The Defining Moment of Christianity

The defining moment of Christianity is the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. I choose this moment instead of the resurrection for a couple of reasons. First, to everyone who has ever claimed that God is dead, in that moment, they were proved right. Jesus, fully God, fully human, succumbed to the final moment of all our earthly existences, death.

Without the resurrection, Christianity is a sham. At best, it is a collection of moral platitudes and clichés built around the Golden Rule. The promise of Scripture was that Jesus would rise again. So, without a resurrection, we have definitive proof of the error of Holy Scripture.

But for the resurrection to occur, Jesus showed the ultimate love for us. He loved us so much that he died for us, and died horribly. Jesus, as human, would find death inevitable as someone who lived fully as human on this earth. But Jesus as God, as Deity, as the Creator, someone fully separated from the Creation, he died too.

Now death could not hold him, and Jesus knew that death could not hold him, but that promise did not prevent his anguished cry, “My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?” It did not prevent him from sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying that the cup of wrath be passed from him. But he was obedient, he was loving, even to the moment of his passing.

Theologies of the Cross explain the death of Jesus judicially, as atonement, morally, as the ultimate example of faith, cosmically, as the victor over the forces of Satan, but I feel a hole in those understandings.

Biblical interpretation is marvelous at logical and intuitive assemblages of God’s Word to show us the marvelous nature of our faith. And for that I am so very proud to be a Christian.

But I also know that I have been called upon to pastor people who have experienced pain and death and loss in ways I can only imagine. The Spirit gives me utterance, but I have this terrible feeling that I do not have the ‘chops’ to really speak to their situation. But the language of suffering and pain permeates Scripture, as does the language of its healing. I don’t have the ‘chops’, but my Lord Jesus does. I want to explore that, to develop the theology of the Cross to include a real exposition of the suffering of Jesus, how that suffering can truly allow us, as the followers of Jesus, to speak more completely to people who could use the healing we have experienced.