Stumbling over the Cross

Preaching the Cross and Resurrection Today

Joni S. Sancken

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498274210
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

It has never been easy to preach about the cross and resurrection of Jesus, but difficulties today are particularly challenging. Hearers ask tough questions of the church and the Christian faith, and they are not satisfied by formulaic answers. People are often suspicious of doctrine and are attracted to a broad but vague or pluralistic spirituality rather than the classical claims of Christianity.In this climate, preachers often see preaching on the central events of the Christian story, the crucifixion and resurrection, as more of a problem than a possibility, more of a burden than a joy. They wonder not only how to preach the "old, old story" of cross and resurrection but whether they should preach these themes at all. This book addresses these concerns and shows preachers how to preach the cross and resurrection in fresh, culturally relevant ways that deepen Christian discipleship. Each chapter shows the relevance of preaching the cross for addressing a particular congregational concern. What has ironically become a stumbling block in the pulpit, the stone that preachers often reject--preaching on the cross and resurrection of Jesus--can serve as the cornerstone for building up the congregation for discipleship in our world.

1

When Every Day is Good Friday

“Good Friday” dawns in everyone’s life. It does not matter what the calendar date is. It might be a Tuesday in November and it might be a Monday in June, but for a good many people, today feels like “Good Friday” and “Good Friday” inevitably can cause even the most faithful and articulate among us to stumble and stammer. Whether you are sixty-eight or twenty-three, “Good Friday” always rolls around and often it lasts far longer than one day. We experience “Good Friday” when we and those we love experience suffering, betrayal, loss, and death as Jesus experienced in the events surrounding his crucifixion. Every congregation has experts on “Good Friday,” those who have experienced tremendous suffering and loss. Walking with a congregation through “Good Friday” rightly brings wise preachers to a posture of silence before the mystery of God.

As a student, I worked as a part-time youth pastor for a congregation in Indiana. This small congregation was rocked by some unusually challenging events affecting children and youth in the church. I participated in an intervention with the lead pastor for a teenage addict whose church-member parents could not keep him from getting high from sniffing common household products like nail polish and cooking spray while on house arrest. A junior high student suddenly contracted Guillain-Barre Syndrome and we watched an active boy transform into a weak shell on life support in the local hospital. Two sisters in the youth group lost a favorite uncle in a hunting accident and were held-up at gun point with their mom in a local supermarket. A final blow came when a vital and beloved science teacher, just a few years out of college, caught a virus that attacked his heart and died despite doctors’ best efforts. As we waded our way through this local experience of “Good Friday,” it became clear that the leadership of the church could not stay silent. These teenagers, most of them raised in Christian homes, were asking the kind of tough questions that teens have the courage to voice (questions that scare the rest of us), and feeling the full weight of pastoral responsibility I offered to step in to help them sort things out. Ten years later, I still don’t have “answers” for why so many bad things happened to one small circle of families, but I remember what I told the eleven to twelve-year-olds seated in a circle on the floor of the fellowship hall, “Some of us have had some pretty terrible things happen to us or to people we know and love in the past few weeks. Some of us haven’t been as closely affected, but all of us will experience hard things and terrible things, things that we struggle to explain and understand sometime in our lives. So it is important that we find ways to talk about it.” “Good Friday” dawns in everyone’s life.

I’ve been evoking a metaphorical sense of “Good Friday” but the real Good Friday, the one that falls during Holy Week, can be just as challenging for pastors and preachers. When Holy Week rolls around, preachers are faced with the privilege of rehearsing again the “old, old story” that lies at the heart of our faith. Unfortunately, the drama of the cross and resurrection looms as burden more than joy for many pastors. Part of the problem with the liturgical experience of Good Friday is our inescapable connection with the other “Good Fridays.” We struggle to give voice to the hope engendered by Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. They seem more like remote, abstract, and unreachable doctrines than life-giving, faith-nourishing living muscles that can propel, transform, and add theological depth to preaching. Preachers who feel called to turn to the Bible week after week to offer moral guidance, serve those in need, and inspire faith often find themselves stumbling when it comes to allowing their sermons to be shaped by these crucial events that lie at the heart of Christianity. As Good Friday approaches, preachers find themselves trying to navigate Christ’s journey from death to resurrection, seeking vital and fresh revelation for a world caught between the agony of the cross and the promise of resurrection. Preachers want to proclaim a word of hope enshrouded in the mystery of atonement, but we struggle to know how to engage with the cross and resurrection in our sermons. For the liturgical observance of Good Friday and for all the other “Good Fridays” we need a way to engage head-on with the cross and resurrection in our preaching that takes human experience and the core of the gospel seriously.

The struggle to address the cross and resurrection truthfully in our context can lead congregations to take bold and drastic steps. Several years ago a Toronto-area congregation of the United Church of Canada—the largest protestant denomination in Canada—removed all reference to Christ from their Easter liturgy. In a bold move they retreated from the cross and resurrection to focus instead on the actual lives of the people in the congregation. They celebrated, sang, and proclaimed the rebirth of hope, of new faith in the human spirit, of the chance to end pain and misery on earth, all without any reference to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen—God among us.1 Why, on Easter Sunday of all days, would a Christian congregation leave this important affirmation on the cutting room floor? This is an extreme example that does not reflect the stance of the United Church of Canada as a whole, but it does offer us a window into the struggles that we all experience around Good Friday and Easter. Although few of us would modify our Easter liturgies by cutting out Christ, we can understand the circumstances that may have motivated West Hill United Church. Those present may have even experienced this service as providing a breath of fresh air and a relief from orthodox Christian dogma that clings heavily around Good Friday and Easter.

Stumbling Over the Cross

There are many reasons why preachers and Christians at large stumble over the constellation of events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. While there are other resources that explore these reasons at depth, I will briefly name some top reasons here as a way of bringing them out in the open. However, our purpose here is not to get hung up on the reasons but to uncover the underlying tensions that can make preaching the cross and resurrection feel so thorny.

Theological Difficulties

First, the difficult theology surrounding the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus is extremely challenging to unpack and understand. We are uncomfortable with Jesus’ death. It is terrible, even unthinkable regardless of our Christological slant. If we hold a Christology that stresses the divinity of Christ, it is difficult to imagine how God could die, how God could allow Jesus Christ as a member of the Trinity to die. If we hold a Christology that stresses Jesus’ humanity, it is still unbearable that Jesus as the embodiment of love and peace who offered grace and healing to suffering people should die in such a terrible way. All the theology that has been heaped upon it in the millennia since Christ’s death and resurrection should not ease the horror and finality of the nails that held Jesus to the rough wood of the cross, exposing him to the elements and a violent agonizing death. Christ’s death on a cross is a historical and biblical event that also functions as a theological cipher for the church, anchoring belief in the resurrection and connecting God with real experiences of suffering today. While it might be tempting to collapse the cross into serving as merely a symbol, sign, or theological category, such a stance could lead us toward a path of cutting Christ from our Easter services. The good news around which Christian proclamation is based cannot be understood apart from the particularity of Jesus Christ and the cross. It is necessary to navigate the space between the function of cross in its historical context and the ways the cross functions in broader salvation history.

At best, the cross can help to clarify our theology. The reality of Christ’s death grounds belief in the resurrection and our future hope. Because Jesus actually died and is experienced as alive, his resurrection has world-changing power and we have confidence that in Christ we too will be raised from death. At its most challenging, the cross obscures. The cross will not be easily categorized, it is a violent event undertaken by God alone for the salvation of humanity that also announces victory over the powers and principalities, and reframes all of history within a new eschatological age.

Language Difficulties

A second difficulty surrounding the cross has to do with the language we use to talk about the saving significance of Christ’s death. If we learned about atonement in seminary primarily through memorizing a set of theories in a classroom, moving into a congregational context becomes very difficult. Atonement theology is tricky in the pulpit because the language can be abstract and ...