A couple of years ago, I saw young Australian comedian Josh Thomas appearing on "Good News Week", as he does often, and, in the segment where they take news stories that make them angry and throw them into a furnace on the stage, Josh expressed, in his usually demure voice, that he was "sick of hearing about Jesus". Why? "Well, I know that he died for our sins and everything, but really that just meant moving into his father's freaking awesome house. And I've done that three times. Where's my book?"
Now, to most Christians, that brief statement would be intensely offensive. And rightly so, I suppose. But why? Is it because he is ridiculing something that is most precious to us? Well, yes. That much is clear. But I suspect that his words reveal a flaw in our own theology that we ourselves aren't aware of.
You see, to a lot of us, there's an element of truth in what Josh is saying. I know that for years I was troubled by the thought that Jesus' death wasn't such a sacrifice since he knew how it would all end and did, after all, come back to life at the end of it - as if it would only have been a real sacrifice if he himself didn't know what how it would turn out in the end.
Now, this is completely wrong, but I don't think that we're necessarily aware all the time of the reasons why it's wrong. This morning my flatmate and I discussed how this is another example of the latent docetism (see my last post for what this means) in the church today. We think of Jesus floating a little bit above the ground for most of his life, with a halo over his head and his hands lifted about six inches apart on either side of his head, not really feeling or experiencing much and just generally being like a fairly relaxed holy Ninja. Or, to use the analogy of my subheading for this post, being an amazing illusionist who can disappear or saw his wife in half on stage because he knows it's all an illusion and that, after the illusion is revealed, he'll be able to stand up before rapturous applause and say, "Thank you, thank you very much" to it all.
And this is completely wrong, for two reasons that we forget to our peril:
1) Crucifixion was intensely, intensely painful. I remember reading once that the pain was so bad that a new word had to be invented to describe it: excruciating, a word we now misapply to situations that are simply annoying or that cause our selfishness or craving for comfort to rise to the surface in profound ways. ("It was excruciating waiting for that train"; "My wife's/husband's complaining last night was excruciating".) No, excruciating meant the pain that could essentially only be derived from the cross. There are some fairly intense medical accounts out there of the effects that crucifixion had on the body. They are easy enough to find if you haven't come across them before. What they prove is that, regardless of the end result, Jesus had to endure, for several hours, a degree of pain that most of us will never encounter in our lives.
2) Jesus bore the rejection of the Father. Now, when we feel rejected by God, there are several ways that this is different to what Jesus experienced. First of all, we deserve rejection, whereas Jesus didn't. Secondly, we have never known the total unity with the Father which Jesus knew, making the rejection all the more crushing. Thirdly, we are never as deeply rejected as we feel. Jesus truly was. When he prayed, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he prayed it with an earnestness and intensity that no human before or after could ever pray. He truly was forsaken, because he had, for that moment, become sin itself for us (2 Corinthians 5:21).
And so, the enormity of his sacrifice only makes sense if we grasp the fact that, when Jesus was on that cross, he felt every second of the pain with every bit as much intensity as you or I would, and also that he experienced, that day, the total wrath of the Father in a way that spared any of us who believe from knowing precisely what we most deserve to know. For that moment, the saw went right through Jesus' body, without a second of illusion. It was no magic trick, because he was no magician. He was God in human flesh. And that is why the pain he suffered for us was no glorious hoax, but the beginning of the most glorious truth the world can ever know.
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