A Fourth Church Sermon by Fleming Rutledge

March 14, 2004 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

OK, Mel, But What Does It All Mean?

Fleming Rutledge
Guest Preacher

Isaiah 53:1–6
2 Corinthians 5:14–21
Luke 13:31–35

As the entire American public must know by now, a Roman scourging and crucifixion was almost unimaginably terrible. We didn’t always know this. When teaching about the Cross of Christ, I used to spend a certain amount of time explaining what was involved in crucifixion. Whatever else we might say, positive and negative, about Mel Gibson’s Passion movie, we can certainly say this: never again will we have to spell out the ghastly details.

But I am wondering, now, if we were ever meant to see the suffering of our Lord in this literal way. Jesus’ disciples saw it, the public part of it at least, but they did not describe it afterwards. We have no testimony from them about the details of the flagellation or the nailing or the three falls on the road to Calvary. The testimony of Peter, the witness of Mary Magdalene, the apostolic preaching of Paul—none of them emphasized the physical suffering. Their attention was focused on something quite different.

The Hebrew tradition about God was exclusively verbal. As a great lover of the visual arts, I have to keep reminding myself of that. In Jesus’ home in Nazareth, there would have been no pictures or icons on the walls. When he was taken to the synagogue, he would have seen no stained glass windows and no statues. When he learned his lessons, there would have been no illustrated books, no slides, no show-and-tell. Instruction about God was entirely in speech. After the resurrection, the news was spread by word of mouth and then in handwritten letters. It goes without saying that there were no radios, televisions, or cell phones, let alone an Internet. St. Paul had to travel on foot, on horseback, or by ship across the Mediterranean world—in person—to deliver the gospel to the Gentiles.

Does this mean that God’s people in New Testament times were deprived because the apostles did not have digital cameras? Would their message have been more effective if they had had overhead projectors? Millions upon millions of people will see Mel Gibson’s movie with its explicit portrayal of sadistic brutality. Will they understand the death of Christ better because of these visual images?

I have been pondering these questions ever since my husband and I went to see the movie two days after its general release. Like Dr. Buchanan, I have collected a huge file of press clippings and articles. In the two-and-a-half weeks since the release, I have sometimes felt as if the entire frame of discourse has changed forever because of this one movie. One thing is for sure, and that is that the rules of engagement between Christians and Jews have changed for ever since the Holocaust.(1) I commend to you Dr. Buchanan’s sermon of February 29 if you have not already heard it or read it. Christians and Jews see two entirely different movies when they go to Mel Gibson’s Passion, and we owe it to our elder siblings in faith to listen to them very carefully in their outrage and alarm, especially in a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise around the world.

Today, however, I am interested in talking with you about the relationship of visual images to the Word of God. I am always grateful to be in a Presbyterian pulpit because I come from the Protestant wing of the Episcopal Church—what’s left of it in America—and it is a joy and a blessing to be in a congregation where preaching is valued and honored. I have listened to the way you talk about Dr. Buchanan’s sermons, and it brings joy to my heart to know that even in this age of sound bites there is this still this kind of intense response to the ministry of the Word. So this is the best of all possible contexts in which to say that the meaning of the Passion of Jesus Christ is not to be found in visual images, but in the living Word of God as it is interpreted afresh for each new generation of Christians.

Here at Fourth Church some of us have been meeting together these past two days to examine the biblical witness concerning the death of the Lord. This testimony of the earliest Christians is the source for understanding the crucifixion of the Messiah. Let’s reflect for a moment on something rather unusual. Imagine that you are one of the first Christians. Wouldn’t you think that you might go out to the place of crucifixion and try to find a piece of the cross to keep as a memento? Wouldn’t you want to try to find one of the nails? How about the crown of thorns—wouldn’t you try to save that, maybe put it in a special container, maybe light a candle in front of it? And the hill of Calvary, or Golgotha—wouldn’t we want to put a marker there? Wouldn’t we want to have an architectural competition to see who could design the best memorial?

So, isn’t it striking that nobody seemed to care about any of this? We have no idea where exactly the crucifixion took place. Nobody was the least bit interested in finding pieces of the true cross, or the shroud, or the Holy Grail for that matter, until many centuries later. In a very real sense, Jesus rose from the grave directly into the verbal testimony of the apostolic witnesses.(2) But please understand: that does not mean he rose only in a symbolic sense. The testimony to the empty tomb comes from a very early stratum of the tradition. St. Paul, writing only twenty years or so after the resurrection, insists that if Christ is not raised, we are still in our sins (1 Corinthians 15:17). The resurrection happened. One of the strongest arguments for the truth of the resurrection is that if it had not occurred, we would never have heard of Jesus at all. We would never have known that such a person even existed. He would have vanished into oblivion like all the other nameless thousands of crucified victims of whom we know nothing whatsoever. The resurrection made all the difference. Yet no one bothered to save the grave clothes, and we do not have the slightest idea where the tomb was located. None of these things were important to the New Testament church.

Paul goes on, even more emphatically, “If Christ has not been raised, then our [we apostles’] preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (I Corinthians 15:14). Notice the way he links the resurrection to the preaching of the apostles, and the preaching of the apostles to the faith of Christians. He explains this in another way in Romans: “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart, that is, the word of faith which we preach. . . . . So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ” (Romans 10:8, 17). So let us say it again: the meaning of the death and resurrection of our Lord was transmitted not with visual images but with words.

Does that mean we should become iconoclasts and go out and smash all the statues, as the English Puritans did in Cromwell’s time? Or, for that matter, as the Taliban did when they dynamited the age-old statues of Buddha, to the horror of the entire Western world? Absolutely not. I have an icon of the crucified Christ in my house, and I plan to keep it there. But the primary witness is verbal. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner said, “[After] the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock, [there will] still be one more sound: that of [man’s] puny, inexhaustible voice, still talking.” Language: this is the link between God and us. The Old Testament Jews left us no paintings, no statues, no bas-reliefs, no friezes or tapestries. What they have bequeathed to us is of incomparable and unique worth. What they have given us is a treasure that can never be destroyed: the treasure of the living Word of God.

What does the living Word of God tell us about the cross of Jesus Christ our Lord? Many things, as we learned yesterday. There are many themes in scripture that are each worth a sermon or a series of sermons. His death was a ransom for our deliverance. He was the scapegoat who carried our sins away from us into a godforsaken place. In submitting to the power of death, he won the victory over the grave. He offered himself as a perfect sacrifice for the atonement of sin. He crossed over from death into life in a new Exodus, delivering us from death in a new Passover. He entered into hell, the domain of the devil, and defeated him on his own territory.

All these motifs and more are found in the apostolic preaching. Today I have chosen just one passage for us to think about. Paul is writing to the Christians in Corinth. This is a congregation that gave him a lot of heartache. He had been with them for a long time, teaching them the faith and building up the community of witness there, and then he had to go on to establish new churches elsewhere. As soon as he was gone, the congregation started dividing into factions. Some of them were devotees of Paul; some were attached to other preachersædoes that sound like churches of today? Then there were these new teachers who came into town (the pneumatikoi). They were very “spiritual.” They were full of signs and wonders and flamboyant manifestations. They encouraged the Corinthians to speak in spiritual tongues3 and to think of themselves as superior in wisdom. To correct this, Paul writes sharply that although he can speak in spiritual tongues more than all the rest of them put together, nevertheless, in church he would rather speak five words in rational speech, in order to instruct the congregation, than ten thousand words in an unintelligible tongue (1 Corinthians 14:19).(4)

In our passage today, Paul writes to the congregation about the meaning of the death of Christ in their context—the context of factions, personality cults, conflicting doctrine, spiritual arrogance, class conflict, and disengagement from the word of truth. They no longer listened gladly to the proclamation of God’s action in Christ because they were so focused on their own supposed accomplishments, their spiritual knowledge, their competing gurus. Paul seeks to recall them to the central message, the evangel—the good news of Jesus Christ. In today’s reading, we hear his impassioned words: Christ died for all. He died that we might live no longer for ourselves and our own selfish interests but for him who gave himself up to death for the sake of the new creation that has come into being through him. And, Paul begs them to understand, all this is from God. Human spiritual achievement has nothing to do with it. There has been a tectonic shift of perspective. At one time we might have regarded Jesus Christ from a merely human point of view, but since the cross/resurrection event, everything is suddenly different. We know everything in a new way. There has been a definitive, world-altering series of actions by God which create an entirely new mode of knowing. This new mode of knowing is derived from the apostolic preaching, the message of the gospel which is received by faith.

We apostles, Paul writes, are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.

As I typed those words into my computer, although I have read them a hundred times before, they struck me with new force. When Paul says “we,” he means himself and the team of apostolic missionaries that traveled with him. But by extension—and there can be no doubt about this—he means all those, down the ages, who are called by God into the ministry of the Word. I will tell you that gives me goose bumps. It means that this very morning he intends to make his appeal through me to you. It means that the lowly preacher with all her faults, and all her sins, and all her weaknesses, and all her annoying personal traits is nevertheless called into the dignity of this high pulpit to proclaim something to you that is not from herself but from God. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled . . . the world to himself. Not the good world, as Karl Barth says on the cover of your bulletin, but the evil world and all the terrorists and all the criminals and thieves and child abusers and embezzlers and torturers in it. For our Lord Jesus prayed for those who were abusing and torturing him.(5) And he died for all the supposed “good” people also, the pillars of the church, with all our hypocrisies and our pretensions and our indifference to the poor and our withdrawal into our gated communities and private schools and exclusive clubs. He died for us too, that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him and for the whole world—the world for which he died, in order to reconcile us to himself.

Paul’s impassioned appeal comes to a climax in one astonishing verse: For our sake [God] made [God’s Son Jesus Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

I have asked the Lord what [the Lord] wants me, [the Lord’s] appointed ambassador today, to say from [the Lord’s] Word. I have asked [God] specifically about this verse in the context of the discussion about the Mel Gibson movie and the terrorist attack in Spain and the precarious situation in which we all find ourselves in today’s world. I ask [God] now to make [God’s] appeal to you through me, [God’s] servant called to this pulpit for this hour. The meaning of Christ’s death is complex and multifaceted, but at the very least we can say that there is a correspondence between the hideousness of crucifixion and the enormity of human sin. The fact that the Son of God gave himself over to such a peculiarly horrible and shameful death, a degrading and dehumanizing death, corresponds to the degrading and dehumanizing things that sin causes us to do to one another. On the cross, Paul is saying, sin attached itself somehow to our Lord Jesus. He “became sin.” All his life he lived in perfect communion with the Father; now on the cross he is divided from him as the power of sin is allowed to wreak its very worst. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” There is a correlation here. Somewhere in the conjunction of these verses there is a signpost to the meaning of the cross.

For our sake [God] made [[God’s] Son Jesus Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. From sin to righteousness, from death to life. That is the movement of the action of God in Christ. We are a new creation: the old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God.

People of God at Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue: you don’t need me to tell you that you are worshiping in the very shadow of some of the world’s most vulnerable buildings. Tomorrow morning you in Chicago, I in New York, may—or may not—awaken to the sounds of sirens and shrieks and the silence of death. But whatever happens tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, we regard nothing and no one from a human point of view. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. There is nothing—absolutely nothing at all—that can undo what God in Christ has already done. We are already—in him—reconciled to our enemies and they to us. Only God can do that. The gospel message is that in Christ he has already done it. Just as he bonded sin to the sinless Christ, so in our baptism he has bonded us, the unrighteous, to the righteousness of Christ. Christ was made sin; we are made righteous. That is the exchange that he has made with us. Our sin, his suffering. Our guilt, his death. Our apostasy, his godforsakenness. Because God in Christ has made this exchange, we are now bonded to the righteousness of God himself.

And so, as Paul’s message is often paraphrased, become what you already are! You are already saved; you are already reconciled; you are already made righteous. Now you are free to act that way. Be reconciled! (katallagete![6]) as God has reconciled you to himself.

Fourth Church has been called for some time to a mighty witness here in Chicago. You are able to go out of these doors with a confidence born of faith in the promises of almighty God, faith in the future that belongs to him no matter what may befall us. The love of Christ controls us now, not because we are ourselves loving but because he is loving, not because we are ourselves righteous but because he is making us righteous. Through his death under the power of sin we are now free to do things we never thought we could do. Be aware of that today and tomorrow and the next day. Be aware that you no longer belong to yourself but to the one who for your sake died and was raised. In this power a new creation comes into being, a new creation where the smallest deed of love, the smallest deed of forgiveness, the smallest deed of reconciliation is nothing less than the righteousness of God. The sign of the cross is raised over the chaos we create for ourselves, and it says that if anyone is in Christ there is [already] a new creation.

That is the Word of the Lord.

Notes
1. The term Shoah is preferred, but since it is not as familiar, I use Holocaust here.
2. The much misunderstood and misappropriated Rudolph Bultmann, by any measure one of the premier New Testament interpreters of the twentieth century, is associated with this idea.
3. Called glossolalia. “Speaking in tongues” is still practiced in Pentecostal and charismatic congregations.
4. It is possible to derive a bit of ironical humor from this, because as the Second Epistle to Peter says, “Our beloved brother Paul” has written letters to you, though to be sure “there are some things in them hard to understand” (2 Peter 3:15–16).
5. “He did not count [logizomai, reckon, impute] their trespasses against them.”
6. For some years, there was a magazine of radical Christian theology and social commentary, actually named Katallagete! The editors were Will Campbell and James Holloway, and the editorial board included such luminaries as Walker Percy.