"The Attraction of the Cross" San Williams, UPC
John 12:20-33
We began our worship this morning by declaring that we have come to see Jesus, know Jesus, follow Jesus, and to participate in the community of Jesus. While I believe that to be true, I also suspect that some of us come with reservations. Perhaps we’re not so sure we believe everything we think Christians are supposed to believe. Maybe we’re embarrassed by the general perception of Christians in our culture. A recent survey showed a disconnect between the word “Christ-like” and the word “Christian.” In this survey, respondents gave overwhelmingly positive responses to the term “Christ-like,” but mostly negative responses to the word “Christian.” We’re living in a time when many people are suspicious of church and turned off by religion.
Leonard Pitts, Jr., columnist for the Miami Herald, wrote an essay recently titled: “What Drives People from God.” In it, Pitts notes that the number of people in the U.S. who call themselves Christian is seventy-six percent, down ten percentage points since 1990. Thirty percent of married couples today did not have a religious ceremony for their wedding. Better than one in four Americans do not anticipate or expect a religious funeral. Pitts acknowledges that there may be demographic and sociological reasons for this decrease in interest in Christianity and church, but he declares that the most important cause is simply that so much of religion has become ugly. He names recent examples of ugly religion and asks us to consider their cumulative effect upon outside observers. His lengthy litany includes Jimmy Swaggart’s pornography addiction; Eric Rudolph's bombing of Olympians and gays in the name of God; Muslim hijackers slamming airplanes into buildings while shouting that God is great; repeated incidents of priests and pastors preying on children while the church looked on and did nothing; the ongoing demonization of gay men and lesbians; all those so-called “family values” councils that try to bully public schools into becoming worship houses, with morning prayers and science lessons from the book of Genesis. Is it any wonder, Pitts asks, that more and more people today are wary of religion?
If you’re a student at UT, maybe you’ve cringed with embarrassment at the angry man in suspenders who frequents the campus, opens his big Bible, and screams at the students, “Repent, you sinners, or spend eternity in hell.” He probably doesn’t have a clue about how effective he is in driving students away from God.
This week I learned about a fundamentalist Christian group called Quiverfull. Practitioners borrow their name from Psalm 127: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the one whose quiver is full of them.” Quiverfull parents try to have more than six children, in an effort to build a fundamentalist Christian army for God. As one Quiverfull mother explained, “Some people think that what I’m doing—having eleven children—is wrong. I don’t really get into that much. The Bible says, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ That’s my belief system.” Never mind that group members rip selected Bible verses out of context and try to paste them into today’s very different world. At this point, I can’t resist using an expression I heard recently: That’s so stupid it drools! So what drives people from God? Ugly religion does. Dumb religion. Mean-spirited religion.
And yet as our Gospel lesson today makes clear, God’s intention is not to drive people away, but to draw them in. In our reading from John’s Gospel, we hear Jesus say, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” Our reading began with the arrival of some Greeks asking to see Jesus. What is the attraction of the Gospel? For John, n our reading, Jesus’ death on a cross is the pre-eminent way that God is attracting the world, drawing all people to God’s self.
But we still face a problem. The particular interpretation of Jesus’ death that has lodged in the imagination of many Christians was the one popularized in the middle ages, one that has run like a cord from Ambrose to Anselm to Mel Gibson. It holds that only the violent sacrifice of a perfect and sinless Jesus could appease a God whose honor has been affronted and whose anger has been aroused. Through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, this atonement theory has it, the debt incurred by human sin has been paid by Jesus’ blood, and God’s wrath has been appeased. But is this the God we want to love and trust—a God who needs compensation, a God who requires a pound of flesh, a God who balances the checkbook by inflicting pain? “We suspect,” writes the theologian Tom Long, “that a God who requires compensation just might encrypt a cancer cell into our tissue in order to teach us an ethical lesson, or send a surging tsunami to pummel a coastline for the sake of some cosmic moral equation.” We have to ask ourselves: Who would love or wish to draw nigh to such a God?
So isn’t there another way to understand the cross, one that more nearly accords to the Gospel, and one that actually draws us to God? In the 16th century, the artist Matthias Gruenwald painted an altar piece for the monastery of St. Anthony in Isenheim, Germany. The monks of this monastery were noted for their treatment of skin diseases. One of the most dreaded of these diseases was a kind of ergot poisoning that resulted from eating rye and other cereals. Ergotism, as it was called, caused gangrenous symptoms, turning the skin of the sufferer a sickly green. When these sufferers went to the monastery chapel to worship, their eyes would fall on Gruenwald’s crucified Christ, whose skin bore the same gangrenous color of their own affliction. These poor sufferers would see in Jesus the God who suffers with us, who makes our afflictions God’s own. Even a philosopher of abstractions like Paul Tillich could say that the Christ in agony on the Isenheim altar was the most religious picture he had ever seen. The attraction of the cross begins to tug at us when we understand that Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind about humanity. Rather he came to change humanity’s mind about God.
How? By showing us the depth of God’s love. People sometimes ask: How can God love me? Look at Jesus on the cross. Will I be alone on the hour of my death? Look at Jesus on the cross. Does God care about the poor, the lonely, the oppressed? Look at Jesus on the cross. On the cross the child with cancer, the soldier blown apart by a roadside bomb, the parent grieving the loss of a child, the homeless, the hungry—indeed all humanity is drawn into the heart of a loving God.
Perhaps you’ve heard the classic formula: that which is not assumed cannot be redeemed. On the cross, God assumed our humanity, including our death making the cross not so much a concept to be grasped as it is a love to be experienced. Once experienced, even the most hardened skeptics among us might be prompted to ask—as both our chancel and bell choirs did this morning: “What Wondrous Love is This?”
But friends, people who have been driven away from God by ugly religion won’t be drawn back by words alone. It will take a servant community, whose way of life gives credence to the Gospel we proclaim. It’s so significant that Jesus never talks about his own self-emptying life apart from the life of his disciples. He insists that his life of poured-out love is to be replicated in the lives of his followers, the church. “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.” The reality we face today is that many people in our society have been driven away from God and religion. But these same people might turn around and take another look if they could find more Christians who are Christ-like. We could receive no greater compliment than to have people say of us: We have seen Jesus in the life of this congregation.