Why the Cross? Understanding the Shape of the Christian Life

By Donald Senior

The cross is the defining symbol of Christianity. It is by turn misunderstood, misappropriated, venerated, and under-appreciated; absorbing a variety of meanings from the inspiring to the problematic. Inside or outside the church, its over-familiarity is its strength and its weakness, reduced at times to

• Language: English
• Publisher: LAB/ORA Press
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739716271

Book preview

Why-the-Cross-Cover.jpg

Published by LAB / ORA Press

St. Peter’s Community Centre

Charles Street

Coventry

CV1 5NP

United Kingdom

Second edition published 2023

First published in the UK in 2014 by Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2014 by Donald Senior

The right of Donald Senior to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Cover design: Alice Marwick

ISBN: 978-1-7397162-6-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-7397162-7-1

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by IngramSpark

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Crucifixion in the First-Century Greco-Roman and Jewish World

The Cross and Human Suffering

The Cross and Salvation

The Gospel of Mark

The Gospel of Matthew

The Gospel of Luke

The Gospel of John

Paul and the Saving Power of the Cross

Other New Testament Writers

Take Up Your Cross and Follow Me

Do This in Memory of Me

Guide

Cover

Title Page

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Foreword

The saving and reconciling work of God in the Cross of Christ is at the heart of the good news Christians proclaim, but it is also very hard to understand and explain.

The Nicene creed simply says that Christ was crucified ‘for our sake’, and leaves it at that. In doctrine courses, the usual approach is to look at theories and metaphors of the Atonement, potentially giving students the confusing idea that we can choose the one we like best. But in this book Senior helps the reader to grasp that the lenses through which we attempt to see what God is doing for our salvation do not need to be treated separately, as competing alternatives, because they are not separated in God’s action in Christ, and they are not separated in our grateful response. The Cross is not either victory or justice or sacrifice, but the victorious self-sacrificial justice of God. Nor can the Cross be treated as a ‘doctrine’ on its own: its meaning and impact can only be discerned by attention to the whole incarnate life of Christ. Jesus dies like this because of the way that he lived. The Cross is the culmination of Jesus’ earthly mission, and of the mission of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit to God’s world.

That is why this book is such a gift. While it does not pronounce on one ‘theory’, what it does instead is provide a rich and meticulous theological whole, based in detailed attention to the New Testament. Throughout the book, Senior keeps the argument firmly embedded in the reality of the gospel witness to the whole life of Jesus, as well as his death and resurrection. This brings out a deep coherence which is often lacking in ‘theories of the Atonement’. In particular, what emerges is a fuller insight into the character of God, and a clearer pattern for our personal and communal discipleship.

Properly, Senior starts with the simple fact of the Cross, and the meaning that it gains from its historical context in the brutal regime of the Roman Empire. Crucifixion was the form of torture and execution largely reserved for those lowest down the social scale in the Empire. It was designed to be a degrading as well as an agonising visual display of Imperial power and justice.

Instantly, questions of truth, justice, power and self-identification come to the fore in interpreting Jesus’ death when the Cross is seen in this light. Throughout his life and ministry, Jesus turns to the poorest, the neediest, the most marginal people around him, those who live in the shame, injustice and neglect of a world that seeks success, wealth, comfort, belonging – a world whose values have changed little in two thousand years.

When the Magi come seeking a new king so powerful that the stars themselves bear witness to his birth, no wonder they initially try the royal court. They, like we, had to be redirected to find the strange and joyful truth of where God chooses to be found. Ironically, it is only at his trial and death that Jesus moves in exalted social settings. It is in this life and death that the saving work of God takes place; like the whole of God’s movement towards us in Christ, the Cross is a source of world-changing revelation.

Senior’s exegesis of the New Testament witness to the death of Christ is illuminating. Texts that I thought I knew well came alive as Senior brought this focus to bear and made connections across the whole. For example, the thread connecting the Prologue of St John’s gospel to Jesus’ dying gasp, ‘it is finished’, is seen to be bound up with the Atonement. From Creation through the Word to completion through the Word incarnate, God’s self-giving love is at work: ‘God so loved the world that he gave ….’

The Pauline and Deutero-Pauline epistles are examined with the same care. At his conversion, Paul encounters the crucified and risen Christ, who becomes the heart of everything that Paul preaches and lives. A crucified Messiah, paradoxically, is a Messiah for everyone, not for the just, the wise, the elite, those who think they don’t need saving, but for all.

The Epistle to the Hebrews makes radical use of the imagery of the sacrificial system; 1 Peter offers hope in suffering and persecution to the community of disciples of the Suffering Christ; Revelation fixes our eyes on the Lamb that was slain. The New Testament witnesses to the reality that the Cross is the interpretative key to the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Particularly illuminating, perhaps, for our culture, is the strong strand that Senior identifies of the confrontation with evil, taking place throughout Jesus’ earthly ministry, and coming to a climax with the Cross. In all of the gospels, ‘the Satan’s’ work is challenged by the healing, forgiving, obedient work of Christ. In John’s gospel, Satan ‘enters into’ Judas, to engineer the arrest and execution of Jesus, little knowing that what was being worked out was salvation, not destruction.

Paul understands sin as a pervasive, death-dealing force, encountering the unbreakable love and life of God in Christ. Hebrews sees the ongoing and ineffective struggle for holiness found in religious systems, and how we can be liberated from them by the once for all act of God in Christ. Revelation sees the cosmic armies battling it out, while Christ’s people wash their robes in the cleansing blood of the Lamb. 1 Peter assures a suffering community that human struggle is no longer a meaningless side effect of the world’s thraldom to evil, but can be taken up into the triumph of Christ’s Cross. The New Testament does testify to the exemplar descriptions of the Cross – we can and must learn from it – but it also insists that some objective reality has changed through Christ’s redemptive suffering.

The theology of the Cross also gives shape, character and direction to Christ’s disciples, the Church. Jesus died like this because he lived the life of the obedient Son of God. Our mission is to live and work from the character of God as Jesus does. Our community is the body of the crucified and risen Christ, reconciled and reconciling. The Cross of Christ shapes everything.

At the end of the book, Senior sums up the results of his study. Why the Cross, he asks, and gives a clear, powerful list of answers to his own question. Why the Cross? Because it happened; because it is incontrovertible proof of the true humanity of Jesus; because it is the condemnation of injustice; because it attends with loving truth to the reality of human suffering; because it shows the love of God; because that saving love is for everyone, not just a few; because it animates our life and mission as the people of God; because it enables us to trust and persevere in hard times; because it forms the character of the Church. The Cross of Christ shapes everything.

Drawing all the threads together, the book brings us to the Eucharistic table: Jesus asks us to remember him, not as an idea, not as a story, but as a people formed and sent. ‘Live as I live; be sent as I am sent; love as I have loved you. This is the ultimate meaning of the cross of Christ’.

Sadly, Donald Senior died before he could see this book return to print. His profound, careful, imaginative and all-encompassing study of the Cross will continue to influence and inform for years to come, while Donald is enjoying another kind of continuing life with the God whom he trusted and whose heart he has helped others to know and love.

— Jane Williams, 2023

Introduction

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 as merely as an exotic necklace or earring.

Art historians debate how soon the cross became a widespread symbol in early Christianity. Some believe that this did not occur until well into the fourth century when the more secure place of Christianity in the Constantinian era blunted the scandal of promoting a Crucified Christ. However, more recent research has challenged this view. There is compelling evidence that the early Christians used a combined abbreviation of the Greek letters tau (t) and rho (r) found in stauros, the Greek word for cross, as a visual depiction of a crucifix. Such visual abbreviations or staurograms are found in some of the earliest manuscript fragments, such as the Bodmer papyrus dating from around 200 CE where quotations from John’s Passion Narrative use these staurograms when the word for cross appears.1

In any case, we know from the witness of the New Testament writings themselves, and later patristic texts, that the cross of Christ stood at the center of Christian proclamation. The fact that crucifixion was a feared and heinous form of public execution in the Roman era was a serious complication for a new faith that proclaimed a crucified Jew was in fact the Son of God and the hope of salvation for his followers. But the cross of Christ was too essential to the Christian message to mute reference to it. When Christianity was becoming more well established in the Roman Empire, from the fourth century on, the cross began to appear everywhere as a sign of Christian faith. Byzantine churches would ultimately take on a cruciform design. In Byzantine art, such as frescos, mosaics, and icons, the cross is an ever-present symbol. The characteristic and universal Christian symbol of the cross has remained a consistent trademark throughout the centuries into our own day.2

As I will illustrate in the pages that follow, within the New Testament itself and in subsequent Christian theology, the cross takes on a wide range of symbolic meaning.

Reflecting the terrible historical reality of crucifixion as a cruel instrument of capital punishment, the cross becomes synonymous with various forms of human suffering. At the same time, as in the theology of John’s Gospel, the cross paradoxically becomes the supreme expression of Jesus’ giving of his life out of love for his friends.

Because Christians view the cross as the definitive means of redemption and atonement from sin, the cross is also viewed as a sign of blessing. Ministers and priests trace the sign of the cross over their congregations as a blessing; Catholic and Orthodox Christians bless themselves with the sign of the cross several times daily.

Linked to a belief that through the cross Christ overcame death and evil, the cross is used as an emblem of protection—affixed to church banners, mounted on the walls of homes, lifted on a pole to lead processions and pilgrimages praying for God’s protection.

In a similar vein, the cross has often been associated with military victory, as in the famous story of Constantine’s vision before the Battle of Milvian Bridge and in subsequent centuries where the sign of the cross was painted on the body armor of the Crusaders, mounted on the tombstones of fallen soldiers, and stamped on famous military insignia such as the Victoria Cross.3

The Scandal of the Cross

But the cross, both as a sign of human suffering and as a positive sign of blessing and redemption, raises searing questions for Christian belief. Answering the question Why the cross? means not only explaining the historical context that led to the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth but also understanding how the cross in Christian tradition symbolizes various forms of human suffering past and present. Therefore, the question Why the cross? also asks how the reality of human suffering, particularly innocent suffering, fits with Christian belief in a God of love, compassion, and justice. These are serious and difficult questions and, in fact, some traditional Christian answers to these questions themselves become part of the problem.

One might note two fundamental meanings given to the cross based on two characteristic Christian expressions. One is the call to bear the cross and the other is to take up the cross and follow me. Like Simon of Cyrene in the gospel passion accounts, we can be asked to bear a cross we did not choose: a serious illness, the loss of a loved one, failure of a marriage, loss of a job. These sufferings come without invitation and often without warning. And yet traditional Christian wisdom affirms that we are asked to bear the cross; to suffer in the spirit of Christ without bitterness or complaint, and, in so doing, we are purified.

By contrast, the gospel saying to take up the cross implies an intentional and active commitment to follow Christ, including embracing the possibility of rejection and suffering, and even death itself, for the sake of the gospel. Thus taking up the cross becomes a way of expressing Christian discipleship and mission undertaken in a deliberate and challenging manner.

One of the most difficult questions the cross of Jesus raises is the issue of innocent suffering. By all accounts Jesus of Nazareth was a just man, innocent of the crimes with which he was charged. Yet his innocence did not protect him from terrible suffering—an unjust arrest, interrogation and torture, and death by crucifixion. The fundamental Christian conviction that Jesus was not only innocent but was, in fact, the Son of God, the most noble and sacred human being ever conceived, one whose life was without sin, who embodied the very being of God—this profound faith only makes the question of why Jesus had to suffer more acute. Jesus’ final words from the cross, the opening verse of Psalm 22 quoted in both the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, seem to make this very point: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34).

It is a lament expressed on the lips of parents and spouses and siblings learning of the death of a loved one. It is the question that rises in the throats of anyone who has witnessed the horror of a crime scene or viewed the devastation of a suicide bombing or stood at the bedside of a desperately ill child. It is the devastating question raised by the genocide of six million Jews in World War II. How do we reconcile belief in a loving God with the reality of human suffering, particularly innocent suffering? This is a question that the biblical peoples themselves struggled with, from the anguish of Job to the Wisdom of Solomon’s wrestling with the suffering of the just man.

Most fundamental of all, Christian faith affirms that the cross of Christ, linked essentially with his resurrection, is a source of redemption and new life. Through the cross of Christ sin is forgiven and the world is reconciled to God—these are deep convictions of the New Testament and consequently of orthodox Christian faith. But here, too, the cross remains an enigma. How exactly does the death of Jesus free us from sin and secure our redemption? What exactly is saving about such a hideous form of human suffering and ignominious death? What difference did the death of Jesus on the cross really make? If, as Christian faith also affirms, Jesus Christ is the Word of God incarnate, and if his becoming human revealed God’s love for the world and gave humanity a new dignity and even a divine character, why was it necessary for Jesus to also have to suffer and die in order to effect our salvation?

The use of the cross as a symbol for Christian experience and discipleship raises another set of questions, one posed in particular by feminist and womanist theologians.4 Does the notion of bearing the cross imply a kind of passive and subservient acceptance of suffering, particularly of suffering imposed by oppressive and unjust structures and systems? Do such traditional exhortations to bear the cross, particularly when stated by a patriarchal authority structure in relationship to women’s aspirations, make the cross a blunt instrument to keep women in their place and to encourage submission and conformity? Have some aspects of traditional piety built around the bearing of the cross and the sufferings of the cross been used to encourage African Americans and other oppressed groups to accept their fate and not redress their rights? Furthermore, does the focus on the silent and uncomplaining bearing the cross of suffering often recommended to persons with disabilities and persons with various forms of illness become a code word that encourages passivity and discourages courageous action demanding access and justice?5

In general, does the focus on the cross give Christianity a fundamentally morbid and negative aura? Is not Christian faith rather a celebration of abundant life? Does not piety and devotion focused on the passion of Jesus and his death on the cross rob Christianity of its fundamental vibrancy and proclaim not a God of life and love but a God who exacts death to atone for human sinfulness? Does not the focus of traditional Christian theology on the redemptive death of Jesus isolate the meaning of the cross from the overall mission of Jesus as presented in the Gospels, a mission whose keynote was the advent of God’s kingdom where suffering and death would be replaced by healing and abundant life? Is not then the theology of the cross ultimately a distortion of the good news proclaimed by Christ?

Why the Cross?

These are serious questions that reach to the heart of Christian faith. And they are all the more serious because they are being raised not by persons hostile to Christianity but by sincere believers who are grappling with the meaning of the cross as a fundamental reality of Christian faith. The study we are about to embark on does not pretend to adequately answer all of these gripping questions.