularly reserved for such people. The Word became expendable flesh and died as one of us. Tim Keller writes:
"Christianity alone
among the world religions claims that God became uniquely and fully human in
Jesus Christ and therefore knows firsthand despair, rejection, loneliness,
poverty, bereavement, torture, and imprisonment. On the cross, he went beyond
even the worst human suffering and experienced cosmic rejection and pain that
exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power exceeds ours. In his
death, God suffers in love, identifying with the abandoned and
godforsaken." (Keller, The Reason for God, 29-30)
Life without God is, as
many atheistic existentialist philosophers have acknowledged, absurd and
meaningless. Enter Jesus.
On a cross, God
suffered. Can God suffer? The brilliant theistic philosopher Alvin Plantinga
writes:
"As the Christian
sees things, God does not stand idly by, cooly observing the suffering of His
creatures. He enters into and shares our suffering. He endures the anguish of
seeing his son, the second person of the Trinity, consigned to the bitterly
cruel and shameful death of the cross. Some theologians claim that God cannot suffer.
I believe they are wrong. God’s capacity for suffering, I believe, is
proportional to his greatness; it exceeds our capacity for suffering in the
same measure as his capacity for knowledge exceeds ours. Christ was prepared to
endure the agonies of hell itself; and God, the Lord of the universe, was
prepared to endure the suffering consequent upon his son’s humiliation and
death. He was prepared to accept this suffering in order to overcome sin, and
death, and the evils that afflict our world, and to confer on us a life more
glorious than we can imagine." (Alvin Plantinga, "Self-Profile,"
in Alvin Plantinga, ed. James E. Tomberlin and
Peter Van Inwagen, Profiles, vol. 5, 36)
He bore our
scandal. Jesus wore our horror. And, by his wounds we are
healed.
