Samantha Christopher, Seminarian | March 3, 2024

Trinity Church on the Green, New Haven, Conn.

7:45am and 10:30am, Lent IIIB: March 3, 2024

1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,

but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (1 Cor 1:18)

In approximately 1515, German painter Matthias Grünewald completed what would become his most famous work: the Isenheim Altarpiece. It is massive. When its two wings are fully extended, it is nearly 15 feet wide, depicting across its face scenes of Christ’s life from the Annunciation to his Resurrection. When closed, as it would have been for the majority of the church year, the central panel, still nearly 10 feet wide, portrays the crucifixion in gruesome detail. Grünewald depicts Christ as emaciated, covered in sores, twisting in pain from the nails driven through his hands and feet. One can almost hear the screams of pain and gasps of agony—it’s that vivid.

Jesus would have been no stranger to crucifixion. Reserved solely for those whom Roman society considered the lowest of the low, the Roman state only used it on their colonized subjects, reserving beheading for Roman citizens. Crucifixion was a truly terrible punishment—often the condemned survived anywhere from several hours to several days, exposed to the elements, on full display to all passersby. Crucifixion was a warning: “look what we can do to you,” the authorities seem to say. Paraphrasing one scholar: “Dying on the cross was reserved for a [group] of people who were without status and…power. …[W]hile [to the Roman authorities] their bodies had no value and could easily be subjected to a most humiliating and painful death, [crucifixion] extracted the [most] value from the action by producing universal terror” in those who witnessed it.[1] The very threat of crucifixion would have been used to keep Jesus and people like him “in line.” Being condemned to death via crucifixion was the most degrading and dehumanizing way the Roman Empire could condemn one to die. Yet it is in this degradation and dehumanization that we find the very foundation of our Christian faith.

For early Roman and Greek converts to the nascent Christian faith that was just beginning to bubble up in the coastal communities of Asia Minor, this declaration of Christ crucified was too much to bear—the very idea that God would subject Godself to such a form of degradation was absurd. As we hear in the Epistle to the Corinthians this morning, Paul strikes back at the upper-class Roman and Greek members of the Corinthian community. It is absolutely essential to Christian faith, Paul argues, that we declare Christ crucified, precisely because it seems so absurd. The cross is an unreligious object—its sole purpose is to not just to kill and to kill brutally but to do so in a way that is utterly unspeakable in polite society.[2]

The exhortation to proclaim Christ crucified is a key part of Christian witness because its central claim turns on its head absolutely everything we expect from a God or from a savior. The Christian story begins at foot of the cross, at that soil watered by Christ’s blood and sweat. The Christian story begins with God nailed to a tree. As second century bishop Melito of Sardis wrote:  “He who suspended the earth is suspended, he who fixed the heavens is fixed, he who fastened all things is fastened to the wood; the Master is outraged; God is murdered.[3]”

Whenever we speak of the crucifixion, we must be exceptionally careful. The death of Jesus Christ on the cross is not the fault of any one group. As one theologian wrote, the cross “testifies to the human capacity for cruelty to others, but God’s love neither condones nor acts as an alibi for the human capacity to impose suffering on others.”[4] Christ was crucified precisely because our world was in need of salvation. Christ was crucified because of the sinfulness of people like you and I, who saw the very creator of all that is and was and ever shall be and thought only of death and destruction. When God became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and was born on Christmas Day, he was born a real human being. He did real human being things—he ate food and skinned his knee just like you or me. His life was human, and his death was human. The key claim of Christian faith and practice is not just that God died on the cross, but that he chose to become human just like one of us, that he really and truly died just as you or I will die, and that he was resurrected three days later. We declare Christ crucified not because of crucifixion’s cruelty or its power to strike fear into the hearts of those who view it. The scandal of the cross is not only found in its humiliation of Jesus, but in the fact that God would willingly join himself to humanity in such a way that would make him vulnerable to such a death. The scandal of the cross is that even in the darkest depths of despair, even in our bleakest moments, the light of Christ—the hope of his resurrection is still there. It is only in the dark of the crucifixion that we can truly see the light of the resurrection and is only in and through Christ’s death on the cross that we can make sense of the incarnation on one end and the resurrection on the other.

It is not enough, however, to simply say that Christ was incarnate, that he died, that he rose again. Rather, we need to live as if it makes a difference to us and to the world we live in—because it does! The birth, death, and resurrection of Christ is important not because it’s a fun little historical tidbit but rather because the creator of everything that was and is and is to come loves us with such a particularity that he was willing to live and die and rise again so that we may come to life eternal in him. This gift—the gift of salvation—can never be paid for by us, we can never earn it, we can never prove to ourselves or to God that we deserve it. God died and rose to break the bonds of sin and death not because we’re particularly worthy or because God liked something we did one time and he decided to be nice, but rather because has God loved us since well before we even knew what love was. That grace, that love, demands things of us—it demands that we move and live and have our being in this world in a way that is Christocentric. It demands that we build the kingdom of heaven here on earth—to do justice, love mercy and to walk humbly with God. It demands that we re-shape the way we interact with one another away from a selfish, “whatever I need or want goes” mentality to an unselfish giving of our time, talent, and treasure to do God’s work. We are called to offer ourselves up as a sacrifice to God—to open ourselves up to his will in our lives and to stand in support and solidarity with one another as we discern how God moves in and through us.

The natural consequence of proclaiming Christ crucified is to re-orient our lives toward the broken and battered figure of Christ on the cross and to see him in the people around us. Grünewald’s Altarpiece depicts the crucifixion in gruesome detail. But once those  wings are thrown open, and we go through the pathway made for us by the crucifixion, we come face to face with the resurrection, shining forth in glorious majesty. May we too, in the confidence of Christ’s resurrection, go boldly forth to proclaim Christ, and him crucified.  

Amen.

[1] Wonhee Anne Joh, “A Postcolonial Spectrality of the Cross,” Concilium, no. 2 (2013): 45.

[2] Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 78.

[3] Melito of Sardis, as quoted in: Rutledge, Fleming. The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2015).

[4] Joh, “A Postcolonial Spectrality of the Cross,” 44.