The Dying of Jesus

Words and Thoughts from the Cross

Cummings

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498238175
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The liturgical season of Lent and Good Friday are very important for Christians as they meditate and reflect upon the dying of Jesus. These are traditions that take us back to the very beginnings of the Christian tradition. From early times, pilgrims have made their way to the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem, to walk where Jesus walked and to remember his death on the cross. Not everyone can go to Jerusalem, and we cannot stand at the foot of the cross of Jesus, but the Stations of the Cross and the Seven Last Words may take us to Jerusalem and to Calvary imaginatively.

1

The Sign of the Cross

The cross is the defining image of Christianity. The cross by itself, or as a crucifix with a depiction of the body of Christ fastened to it, is found in countless places: mounted on church steeples, embroidered on sacred vestments, attached to the walls of homes and institutions, tattooed on the hands of Coptic monks, fashioned into jewelry worn by believers as a symbol of their faith and by others merely as an exotic necklace or earring.

—Donald Senior1

Death by Crucifixion for Jews, Christians, and Muslims

The earliest Christians had to react to the death of Jesus particularly because it was a real stumbling block for them, what they called a “scandal,” and this reaction may have been expressed in what many regard as the origins of the gospels, that is, the passion narrative. Many scholars think that the passion narrative developed fairly quickly as a kind of apologetic for the crucifixion. We read in 1 Cor 1:23, “But we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” The word for “stumbling block” is the Greek word skandalon, and the word for “foolishness” is the Greek word moria, the root from which “moron” comes. So, the cross of Jesus was something you might stumble over for the Jews, and for the Gentiles something that only a fool could believe that God was positively involved. To the Jews, talk of a crucified messiah must have seemed blasphemous on the basis of Deut 21:22–23: “If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his corpse hung on a tree, it shall not remain on the tree overnight. You shall bury it the same day; otherwise, since God’s curse rests on him who hangs upon a tree, you will defile the land which the Lord, your God, is giving you as an inheritance.” Being “hanged upon a tree” was interpreted in first-century Palestinian Judaism as being crucified. Since Jesus was crucified, God’s curse must have rested upon him. The stumbling block for Jews was obvious. “The Messiah of Israel could never ever at the same time be the one who according to the words of the Torah was accursed by God.”2 Some response to this apparent absurdity had to be made, and not only for the Jewish element in early Christianity. To Gentile ears, the crucifixion, preached as a saving event, in some way, shape, or form beneficial for human beings, must not have been less absurd. That a man dying in such a repulsive fashion could have anything to do with the divine world was utter foolishness, and something only a “moron” could believe.

This moronic attitude is expressed in what has come to be known as the graffito of Alexamenos. This graffito was scratched in plaster in Rome circa 200 AD. It shows a crucified man with the head of an ass. Next to him is a smaller figure named Alexamenos, who has his arm extended toward the crucified. Nearby the following words are etched: “Alexamenos worships [his] God.” It seems clearly to be the case that Alexamenos was a Christian and some crude artist has shown in the graffito what he thinks of Alexamenos’s god, the crucified Jesus. The graffito expresses what St. Paul means by “foolishness” from a pagan Gentile point of view. How could any right-minded person believe that God was somehow active in the death of a crucified man? The comment of theologian Richard Viladesau is helpful: “It is the earliest known pictorial representation of the crucifixion of Christ and of his adoration as divine. In a city so full of the triumphant monuments of Christianity, there is something strangely moving in finding this first visual testimony to the Christian faith amidst the fragments of daily life of pagan Rome; and even more so in finding it in this rude sketch, probably drawn by a palace page with cruel schoolboy humor to mock the faith of a fellow slave.”3

The scandal of the cross remains a scandal also for devout Muslims. In his book on the cross, Viladesau goes on to share an experience from his teaching at Fordham University in New York. Christian students in one of his classes were utterly surprised at the reverence that Muslims had for the person of Jesus, “and even more surprised that most Muslims teach that Jesus was not crucified.” Viladesau asked a Muslim student to explain this idea that Jesus was not crucified to the rest of the class; here is the gist of her response: “It is inconceivable that God should allow his Prophet and Messiah to suffer such a death; rather, God took Jesus to himself (See Koran 4.157–58).” At that time, Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ was attracting a large number of moviegoers; Vildesau reports that “another Muslim student commented that while he was very affected by the portrayal of human suffering in Mel Gibson’s film on the passion, he obviously could not believe that any of this had happened to the Christ: either it happened to someone else, or it was an illusion produced by God.”4 So, the cross has been a scandal, foolishness—or, because of God’s concern for Jesus, it never really took place.

The Sign of the Cross

The image of Christ on the cross was a latecomer in Christian religious expression. The specialists tell us that the earliest surviving examples of Christ on the cross date from the fifth century. It is pointed out that the earlier image of the Good Shepherd, found often in the catacombs and represented in early Christian sculpture, was a more attractive and consoling image for early Christians. The image of the Good Shepherd depicts Jesus’s dedication and sacrifice, his willingness to die for his flock, as in John 10:11: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” The image of Christ as the Good Shepherd does not show him suffering. In point of fact, many of the earliest Christian images of the cross do not show a crucified and suffering Christ. “Either: they show only his head, or they show him glorious and triumphant, rather than in agony, wearing the tunic of a Byzantine emperor, or a purple royal or priestly robe. Early Christian artists tended to avoid depicting Christ as dead, on the Cross or elsewhere.”5 Historians of art may present various reasons for this, but surely one reason stands out from our human point of view. Suffering is difficult to reconcile with the understanding of God as Love. The image of the Good Shepherd in its own way seems to convey this so much better. Later generations of Christians were to develop different and sometimes challenging ways of thinking about the suffering of Christ on the cross, but surely all have come to recognize that Jesus did not come to placate an angry God, nor to be a model for submission to a cruel God. “He came to be the love of God; to show in our own ‘frail flesh’ not what God demands but what God is prepared to give.”6 “He came to be the love of God”—that is the whole point of the incarnation and of the cross—to manifest to us what it means when we say that God is Love (1 John 4:16), and in and through that manifestation gracefully to embrace us in the communion of the Trinity. Whether intended or not, there is a firm strand of at least Western theological thought about the cross that sees it in terms of punishment. Perhaps this strand of punishment thinking reveals something unsavory about ourselves, but it certainly does not reveal the Trinitarian God whose best name is Love.7

A couple of references to early Christian writers help us to see how precious the sign of the cross had become. Our first author is Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 225), a Christian from Carthage in North Africa. Around the year 211, he wrote a book entitled De Corona (Concerning the Crown), in which he commends a Roman soldier for refusing to wear the soldier’s crown. Tertullian believed the crown to be a symbol of paganism, and he was utterly opposed to it.8 Tertullian contrasts the pagan symbol with the sign of the cross: “At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at t...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Sign of the Cross
• Chapter 2: The Stations of the Cross
• Chapter 3: The First Word from the Cross
• Chapter 4: The Second Word from the Cross
• Chapter 5: The Third Word from the Cross
• Chapter 6: The Fourth Word from the Cross
• Chapter 7: The Fifth Word from the Cross
• Chapter 8: The Sixth Word from the Cross
• Chapter 9: The Seventh Word from the Cross
• Bibliography