Today, on Holy Saturday, Christians are in the between times of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, and for those so inclined a time such as this can be a good time to wonder, just what is this all about and where is it that we are going.
As a life long Christian I can’t help but feel a sense of deja vu, here we are once again at Easter and then days and months will pass and the liturgical calendar will start all over again. And I wonder some times, what is the point? Is humanity evolving in any way through this repetition?
If I may be so bold, I would like to propose that perhaps, just perhaps, the prevailing view of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection as a transaction to appease God or Satan causes us to have a wrong view on sin and thus ourselves.
If Easter is simply a transaction for sin, then sin is a thing we can either avoid or eliminate and purity becomes that of which we all strive for. The consequences of purity being the goal is evident in the segregation of Jesus’ own people, the more pure or sinless one was the better they were treated and the further inside (closer to God) they could be in the Temple.
The desire for purity seems to naturally lead to humans putting themselves in roles of looking for and labeling actions as pure or impure and inevitably this results in our scapegoating of others to make ourselves feel better. Seeking purity prevents us from achieving any form of real peace between people and ourselves.
Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, put himself right in the midst of those in his society considered impure. Jesus’ life and what he taught of how close God actually is to us and how His rule, his polity (peace through love), is opposite to empire (peace through force), which humans believe is the norm.
What if the Cross exposes scapegoating and the related desire for purity as opposite to how God intends us to live rather than being simply a price paid? What if the Resurrection is God saying “Jesus is right and Caesar is wrong”? What if the purpose of Easter is for at-one-ment between us and the Triune God rather than the scapegoating act of atonement?
Peace amongst all the peoples of the earth does not yet exist, and we Christians have to be honest in our complicity in preventing such peace. Today leaders of the United States who claim christianity are waging war against peoples who they deem less than themselves.
Had Jesus been a king like Caesar there would have been no crucifixion and no resurrection. The question posed by the cross to those who claim the adjective christian is, who do you follow, Jesus or Caesar? Your answer defines the meaning of the cross and the validity of the resurrection and determines whether the violent cycle of the civilization that may lead to human extinction keeps repeating or finally diverges.
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Notes From The Cave 