A Sermon in Austin, Texas
In this video, Dr. Marcus Borg speaks at the University United Methodist Church in Austin, TX. This sermon took place on April 6th, 2014. The title of his sermon is “Lent: What’s the Cross About?” The text is Mark 8: 31-34; Mark 10: 32-34.
Borg spent the weekend with this congregation and led a seminar on Friday evening and Saturday on the topic of “What Does It Mean to be Christian Today?”
A Prayer
Lord, Jesus Christ, you are the light of the world. Fill our minds with your peace and our hearts with your love. In your name, oh Christ, our body and our blood, our life and our nourishment. Amen.
The Beginning of Lent
Holy Week is about following Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem. Jesus warns his followers that he is going to Jerusalem where the authorities will kill him. The cross has been central to Christianity since the beginning, but what is it about?
The cross is the familiar notion that Jesus died to pay for our sins, the payment understanding of the cross or the substitutionary understanding of the cross. Jesus died in our place, substitutionary, to satisfy the debt that we owe to God because of our sinfulness. This understanding of the cross goes with popular level Christianity’s emphasis on sin and forgiveness as the central dynamic in the Christian life. Many Christians grew up with this understanding. The payment understanding has serious problems, both historical and theological problems.
Breaking down the Substitutionary Understanding of the Cross
The first historical problem, the payment understanding of Jesus’s death is not central in the first thousand years of Christianity. In the new testament, it is at most, a minor metaphor and some scholars say it’s not there at all. It first appears in a book written in 1098 by a Christian theologian monk named Anslem, so the idea is less than a thousand years old. Anslem used a model drawn from his cultural setting in the middle ages, namely the relationship between a midevil lord and his subjects. When a subject disobeyed the lord, could the lord simply forgive the subject if he wanted to. No, Anslem said, because that would suggest that disobedience didn’t matter that much. Satisfaction must be made s that the lord’s honor would be maintained. He then applied this to our relationship with God. God could not simply just forgive sins, sins must be paid for. But only someone who was sinless could pay for someone else’s sins. You would need to have a sinless human being whose suffering creates a treasury of merit so that everyone could be forgiven. Again, this idea is less than a thousand years old. It is not ancient biblical thinking.
Then there are theological problems with it. First off, it makes Jesus’s death part of God’s plan of salvation, in fact, God’s will. Was it God’s will that this God like human being be killed? What does that say about God? It emphasizes God’s wrath and that God’s wrath must be satisfied. Is that what God is like? It makes Jesus’s death much more important than his life and thus obscures his life what he was passionate about. A classic example of this is Mel Gibson’s movie, the Passion of the Christ. That movie focused on the last 18 hours or so of Jesus’s life from his arrest to his torture to his crucifixion and death suggesting that that’s the most important thing about Jesus. That he died to pay for our sins. The movie was received with great excitement in evangelical Christian circles because it expressed what their understanding of the cross was about. It makes believing in Jesus much more important than following him. To use a somewhat inflammatory phrase that was first created by an evangelical Christian, it refers to Christians as vampire Christians by which he means, Christians are interested in Jesus for his blood and not much else.
Another theological problem is that it really makes Easter irrelevant. What really matters is the death of Jesus. There is no intrinsic connection then between Jesus’s death and resurrection. Instead Easter becomes something about God raised Jesus and therefore really proved that Jesus was the son of God. But the notion that somehow Easter is connected to Good Friday as a reversal of what happened on Good Friday virtually disappears.
The Alternative to the Payment Understanding of Jesus’s Death
The twofold meaning of cross and resurrection in the Gospels and the first thousand years of Christianity. The first of these meaning might be called the political meaning. Jesus didn’t simply die, he was killed. He was executed by the authorities that ruled his world. When Jesus speaks about what will happen in Jerusalem, he doesn’t say, the son of man must go to Jerusalem where he will die for the sins of the world. The texts say, the son of man must go to Jerusalem where the authorities will kill him. And he was not just killed. He was crucified, a type of execution reserved for only one type of person, for people who defied Roman imperial authority. Crucifixion sent a message that this is what we do to people who defy our authority. And why did the authorities kill him? Because they were unknowingly doing God’s will? No. They killed him because his message about the kingdom of God on Earth challenged the way the authorities had put the world together. And because he was beginning to attract a following. Jesus was a nonviolent revolutionary. And the authorities desired to snuff him out. Jesus was about a transformed world where justice and the end of violence would be with the coming of God. Easter is God’s no to the powers that killed Jesus and His yes to the passion and kingdom of God. In the world of Paul, the cross was always a Roman cross.
The second meaning is much more personal. Good Friday and Easter, the death of Jesus, as an archetype of personal transformation. Archetype meaning an image or metaphor or symbol that is wide spread across many cultures. The cross symbolizing death and resurrection is a cross cultural image. Dying and rising as an image of personal transformation, following Jesus is about following on the path of dying and rising. Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ, the old Paul has died, it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. The new Paul has been born whose identity is in Christ. Properly understood, being born again is to undergo dying to an old way of being and be born into a new way of being. And that transforms us into a way of life transformed by action, freedom from those standards of culture that get internalized in our psyches through the process of growing up in a particular time and place. A life marked by courage, the courage that can come from being center in God. Gratitude, when you are grateful its very hard to be mean. A passion for justice and peace.
What the Cross is About
The cross is about the twofold transformation at the center of the Christian life, personal transformation and political transformation. The cross is not about Jesus doing it for us, so that we can be forgiven. The cross is an invitation to participate in the path and the passion that we see in Jesus. It’s not about substitution but about participation, not substitutionary atonement, but participatory atonement. It is about how we become one with God and with God’s passion for a transformed world. Christianity is about standing against the domination systems of this world and standing for the kingdom of God. It is the way of life.