Everybody loves Christmas. We might not love the crowds and the queues at the checkout, but everybody loves Christmas. Even as we're wrestling the laden trolley to the car, strangers smile and wish us "happy Christmas'! Even the grumpiest workmate thaws to a smile under the tinsel.
People know what to do with Christmas. It's a happy time; it's a time that gets people together; and it still has a home in our culture, even a quasi-religious home.
No one is offended by Christmas " because somehow you can talk about Christmas and be part of Christmas without being confronted by Christmas.
But not so with Easter.
The Easter confectionery might appear on the supermarket shelves the week the Christmas confectionery is removed, but there's no sense our culture is at home with Easter the way it is with Christmas. And that's not a bad thing.
The cross was never meant to make people comfortable. It was always meant to be a cultural misfit and cause affront. But I think the offence has changed and that's because the nature of the offence is, at least in part, informed by the culture of the day.
Often these days, preachers will liken the offence of the cross to that of the electric chair, saying that wearing a cross around your neck in the first century would be like wearing an electric-chair pendant in the 21st. But there was more to the offence of the cross than just as a means of capital punishment.
First of all, it was a hideously cruel death, brought about not by the injuries of crucifixion, but by asphyxiation as the muscles for breathing gradually tired. It was so distressing that there is nothing in antiquity like the detailed depiction of crucifixion found in Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, for it seems "good taste' prevented people from dwelling on the horror of crucifixion. Even the gospels' accounts are short on details about the
method and effects of crucifixion.
Crucifixion was also an experience of extreme public humiliation and ridicule, where a person's naked body, guilt and lowly social status (Roman citizens were not usually crucified) were displayed to all who passed by (cf. John 19:20).
No doubt all this played a part in the general offence of "Christ crucified' in the first century but for the Jews there were additional reasons. They were looking for powerful signs that the Messiah had arrived and the weak message of "Christ crucified' was an affront (1 Cor. 1:22"23). Worse still, God had said anyone hung on a tree was cursed (Deut. 21:22"23; Gal. 3:13). So how could a crucified man be God's promised Messiah?
A third offence was that the cross made it clear that salvation was only through faith in the death of Christ and not in anything achieved by observing the law or by human effort (Gal. 3:1"5; 5:2"11).
The Greeks, who valued success and self-reliance, would also have found this offensive, as they did the unsophisticated foolishness and shameful exaltation of failure they saw in the message of "Christ crucified' (1 Cor. 1:22"23).
Given all this, I think we can see why the early Christians might have been tempted to massage the message of "Christ crucified' in order to remove its offence. You can almost hear them thinking; without the offence of the cross, the message might stand a chance.
But Paul's response is: take away the cross and you take away the message. The message of Christ and him crucified is the Christian message. It is nothing less than the "power of God for those who are being saved' (1 Cor. 1:18; 2:2).
But of course, our situation is very different. The closest any of us has been to a crucifixion is at the movies, and the foolishness and shame of the Jewish Messiah being executed by occupying Roman forces belongs in SBS documentaries, not in our culture.
But the cross is offensive nonetheless.
The offence however is no longer the 20th century's "usual suspects' " the historicity of the New Testament, the morality of an innocent victim suffering or the violence of the crucifixion. These questions are still around but there are bigger (and related) issues that cause offence.
The first is that the cross says human beings are sinful.
If the first question people ask these days is "what does it mean for me?' then the answer for the cross is profoundly offensive, because it means each one of us is a sinner.
These days "sin' is a word advertisers use for chocolates and TV shows because it's a word with market appeal. But even if we ditch the "sin' word and talk about standards of personal morality or moral character, people these days do not tend to think of themselves as anything but averagely good.
Not so long ago, Western society was more familiar with the notion of "sin'. God (or at least the ten commandments) was allowed more say in ethical debate and personal morality, and because God's law helped inform public consciousness, people were more likely to think of themselves as falling short.
The measure now is other people, not God's rule, and provided you're not the very worst of people (pedophiles and terrorists) and provided you're not found out, you can think of yourself as being as good as (if not better than) the next person.
As well as this, the (pop)psychologising of our "weaknesses' has made them something we're encouraged to "learn to live with', "embrace', or "express', and if we choose to "work on' certain failings, we're inclined to excuse our own bad behaviour and see ourselves as victims and not morally culpable. We talk about "being taken out of context' or "making a bad decision' instead of doing, thinking or being something objectively wrong.
But no matter how well we compare with others, Jesus' death on the cross says that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God' and that "none is righteous, no not one' (Rom. 3:10"18; 23, cf. 5:12). That the cross was necessary is a statement about us.
This is not a denial that we have all at times been victims, but the stark reality is that, left to our own devices, none of us pleases God and we are all rebels against him.
And if we move from the answer to the first question "what does the cross mean for me?', to the second question, "what does it mean for me that I'm a sinner?', the answer provides the second offence of the cross.
For it means that God will judge all people.
Now obviously some people today say there is no God, and perhaps the cross is less of an offence to them than the resurrection. 1 But for those who do believe there is a God, the cross is an offence because the god they believe in is not a holy God of moral absolutes.
The god they believe in is a god who can be summonsed and dismissed as needed. He/she (or it) is not a personal God who rules the world and knows all and is judge of all; that sort of god belongs to militant and fundamentalist religions. The god of popular imaginings can be prayed to in times of trouble and is allowed to share our space, but this god answers to us, not us to him.
People want this god to judge Osama, Hitler and Pol Pot (as the recent furore over the "Jesus loves Osama' sign shows) but they do not think he needs to or should judge them.
In fact the truth that God is judge is so widely rejected by our society that even some Christians baulk at it. In another Anglican diocesan newspaper, an article recently contrasted the fierce message of the wrath of God proclaimed by the "plain-speaking, Bible-believing' John the Baptist, with Jesus the "helpless baby' and the "helpless young man nailed to the cross' and concluded "there is no wrath to flee, no severe mercy to avoid like the plague. The Christlike God knows no anger. In God there is no violence at all.'
But this is to miss the offence of Easter.
The cross declares God is holy, that he is morally perfect and pure, that he cannot abide sin in any of its manifestations. The cross shows how seriously God takes sin and that we can no longer fool ourselves we have not deserved his wrath 3 (cf. Rom. 3:26; Heb. 9:27, etc).
Our society's domesticated god cannot co-exist with the death of Christ. We are confronted there with the love of God and the wrath of God " and the two are not in competition. God's holy love is expressed in his personal wrath, with which he punishes all unholiness.
The wonderful news of Easter however is that God himself paid the penalty for our forgiveness. As Paul puts it: "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). Or as John puts it: "This is love: not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins" (1 John 4:10).
This is the ultimate offence of the cross. It is the public historical event that declares we are utterly dependent on the self-sacrifice of the Son of God in our place to escape the wrath of God (Mk. 10:45; 2 Cor. 5:18"19; Col. 1:21"22; 1 Pet. 3:18 etc).
This is so offensive it has become fashionable, even amongst theologians, to deny this substitutionary aspect of the cross of Christ. People say instead that Jesus' death is an example of absolute obedience and sacrificial love and humility; or that it speaks to us of the depths of God's love for humanity; or that it signals the defeat of death, sin and the Devil; or that Jesus died as our representative (one of us). All these things are true but the offence of the cross does not lie in them.
The offence is that Jesus died as our substitute (instead of us). We deserved God's judgement and "with his redemptive act in Christ, God has acted to free us from the penalty he himself imposed'.4 The scandalous affront is that God suffered instead of us.
And so the first step in our Easter evangelism is to realise we can't remove the offence of the cross. It is right. It's how it should be. We don't want to chocolate-coat the cross to remove the offence.
The second step is to know where the offence lies: not in the historical gap of 2000 years; not in the violence or taboo of death; not in philosophical questions about the innocent suffering or the existence of God.
Our culture asks the question "what does it mean for me?' and ironically that self-absorption allows us to talk about the real offence of the cross as it exposes the dark recesses of each human heart, and counter-intuitively and once-for-all demonstrates the love and holiness of God, and the new life he offers us all.
