God Rejects Crucifixion Through Resurrection: Let us become resurrection to one another

[The Great Open Dance]

God’s absolute rejection of the crucifixion expresses itself in the resurrection. “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” declares Jesus (John 15:13). In this declaration, Jesus associates love with death because Jesus well knows that love is perilous.

Hatred is safer than love, despair is safer than hope, and fear is safer than faith; hence their attractiveness. But Jesus does not call us to safety; Jesus calls us to life. Life is love in the shadow of death, and love in the shadow of death is love that defeats death. For this reason we can find God everywhere, even in “thick darkness” (Exodus 20:21), even in the tomb.

The symbol of love defeating death is the resurrection. Jesus did not rise from the dead; Jesus was raised from the dead by Trinitarian love, by the agapic communion of three persons. His resurrection was not the act of an individual; it was an act of community. It was communion celebrating itself and declaring victory over division.

To the extent that the “hero” is an individual who acts alone, without need of assistance, Christ is no hero. Were he such, then he would contribute to the forces of individualization and separation. But as the perfectly loving person who was crucified, entombed, and resurrected, he becomes Savior, opening us to the power of sacred fellowship, the holy place where we will find healing.

The power of God triumphs by means of the power of God, not by means of the power of this world. The Romans who crucified Jesus believed in the power of this world, which is the power of godless violence. Throughout the empire, many awaited the messiah, or “anointed one.” Previous recipients of this exalted title were Aaron, the high priest of Israel (Sirach 45:15); Saul, the first king of Israel (1 Samuel 24:10); and Cyrus, the Persian emperor who allowed the Jews to rebuild their temple (Isaiah 45:1). Given this pedigree, people naturally expected wealth, power, and conquest of their savior. They wanted a messiah who trafficked in absolutes, who would establish absolute dominion, thereby resolving all the ambiguities of history. They got no such magnificence. Instead, they got an authentic revelation of God as love, the image of all-forgiving meekness who prays for enemies and tormentors. They got reconciliation between persons, which is reconciliation with God.

God makes a universe that makes itself, that evolves from simplicity to complexity, toward God. Likewise, God makes persons who make themselves. We have the freedom to live plumb with the divinely sustained cosmos or against it. When choosing greed, hatred, and power over generosity, love, and community, we choose against God. The crucifixion symbolizes our freedom to make this choice, a freedom that makes our choice for God meaningful. Through the cross, inhumanity believed that it could defeat humanity. But the Spirit of the universe could not be defeated by the spirit against the universe. Hatred cannot defeat love, and division cannot defeat communion. The will of the godless cannot override the will of God, which is to life in its fullness.

In a context in which suffering is recognized as a universal human constant, the cross is an assurance. Jesus is God among the suffering; hence, Jesus is God among us. Through the divine identification with our condition, we receive assurance that God is with us in our affliction, denying our affliction the final word. God grants finality instead to Jesus, the Word of God, the Beginning from which all things come and the End for which all things yearn. Kent Annan writes that, if we trust the Christian story, “We don’t have to minimize either suffering or uncertainty. Our love for truth can help protect us from ourselves and from worshiping an untrue god that can’t survive the trials of this world. Let our faith too be nailed regularly to the cross of this world. Any faith that dies there was dead to begin with. What is resurrected is Life.”

Resurrection to life leaves us among the tensions of experience. Jesus was resurrected to us, not away from us. Resurrection is into embodied life, not a spiritual heaven. We can trust that, having tasted death, Jesus savored life all the more. He arose to hear the sounds of nature, smell life in the soil, and feel the warmth of the sun on his face. All these sensations must have felt wonderfully extravagant after three days in the tomb. He could once again feel the Infinite Creative Benevolence, not as a mountaintop revelation, but in the moment-by-moment experience of everyday life.

Resurrection is transformation. It is not just a historical event that we remember; it is an eternal truth that we participate in. The Holy Spirit, Sophia, now invites us to become resurrection to one another. We are to risk entry into one another’s lives, as Jesus entered our world. We are to walk in one another’s troubles, as Jesus walked in ours. And we are to raise each other up, as God raised Jesus. Such love is laborious, but labor is the height of creativity, and creative love fulfills the image of God within us. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 202–205)

*****
For further reading, please see:

Annan, Kent. After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011.

Bulgakov, Sergeĭ Nikolaevich. Churchly Joy: Orthodox Devotions for the Church Year. Translated by Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.

Madigan, Kevin J., and Jon D. Levenson. Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.