The Christian faith has had detractors from the very beginning. This makes some sense, since its founder, Jesus Christ, united all the powers of the world against Him. Thus He came to the end of His earthly life as a victim of capital punishment. This very fact was proof enough for the earliest opponents of the Christian Way. How is it possible that the One, True God could consent to take the form of a criminal, and the worst sort of criminal at that?
In the intervening centuries, the Church that Christ founded by the opening of His side on the Cross has spread over the whole world, and the Cross itself has become so commonplace a symbol that its scandal has been largely neutralized. Also of note is that the detractors of Christianity are often today atheists or agnostics rather than polytheists as was the case in the ancient world. There is some irony to this, inasmuch as Christians were frequently accused by the Romans of being atheists because they refused to recognize the divinity of the many gods of the Roman pantheon and worshipped a God who could not be represented in images.
In any case, today’s detractors are more likely to be scandalized by a different aspect of the Incarnation. They point to its arbitrariness. Why was Jesus born a Jew and not a Persian? Or Chinese? Or Inca? Why did He speak Aramaic? Why was He born at that specific time? And finally, why make such a big deal out of the Cross? It’s just one form of capital punishment among countless horrendous tortures cooked up by the infernal ingenuity of the world’s rulers. I’ve heard it asked: “If Jesus had died in an electric chair, would Christians would wear stylized electric chairs on chains around their necks?”
Even though this objection to Christianity sounds new, the Fathers of the Church had, in some ways, anticipated it. To them, the brute fact of the Cross was not arbitrary at all. From the time that Adam and Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit of the tree in the Garden, there was an almost inevitable movement toward a new tree that would undo that sin. In this light, perhaps the specific punishment of the Cross is not arbitrary at all. Somehow it represents the inner logic of the cosmic drama of sin and its healing, as suggested by this morning’s first reading (about the healing effects of the bronze serpent) and Jesus’s interpretation of it in the gospel.
The Romans may not have invented crucifixion, but they refined it into a kind of diabolical art. As I already mentioned, this was the punishment for the worst sorts of criminals, meaning for slaves and others who had no worldly power at all. It was intended to be a strong deterrent against any lowlifes who might get it into their heads to challenge the powers that be. And the Romans were not only the greatest empire to have existed at that point, but they have remained the epitome of imperial success. And their success was underwritten by the more or less constant threat of brutality against those who tried to stand up against them.
But why did they fix on crucifixion as the most concentrated form of this threat? If we can understand this, we can understand more deeply God’s complete inversion of worldly power, since the Son of God would then be going right to the root of its poisonous growth. First of all, crucifixion needed to be public. Everyone had to see exactly what criminals had coming. The shape of the Cross is a kind of mockery of the human form, humans being the one truly upright-walking animal, with a head that can search out the heavens and arms that can embrace all things. That dignity needed to be subverted and ridiculed. Furthermore, it is a mockery of life itself, being a parody of fruit-bearing trees, the message being that the state itself gives life and takes it away.
Jesus walks right into this display of pompous human arrogance, takes the Cross, its symbol, and by His Resurrection, carries it off in triumph. In Christ’s Crucifixion, we see the climax of a epochal struggle between God and His spiritual enemies. God had been patiently training His chosen people, while the worldly powers of Babylon, Macedonia and Rome repeatedly subjugated them. And when the ungodly powers unleashed all of their fury on God’s greatest and most Beloved ambassador, Jesus demonstrated God’s serene sovereignty by uniting Himself to all that is lowly by human estimation, all that represents our sad exile from paradise, embracing all our disgrace, humiliation, and shame in the form of the Cross. By this obedience, Christ shows us that salvation is never far for those who learn to trust God, no matter how utterly hopeless the situation might appear from a worldly perspective. The lowly—those excluded from the advantages that the world purports to hold for those who embrace its logic of violence—more instinctively see in the Cross a vindication of their dignity before God. In celebration of Christ’s triumph on the Cross, let us strive to be among those poor in spirit who experience His salvation.