There’s a new Mumford and Sons song Conversations with My Son (Gangsters and Angels) that I reckon reveals maybe preacher’s kid Marcus Mumford has been reading Paul Kingsnorth (Genius.com says he has been). It contains the lyric:
Gangsters and angels
Darling, come and see
The cross or the machine?
It’s always the same choice
The best I ever met
Had nothing and gave it all away
So. Rather than seeing this post as a breakaway from the current series of articles; here’s a sketch of an alternative basis for life in the world built from a term of grappling with the significance of the Cross of Jesus at church. Each of these numbered points was a sermon. Maybe I’ll post them up one day, but I give them to you as a Good Friday reflection.
- The Bible calls God ‘the author of life’ — the cross was God’s plan from ‘before the beginning of the world and fulfills the story of the Bible (especially the ‘law, Psalms, and the prophets’ — a catchall description of the Old Testament). If you read history as orchestrated to land on this particular event, and then history afterwards as unfolding in its shadow, it has pretty big explanatory power. The cross sits at the centre of human history in profound and significant ways given it was a torture device designed by an empire that had mastered a certain kind of propaganda and was meant to make a person totally forgettable as a symbol of absolute shame.
- God doesn’t abandon Jesus at the cross, at the cross Jesus reveals what the triune God is like — redeeming and restoring humans who were ‘his enemies’ through sacrificial love. When Jesus cries ‘my God my God why have you forsaken me’ he quotes a Psalm where God’s anointed Messiah is heard and beloved.
- In a sort of ‘cosmic geography’ symbolism, Jesus goes to the places God’s enemies are sent in the Old Testament — exile (the wilderness where a sacrificial goat was sent on the day of atonement), and the grave (‘sheol’ or ‘the deep’), as the one who is infinitely pure; who carries the purifying light and life of God (represented by his blood) to ‘rescue’ people from that judgment by entering those spaces as God himself. Jesus becomes ‘down and out’ so we can be brought “up” and “in” to God’s presence.
He experiences the punishment of exile and death, but does not stay exiled and dead, because he goes into those places as the beloved son of God. He is, in a way, both the goats from the day of atonement. The math equation at the cross is not Jesus’ infinite suffering exchanged for ours, but his infinite purity cleansing and bringing forgiveness (like the sacrificial animals in Leviticus whose ‘lifeblood’ cleansed and atoned; a life in the place of death). - Jesus, as he dies, fulfils many images or motifs that run through the Old Testament — one of these is the lamb. There’s a thread from God providing “a lamb” (actually a ram) when Abraham is tested on ‘Mount Moriah’ (where Chronicles says Israel’s temple is built), through to the lambs whose blood is used to spare and claim Israel as God’s ‘firstborn’ in the Passover, through to lambs whose blood is used to consecrate priests, all the way to Jesus being the ‘passover lamb’ who dies at Passover time as “the lamb who takes away the sin of the world.” The Gospel writers, and other New Testament authors, are really keen to pull all these threads together in rich ways.
- The Bible tells the story of violent humans spilling blood into earth from about page 4 (Cain and Abel). This blood cries out for justice, and tarnishes humanity’s ability to ‘bring forth life’ from the ground (like gardeners in Eden). Over and over again humanity is told that ‘blood and soil’ lead to exile from God (it’s all through the ‘law’ — Genesis to Deuteronomy, and the prophets — and it’s the reason given for Israel’s exile into Babylon in 2 Kings). Jesus’ blood being poured into the soil by a violent empire is the culmination of this story (and the ‘serpent’ is often standing behind this bloodshed in the Bible’s imagination). When Jesus’ blood is poured into the soil it earns ‘curse’ and exile for those who side with those violent human empires, but also ‘cleanses’ as he sows life into the ground, demonstrating God’s commitment to justice and that he hears the cries. Jesus invites us into a new path of fruitful life-giving image bearing, cultivating God’s presence in the world again.
- When humans were made ‘in God’s image’ we were made to “rule” earth on God’s behalf. In the ancient world, the “image of God” was the king, who would make idol statues of himself to spread his image through his kingdom; and then be worshipped as a god either in life or after death (Rome picked up this practice). The Bible says all humans — male and female — are made with this function — as ruling image bearers. But we try to rule without God rather than on God’s behalf, and we are dethroned as a result.
The Bible promises a ‘son of God’ and ‘son of Man’ who will rule the heavens and the earth (God’s realm and the world). And Jesus, the perfect human and the incarnate “word of God who is God”, is this promised king (messiah (Hebrew) and Christ (Greek) both mean king). The Gospel writers are really keen to tell us that at the cross Jesus is crowned, and ‘enthroned’ on a cross with a sign calling him king. The crucifixion is Jesus’ coronation; the crown of thorns is his crown; the cross is his throne. The crown and throne (and the ceremony of a coronation) reveal the nature of his kingdom. - The ‘big bad’ in the Bible’s story is the serpent, Satan. Ancient empires had snakes and dragons embedded in their mythology and iconography — from Pharaoh king of Egypt with his snake hat, to Marduk the Babylonian Sea Serpent slayer. The empires that oppress Israel in the Old Testament ‘see’ and ‘take’ — and often build literal structures and cities with their names attached trying to bridge heaven and earth; like the tower of Babel (Babylon). In the famous story of David and Goliath, Goliath is presented as a giant serpent (the word for bronze and the word for snake in Hebrew are visually very similar — he’s bronze from tip-to-toe scaly giant. Dagon, the Philistine God is also scaly. Both land on their bellies, in the dust, with crushed (or chopped off) heads.
Conquest in the ancient world was understood to happen through violence and to be the will of the gods behind the nations doing the conquest (and the defeat of their gods). God defeats the serpent and serpenty nations by the crucifixion (this is the way the story of the world is told in the book of Revelation). This is a subversive vision of victory that does not come through the sword, but through non-violent, life-giving love. Jesus is the serpent crusher; and the victory happens at — and by — the cross. - The cross is our pattern for life. We love to see things we like and ‘grasp them’ for our own advantage (and at best, for the sake of those we love). Jesus ‘did not grasp’ his rights or status ‘for his own advantage’ but ‘made himself nothing’ even dying on a cross. For Paul, in Philippians 2, this is the shape of our life in all our relationships — trusting that the Father won’t turn his face away, but will raise us up in love and vindicate us as he did his beloved son. The language of Philippians 2 shapes how Paul describes his evangelism in 1 Corinthians 9-10 and the life of the church together and for the world in Romans 12.
Our love for one another in our communities, our love for our neighbours and enemies, and our politics — as Christians — would look profoundly different to the patterns of this world if we embraced the cross as the way God chooses to reveal himself and act in subversive power to save. - The cross is where God creates a healing refuge from death and the impacts of what the Bible calls the curse on the world. Hospitals have crosses on them still because they are a product of the Christian story’s impact on the world (google Basil the Great’s hospital). In John 3, where Jesus famously says “for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life,” Jesus, just before this, throws back to a story from Israel’s history where God unleashed snakes on the people in the wilderness because they wanted to go back to Egypt, the land of the snake. God invites them to ‘look at a snake on a pole’ that Moses makes and ‘live’, and Jesus compares his crucifixion to this moment.
In Mesopotamia, there was a serpent God named Ninazu who was the god you prayed to if you had been bitten by a snake. Egypt’s first “medical doctor” was an engineer called Imhotep, who, within a century after his death was deified as the god of healing. When the Greek empire conquered Egypt, Imhotep was fused with their god of healing, Asclepius. In the Greek and Roman world (including in first century Jerusalem), temple-hospitals were called Asclepions. When they were built, they would be filled with (harmless) snakes who would slither around those who came to the temple praying for healing, while statues of Asclepius with his snake-on-a-pole (still a symbol for healthcare) were stuck around the joint.
All this ‘snake on a pole’/snake god healing imagery in the ancient world forms a backdrop for people as they read the story of Moses in Numbers, and then hear and read the words of Jesus in John 3. He is the one who offers the remedy for the ‘bite’ of the snake; and the cross is the ‘ultimate hospital’ that offers hospitality and refuge from the violent, grasping ways of the world and the consequences.
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