PeaceBang

The Meaning of the Crucifixion

August 12, 2007 on 10:53 pm | In Theological Reflection (Biblical), Unitarian Universalism |

I’ve just started to read Elaine Pagels and Karen King’s book on the Gospel of Judas and I’m already getting lost in my own thoughts on every page. I’ll read like two paragraphs and get all snarled up in christological musings –because I’m such a DEEP GIRL and that’s the sort of thing I do — when I’m not reading celebrity gossip blogs and playing “psycho mousie under the covers” with my cat, that is.

No, seriously.

Today, after having attended a two-hour worship service at a local American Baptist church, I was thinking about how little they actually taught about Jesus even though the two hours were full of enthusiastic, percussion-heavy shout-outs to him. The basic assumption was that you came into the church already having established a very personal relationship with Jesus. There was no need to dwell on the Bible stories about him, to focus specifically on his sayings or actions, or to analyze him in any way.

Of course this is light years’ difference from the way we treat the J-Man in the UU church. If we mention him at all, we have to carefully set the context and explain the heck out of our analysis because we assume that either (a) people are wigged-out former Christians whose hair stands up on the backs of their necks when they hear his very name or (b) our listeners don’t give a fig about Jesus, so you’d better make this interesting and smart or (c) we have to make sure to make this clear to the unchurched, who may have no Biblical knowledge whatsoever.
The end result is that there’s very little enthusiasm involved in talking ’bout Jesus. We’re very bookish, little owls blinking behind our pages of research.

Which is all rather a shame, of course, because a good number of our UU seekers these days have lots of good feeling about Jesus and come assuming that we do, too. They’d like to learn about his spiritual philosophy beyond the basics and they don’t understand why we walk on eggshells around the Christian tradition.

Part of why we walk on eggshells, of course, is that a whole bunch of us have no acquaintance whatsoever with Unitarian and Universalist christology and assume that to be Christian — or even to talk about Christianity as an insider — means to believe that Christ died on the Cross as a human sacrifice for our sins. Which is abusive, sick nonsense, they say, and what kind of irrational, credulous ninny would put their faith in a God who makes this necessary?

Conversation over!

So I’m reading The Gospel of Judas this afternoon and I’m thinking there are so many deep ways to consider the meaning of the crucifixion of Christ. I’m so sorry that so many of my co-religionists reject the entire tradition because they can’t move beyond the orthodox treatments of this event.

I would think, in fact, that a religious humanist would potentially be very drawn to this story because it’s such an incredible tale of the human struggle. Take God the Father and what He might be doing out of the picture and it’s still a breathtaking story: one courageous itinerant preacher of healing and justice being nabbed by the authorities, brutally beaten and then crucified. A community of friends and disciples running away in horror, and shame. A reappearance of the dead man: who knows how? Communal psychotic break? Something funny in the wine? Who knows! And then a subsequent passionate re-emergence by the formerly traumatized community of friends who then proclaim that the love will overcome violence, that the world has totally misunderstood the nature and uses of power, and rushing off to spread the good news and to get decapitated for their trouble.

Fast forward to 2000 years later and the story is still going strong! Wow, what’s going on here? Are all those billions of people just crazy, nutso, just plain dumb? Wouldn’t any respectful student of the human history of meaning-making delight in digging into this story, and this figure? Doesn’t he beckon in a personal way, this cipher? Haven’t we figured out by now that purely academic study of whether Jesus was a real dude or not, or whether or not he actually said certain phrases is kind of fruitless?

I’m sorry that so many people who are secretly thirsting for living waters of Christian life are still living in the arid desert of the Jesus Seminars. I mean, it’s a great place to start reading if you’re tentative about Jesus, but I wouldn’t stay there. Current theological offerings are much richer than that, anyhow.

Someone asked me recently what I thought it meant to have a personal relationship with Jesus. For me it means (1) to seek instruction by him through studying the most reliable reports of his life and teachings and (2)to agree to be part of the “you” he was talking about when he said, “I will be with you always.” The former commitment is about being a disciple of Jesus the living man. The latter commitment is about embracing the cosmic Christ as a spirit that manifests in the world through a combination of the grace of God and human willingness to have faith in its reality. To have a personal relationship with Jesus is to say to him, “I am going to look for you today out there. I am going to try to be more influenced by you than by Madison Avenue or the Rupert Murdoch empire.”

To have a personal relationship with Jesus is to stand where he stood — even in those terrible moments under the Cross — and to ask myself, “What does this mean? How can I live with this? What am I supposed to do about it?” Even if I had no belief in a transcendent God whatsoever, I believe I would still be drawn to the Jesus event in much the same way. I ask myself now and then how we as a human community would react even today to someone who rejects the things we all tacitly agree matter most (home, family, possessions, worldly goals), who breaks down barriers of class, gender, race in an impolite and even disdainful fashion, and who dares to insist that no matter how popular they become and how amazingly they influence people for the better, they have no agenda but to bring about a new world order based on peace and love. I’m thinking the slammer, the psych ward or an assassination.

To have a personal relationship with Jesus is to sit eating peanuts with him at the kitchen table, throwing the shells on the floor and saying Man, we are still so totally not ready for you. And when he says, “Well, stop eating peanuts then and GET ready,” you sigh and brush the shells off your lap and keep trying because you think he’s the most rightest person who ever was.

P.S. I’ll be away visiting MotherBang for a few days so don’t freak if your comment doesn’t show up right away. She has a dial-up connection and I won’t be online much. — xoxo PB
P.P.S. Please don’t yell at me for suggesting that you can have Christ without God. A lot of Unitarian Universalists don’t believe in God and I am trying to do what the preacher said to do this morning, which is to bring someone the gospel today. You dooz what you canz. I personally thought Jesus was the Way way before I believed in God, so I’m living proof that theological righty-osity doesn’t matter much to the Holy Spirit.