Hilton Head Island, SC – April 23, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
I Corinthians 1:18-25; I Corinthians 1:26-2:7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power. – I Cor. 2:4 (NRSV)
At the outset, I want to alert you to the fact that what you just heard as the title of this sermon is the title of what may then have been the most important sermon I ever preached up to that time. I preached that sermon over twenty years ago when I was the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Hilton Head Island.
This sermon will not be a duplicate of that one. This one has the same title as that one, and, I think, the same scripture passages. (I didn’t bother to find that out, because the old sermon is in a box in storage in Bluffton. A copy of it may be on a disk in a small box in a bigger box under my computer table, but I didn’t risk deleting the whole disk (which is something I’d be likely to do, to find out, and in any case, that was then and this is now.) Besides, I have had twenty-plus years further to ponder the crucifixion since that last controversial crucifixion sermon.
The morning after that by-now long-ago homily, the three associate ministers of the church solemnly marched into my office. Without going into the particulars, one of them said she was very interested in the sermon, but she was curious why I ever decided to preach it. The second said she was thunderstruck that I decided to preach it. The third said that if he were not about to be moving on to his own pastorate, he would bring me up on charges of heresy before the Charleston-Atlantic Presbytery. You might deduce from those observations that those three well-trained-in-matters-theological-people thought I had gone way over the top in the collection of controversial sermons I have tended to preach on occasion.
Two of my three colleagues further suggested that fortunately, probably 80% of the congregation didn’t understand at all what I was trying to say, 10% did understand and hated it, and 10% understood it and loved it. No, said the third minister, 90% didn’t get it, 5% got it and hated it, and 5% got it and loved it. Anyway, twenty years later, here I go --- again. But I want you to know up that I do this again because I believe the notion upon which this sermon is based is an absolutely crucial one for every would-be Christian to think about.
The cross does not save us. God saves us. God alone can and does save us. The cross was historically, but absolutely not theologically, inevitable. That is the essential message of this sermon. The ironic circuitous result of the cross is that it demonstrates God’s love for us, although not in an immediately apparent manner.
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ surely sent the nascent and extremely tiny Church of Jesus Christ into a totally catatonic state of inaction from which it almost surely never would have recovered were it not for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Church seemed stillborn on Good Friday. Less than three days later the newborn baby began to breathe, but very unsteadily. If there had been no resurrection, there would be no Church, as I said on last Sunday, which was Easter. But this sermon is about the cross, not about Easter.
How did the New Testament Church “get over” the crucifixion? First of all, very slowly and very painfully. The crucifixion seemed so unspeakably horrendous to them, so violently bloody and unjust and unnecessarily ghastly, that even Easter did not instantly remove the shock they felt. Jesus had died, not of natural causes, not in an accident, but on a cross! He had been killed!
Why? Why would anyone do that? Jesus had done nothing to warrant a crucifixion! From their standpoint, he deserved to go on living and preaching and teaching until he would finally die a natural death. Instead, he had been nailed to a rough Roman cross, and there, mercifully, he quickly died, compared to most victims of crucifixion, who might hang for days on their inhuman instruments of tortured execution.
It took several decades and even a few centuries for a widely-accepted theology of the cross to coalesce. It took a very long time for a coherent understanding of the meaning of the crucifixion to evolve. The man who was the most important in the early years of crucifixion theology was a man who initially was an implacable enemy of the earliest Christians. As you know, his name was Saul of Tarsus. He became, by his own description of himself, the apostle Paul. Probably that was a title which none of his contemporaries would enthusiastically affirm.
Paul’s letters are the earliest writings in the New Testament. They were written before the Gospels were written. He clearly proclaimed that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was the means by which God chose to save the human race from sin. The person who wrote the letter to the Hebrews also clearly stated that conviction. Whoever wrote the Letters of Peter (who was almost certainly not Peter, the chief of the Twelve Disciples) implied it. The Gospel of John and the Revelation to John (and neither writer was the apostle John) were probably the last books in the New Testament to be written. Without hesitation they declared that the crucifixion is the means by which God saved the world from eternal damnation.
What I said twenty years ago and what I am saying again now is that I think, unfortunately, none of those New Testament writers truly believed that the cross demonstrates God’s love for us. Instead they believed the cross demonstrates Christ’s love for us.
Upon first reflection, it seems undeniably true that the cross illustrates the love of Jesus. Most of us have concluded long ago that Jesus willingly went to the cross to show how much he loved us and how much he believed in us. We have thought that because the Gospels clearly suggest it without actually stating it.
Upon further reflection, however, I believe --- and I want you at least to think about this, whether or not you ever come to believe it --- that the cross demonstrates God’s love for us. It isn’t primarily Christ’s love that is demonstrated by the cross; it is God’s love.
Of all the New Testament writers, I think it is Paul who almost actually admitted that, and he said it almost with that very nuanced meaning. I also hope that I have seriously pondered this matter long enough and hard enough for the better part of 60+ years in order to come to that conclusion. With huge hubris I am suggesting that nearly everyone for two thousand years has misunderstood the meaning of the cross. As my mother would have told me, “You have more nerve than a canal horse to do that!” And of course she would be right. I also am admitting that it doesn’t matter one jot or tittle what I think, because it all turned out all right anyway. Nonetheless, I still think it is an injustice to both God and Jesus that the traditional interpretation of the cross has been so carefully maintained as the factor which saves humanity. It doesn’t.
Further, It makes no sense to me to explain the crucifixion by saying that it was Jesus rather than God who showed his love for us on the cross, even though it also is true that Jesus did show his love for us on the cross. However, despite what the Gospels say in several places, I am convinced Jesus wanted at all costs to avoid the cross. Increasingly Jesus knew that he was going to be crucified, but that is the last thing he wanted to happen. On the last night of his life, in all three of the synoptic Gospels and in their recounting of the story of Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus made that crystal clear. “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine, be done.” Jesus left Gethsemane supposing that God wanted him to go to the cross. Surely Jesus was mistaken in that supposition.
By the time Jesus got to Jerusalem at the beginning of Holy Week, he sensed in the depths of his being that his remaining days on earth would be very few. The antipathy to his teachings was too strong, the opposition of his theological enemies was too fierce, for him to avoid being killed. He knew there was no way out, and that he could not somehow just disappear, never to be found again. Furthermore, to try to accomplish that would be to negate everything he stood for. But Jesus definitely did not want to die, least of all to die by crucifixion. And there was NO theological necessity for the crucifixion; none.
The New Testament scholars say that Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was written before his letter to the Romans. In I Corinthians Paul wrote, “When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (2:1-2). To state that in 21st century terms, Paul was insisting that the plain unvarnished truth is that the crucifixion cannot be understood as anything other than as an ultimate mystery. It is an apparent tragedy that is so profound as to defy any obvious rational explanation.
Nevertheless, said Paul, “My speech and my proclamation were not of plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God” (2:4-5). In other words, the crucifixion says something about the power of God, but that “something” of necessity shall be forever hidden.
Several years after he wrote his Corinthian epistles, Paul wrote his epistle to the Romans. In the intervening time, apparently he slightly altered his thinking about the crucifixion. He wrote, “But God proves his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (5:8). Paul came to believe that the cross indeed does validate God’s love for us, but it was demonstrated by means of Jesus’ death. Because God is the Spiritual Being above all spiritual beings, He Himself could not physically demonstrate His love for us directly. If God could do that He would do that, but even God cannot accomplish that. Therefore Paul said God demonstrated it indirectly through the death of Jesus on the cross. Jesus was the most God-centered person who ever lived, and Jesus willingly went to the cross because he believed that is what God wanted. God didn’t want it, but Jesus’ uniquely close relationship with God led Jesus to believe it was what God wanted.
But how could God ever want Jesus to die on a cross? Why would God want that? What good could it accomplish? Just this: For the Church of Jesus Christ, the cross very ironically came to symbolize the love of God for the entire human race, even if the human race never understood the message.
It is so strange. The Star of David is the symbol of Judaism. The tilted crescent is the symbol of Islam. But the cross is the symbol of Christianity. It could not be more ironic. A horribly inhuman means of execution became the permanent visible reminder of the love of God for everyone. Jesus was not crucified to make Easter look all the more spectacular. Jesus was crucified because some terribly misguided men thought he needed to be forever silenced. Yet by doing what they did, they guaranteed that the message of Jesus would never be silenced, that it would be proclaimed to the end of time. The Gospel of Jesus is the signal that a New Time has begun. The Gospel fully began with the crucifixion, and it was sealed by the resurrection.
To repeat: The cross does not save us. God saves us. Jesus is not our Savior; God is our Savior. But the cross demonstrates to us that we are already saved. It isn’t that we shall be saved, at some unspecified future time, perhaps at the moment we die. We have already been saved, before God created the universe. Being good Christians won’t save us; God has already saved us, long before we were born, and long before Jesus went to the cross. But for those whose minds can perceive that truth only in that way, the cross shows us that truth. In Romans 5:8, Paul said the cross even proves it.
“Being saved” does not mean that God prevents us from going to hell. There is no hell. “Hell” is a truly hellish notion concocted by people who wanted try to scare people into doing good. Being saved does not mean that we once were lost but now are found. We were never lost, nor shall we be. Salvation means that we were in God’s loving care before we were born, that we are with Him every day of our earthly life, and that we shall be with God forever after we die. Nobody can know what that last statement really means, so I most certainly am not going to try to explain the very diffuse ideas I have about what I believe it means. But I will state, yet again, that it is not the cross that saves us. Nor is it Jesus. It is God who saves us.
No one, least of all God, requires anyone to perceive the theology of the cross as it is being presented in this sermon. But if this sermon helps anyone to perceive the cross differently and more convincingly and allows you to feel liberated in your thinking and your beliefs, then it will have succeeded in what I hoped it might do.
Is all of this now crystal clear to you? I most certainly hope not. After all, as Paul correctly insisted, it is a mystery. And there can never be any clear explanation to anything that remains a mystery. The cross is an enormous, monstrous, wonderful, terrible mystery. But at the heart of this particular mystery is love, the love of God. God convinced Jesus to go to the cross, because in God’s providence, the crucifixion turned out to be the first half of the three-day event that changed the world forever.
On the cover of the bulletin is a quote by a late 18th century German astronomer named Johann Hieronymus Schroeder. He wrote, “It has been the cross which has revealed to good men that their goodness has not been good enough.” Whatever else you might take that to mean, it seems to suggest this: The notion that we can save ourselves by doing by good or by being good is misguided. God alone can save us, and the cross demonstrates that all of us already are saved.
I am well aware that this sermon is different from and is at odds with traditional Christian theology regarding the cross. But if the cross never made sense to you before and it does now, then I will have succeeded in what I attempted to do here. On the other hand, if the cross always made sense to you before and what you have heard here makes no sense at all, stick with what worked before, and forget what you have just heard.
In the end, if you believe that the cross is the demonstration of God’s love, that is what matters in what I have been trying to say. And God’s love, as the Rev. George Matheson of Helensburgh and Edinburgh, Scotland, declared in his outstanding hymn, will never let you go.