Category: New testament

A Lenten Reflection

Why would God need the cross to forgive us? Isn’t he powerful and merciful enough that he could just have declared us forgiven and reconciled? Why would Jesus have to die?

This is a point Muslims sometimes make. In fact, they say the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15 backs their claim. The father (clearly a stand-in for God) did not die. We have no cross, no incarnation, no Son of God, no savior, no resurrection. In fact, the father doesn’t even pronounce forgiveness. The father simply wills their reconciliation and demonstrates that by restoring the son’s standing through clothing him in the best robe (which would be the father’s best robe) and putting the family signet ring on his finger.

No, they say, Jesus is clearly a good Muslim who affirms Muslim teaching. Christians, they say, have perverted his message.

This challenge was key in driving Kenneth Bailey deeply into this famous story. The result was his book, The Cross and the Prodigal. As he notes there, he found, to the contrary, that the cross, that sacrifice is profoundly embedded in this parable.

Long the father suffers. Devastated by the abrupt and painful rupture with his son, daily he waits, looking in the distance, hoping to see his son return, his son whom he misses dearly.

When he does spot him, the father sacrifices his dignity by running to meet his son. Nothing is more sacred to a Middle Eastern patriarch than his honor. Such men of his age and stature do not run in excitement like school boys. They float. They move with slow decorum, befitting their place in the community.

In addition, for such a man to run would require him to gather up his robes so he could move quickly and easily. This would shame him even more by exposing his legs in public. This may seem a minor point to those of us who do not live in honor-shame cultures. But for the father it was a very costly act.

The children of the town, “amazed at seeing this respected village elder shaming himself publicly,” would no doubt race after the man to see what the to-do was all about. Others would follow, including his servants who are present to receive instructions from the father regarding his son. In this way, openly for all to see, the father covers the son’s shame and humiliation, and takes it all on himself (p. 67).

Further, he acts as his own intermediary. Mediators are common in such cultures. Two people who are at odds do not confront each other directly lest one loose face. The father took this risk of rejection. Indeed, having been the grievously injured party, custom would require that the father wait and aloofly receive his groveling son—which is exactly what the son expects. The father again sets aside his honor for the prospect of joyful reconciliation.

I already mentioned the robe and the ring, costly gifts in themselves. The father also sponsors a lavish feast for the whole community. The son, you see, has not only alienated himself from the whole family but from everyone who knew of his despicable behavior—and in a small, tightly-woven village, everyone would know. They would all have felt shamed by the son. If the patriarch of their community is dishonored, they are all dishonored. The father must publicly demonstrate the son’s restored standing (restored honor) so others will do the same out of respect for the father.

During Lent, as through the whole year, we marvel at the God who surrendered his honor and his wealth to make forgiveness and reconciliation possible for we who wandered off.

Forgiveness comes with a cost. Our forgiveness comes with the cross.

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Image by wal_172619 from Pixabay

For those like me who are steeped in Western individualism, the honor-shame dynamics of the Bible are hiding in plain sight.

Honor abounds in the Bible as seen in words like glory, name, blessing, praise, clean, renown, glorify, beloved. Shame words are equally plentiful—ashamed, accursed, humiliation, wretched, forgotten, reproach, despised, mocking, crushed, reviled, cursed.

The dynamic of corporate identity comes to the fore in Scripture far more than many of us imagine. Jackson W.’s Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes (a series of essays that move through the letter chapter by chapter rather than a verse-by-verse commentary) does not seek to undo centuries of analysis in the Western tradition that emphasizes sin and guilt. Rather it seeks to place alongside that viewpoint another dimension that deepens our understanding of Paul’s most theological letter.

The author defines honor as “one’s perceived worth according to the agreed standards of a particular social context” (14) As such, honor can be achieved or ascribed. In the West we lay greater emphasis on the first. The East emphasizes the second. But we still see a number of honor/shame-oriented subgroups still thriving in Western culture—the military, street gangs, teenagers, sports teams, and rural communities. The fear of shame can effectively control the behavior of these members.

God’s glory gets particular emphasis in this book. As the author says in his discussion of Romans 4:20-21, “Genuine faith in God magnifies his worth. By faith, we honor him” (48). In this vein Romans often focuses on how God deals with Jews and non-Jews, bringing them both into his family, to glorify him. A Jewish sense of superiority relegates God to a tribal deity. Therefore, “Romans contradicts the idea that ethnic conflict is a second-tier concern for the church” (65).

Just a couple other highlights. The author’s analysis of Romans 7 (famous for Paul’s use of first person—“What I want to do I do not do,” etc.) is of particular interest. He makes a strong case that this seemingly quintessential discussion of the individual instead “refers collectively to Israel during the exodus” (132).

Later the author critiques ancestor worship but also helps us sympathize with it by quoting Chesterton: “Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who happen to be walking around.” Tradition can be good, but it does not eclipse God. He is the “Lord both of the living and the dead” (Rom 14:9).

This book does not dismantle everything we ever thought we knew about Romans. Rather it enriches our understanding of the letter by getting behind the honor-shame culture that infused the Bible’s world.

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photo: Pixabay zgmorris13

The center of Christianity is the cross. But how are we to understand the crucifixion? How is it that in the death of Christ we find salvation, forgiveness, new creation, justice, victory over the powers, and hope for the future? And why in particular was such a gruesome, publicly humiliating execution required?

This Lent, to assist me with such questions, I have been reading Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion, a book providing what she sees as the first substantive book on the cross for pastors since John Stott’s The Cross of Christ. Overall in her view Christ’s crucifixion is God’s victory over Sin, Death, and the Devil. The Powers are vanquished as the Apostle Paul so often gives testimony. But Christ’s substitutionary work—in our place and on our behalf—is the necessary partner to this cosmic rectification, a theme that arises out of the biblical narrative rather than a theological scheme.

She offers a robust defense of substitution throughout. In particular she thoroughly rehabilitates the eleventh-century archbishop Anslem when today it is popular to denigrate the person credited with bringing substitution to the fore of church teaching. She also finds much to admire in Calvin, though not necessarily in his successors. Rutledge believes both have been misunderstood because scholars fail to see that these two are not working primarily in the realm of academia. Their purpose is pastoral—as is hers.

Rutledge’s sword cuts both ways. She finds much to praise and criticize in both mainline and evangelical circles. For example, she has no patience for evangelicals who see penal substitutionary atonement as the only true way to understand the cross. The Bible offers a wide range of images, metaphors, and teachings on Christ’s death, and we do it much injustice by diminishing or ignoring these. Nonetheless, she also has words of praise for figures like Billy Graham and F. F. Bruce.

At the same time she upends superficial aphorisms such as “God accepts us just as you are” or “Forgive and forget” or declarations of radical inclusiveness. None of us can achieve this no matter how open we are. Our congregation may accept those with Downs but may give up on someone with narcissistic personality disorder. We may welcome a transgender person but find we cannot include an unwashed, unmedicated street person. Then there are times conservative evangelicals are disdained or discriminated against. All fall short, you see.

Another major theme throughout the book is the equivalence of justification and righteousness which derive from the same Greek word. Further, we should not see this as a static condition, says Rutledge, but as God’s activity of setting things right. God rectifies the wrong, the sin, the evil in us and in the cosmos. Rectify better emphasizes what is going on than justification or righteousness which have become encumbered with centuries of debate and misunderstanding.

She is right that the manner of Christ’s death is significant. Dying in his sleep or having the dignity of being beheaded like a Roman citizen would have meant entirely different things. I found her case unconvincing, however, that the crucifixion was the most horrific and humiliating death of all since she would have to survey every other possible form of death to prove her point, clearly an unachievable task.

This and a few others are quibbles however in a stellar work that deserves (as it is getting) a wide readership among pastors, scholars, and those in the pew. She fully achieves the goal of searching the depths of this core of our faith, leading us to praise, worship, and renewed hearts.