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| ISBN-13: | 9780898694994 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2005 |
| Pages: | 100 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x (d) |
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WE PREACH CHRIST CRUCIFIED
By Kenneth Leech
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2005 Kenneth LeechAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89869-499-4
CHAPTER 1
Foolishness to the Greeks
For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God,
(1 Corinthians 1:22–24)
STRANGE MEMORY
Thousands of people were crucified during the sixty-five years from the time that Judea became a Roman province until the end of the Jewish War. Almost all of them are now forgotten: they have become part of the immense historical mass of the anonymous dead. Such a loss of identity is hardly surprising in the aftermath of this most degrading and dehumanising form of punishment in which, according to Cicero, even the name of the victim should be removed. The rotting corpses were often left for vultures and animals to devour. It is this form of punishment, reserved mainly for the lower classes, particularly for slaves, violent criminals and instigators of revolt, which provides the location for these reflections on the work of our salvation.
Among the crucified people, Jesus of Nazarath alone is remembered. But he is not only remembered, he is remembered by his followers as the crucified God. The accounts of his death in the gospels are the longest and most detailed accounts of crucifixion in the whole of ancient literature, and the event itself is supported by evidence which is better than that for any similar event in the ancient world. Within the gospels themselves the accounts of the passion (suffering) and death of Jesus take up the largest single sections: indeed the gospels have been described as passion narratives with extended introductions. Clearly this crucifixion is seen as being exceptionally important, at least by some people.
Within the community of his followers, Jesus is remembered – in the most literal sense, re-membered. Week by week, day by day, in the eucharistic offering, in the exposition of the word and in other ways, there is a ritual re-enactment, an anamnesis, of the dying and rising of Jesus. It is the Eucharist or Mass – that regular act in which Christians claim to 'eat the flesh' and 'drink the blood' of Christ – which most dramatically manifests and makes present the mystery of the cross and resurrection. This ritual or liturgy is central to Christian consciousness and to the nurturing and sustaining of Christian identity. 'Do this in remembrance of me' stands at the heart of Christian worship. Yet it is a strange act and seems to the outsider to be a foolish one. For here Christians not only retell the ancient stories, they claim to re-enact the Last Supper, relive the sacrifice of Calvary and of heaven, and remember their own broken body through solidarity with the broken and glorious body of Jesus Christ. This 'unbloody sacrifice' of the Mass is strange, mysterious, fascinating and impenetrable, and, for all the attempts to dispense with its mystery and reduce it to a crude one-dimensional fellowship meal, the complexity of the mystery keeps returning. In the mystery of the Mass we are, as it were, present at Calvary and at the resurrection. It is a strange event rooted in a strange memory.
While most Anglican eucharistic prayers use 'remembrance', the English versions of the Roman Mass use the weaker word 'memory'. However, while memory is often seen as a looking back to past and finished events, in recent years there has been a renewed emphasis on corporate memory, the memory which recovers lost traditions and suppressed histories, the memory which nourishes and strengthens movements and struggles. Memory is of the greatest importance in the lives of Christians. Without memory there can be no forgiveness, no healing of the hurts and pain of the past. And forgiveness and healing are central to Christian existence. The trouble is that our memory is often blocked. Past hurts and sufferings are too painful to remember, so we blot them out of consciousness. We often justify this organised amnesia by saying that we 'live for the present'. But living for the present can easily be an evasion of the reality of our past. It is this evasion which must be undermined, lovingly yet deliberately, by the Christian community. For to live within a community of faith is to live within a community of memory, and the Christian community is shaped by what J. B. Metz calls 'the dangerous memory of the passion of Christ'. It is a community with a history. T. S. Eliot in 'Little Gidding' tells us that a people without history is not redeemed from time, and, in Christian thought, redemption takes place both within time and from the captivity of time.
However, the word 'remember* brings out the present dynamic in the past events. To re-member is to put together again. And this is what happens among the disciples of Jesus. Week by week, day by day, the Christian community celebrates the mystery of his dying, breaking bread in his memory, and in that fragmentation, that brokenriess, celebrates its own unity as 'one body in Christ'. The term 'body of Christ' is used in Paul to mean both the Eucharist and the people. This continual memorial or anamnesis is more than an act of nostalgia. It is a putting together again of the body of Christ which was broken and given for the life of the world. There is something immensely powerful and energising about this movement, and yet we must admit that it is very odd, very strange – indeed, on the surface, utterly absurd. For one would have thought that the event of Calvary would have marked the end of what we call 'Christology', thinking about Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah: it would seem to mark the disastrous failure of a project. Yet this seems not to be so. Christ was broken and crushed, and yet it is when we are broken and crushed that we know him. Christ was a failure and it is in the midst of our failure that we know him, not as another failure but as a source of life and power.
In fact the original Calvary experience was, for the disciples, one of failure. It was later, on the road to Emmaus, and on similar subsequent encounters, that the reality of the cross and of the crucified one became a living reality. It was on the first Pentecost after the death of Jesus that, as a result of Peter's preaching, they were 'cut to the heart' (Acts 2:37). It was as a result of the preaching of the gospel of the crucified Christ that people were brought to faith and discipleship.
And so it has been through all the succeeding centuries. Although evidence suggests that friendship and the witness and examples of friends is the most important single factor in leading people to Christian faith, there is a power in preaching which is not dependent on the preacher's own ability or personal strength. We may be chained in various ways but the word of God is not chained (2 Timothy 2:3). There is liberating and healing power in the word. So the Letter to the Hebrews says that the word of God 'is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow' (Hebrews 4:12). Similarly the Baptist preacher C. H. Spurgeon, when he was asked 'Why do you defend the Bible?', replied, 'I do not defend the Bible. The Bible is a lion. Set it free and it defends itself.' In preaching, we are seeking not so much to draw attention to ourselves or our rhetorical and dramatic ability as to set free, to liberate, the word so that it does its own (or rather God's) strange work (Isaiah 28:21, King James Version).
GOD'S STRANGE WORK: LIFE THROUGH THE CROSS
For his followers Jesus is the exact opposite of Humpty Dumpty. Not only is his broken life put together again in the resurrection, but each celebration of the Christian community is a re-membering of Christ, a putting together of the Christ who was broken and smashed. But in this re-membering, we become his members, his body, the extension of his incarnation and passion into human history. It is in this social experience that salvation is found. For salvation involves a participation in a new history, becoming members of a new community. We are not redeemed in isolation but as part of a redeemed community, a community brought into being by God's strange work. When Christians meet together to break bread and share wine in his memory, they are taking part in an act which helps them to live. Through this act the distant figure from first-century Galilee and Jerusalem becomes a living presence and source of life.
The re-membering of Christ, the movement of his passion into human history, is one of the most striking, most baffling and yet most clear features of the human story. For when people contemplate this crucified figure, they do so not as a solitary and tragic martyr but as a source of strength and grace, and as a way of deepening solidarity in pain and struggle. To remember Christ in his dying is to become his members, his limbs and organs, to be his body crucified and risen. It is to reawaken his memory as a contemporary source of strength and illumination. Or so Christians claim.
So in contemplating the passion, we look back to the event of Christ's death, not only as a historical memory, but as a source of life, of freedom, of nourishment, of renewal. In that crushed and broken victim, we see our hope, our only hope, in a world which continues to crush and break the children of God.
GOOD FRIDAY: THE FEAST OF FOOLS
Christians commemorate Christ's death on that paradoxical day called Good, a paradox which has been reinforced twice in recent years by its coincidence with April Fools' Day. It is a coincidence with deep meaning. On Good Friday we celebrate the fact that 'God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross' (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). It is the feast of the divine folly. Indeed in the New Testament the cross is seen, and its proclamation is seen, as an act of folly. St Paul puts it like this:
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart ... Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified ... For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:18–25)
Paul goes on to say that God has chosen what is foolish in the world to confound the wise (1:27). And so if anyone claims to be wise in this age, that person must become a fool in order to become wise (3:18). The cross is described as moria, insanity (1 Corinthians l:18f.) and as 'God's foolishness' (1:25). We need to become fools in order to become wise because the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God (3:18).
It is essential to grasp the importance of this idea of folly in sharing the mystery of the cross and in following the way of the cross. One of the earliest crucifixes shows Jesus with the head of an ass, an image which no doubt was derived from Paul's portrayal of the cross as folly. But we could say that the entire life of Jesus was an act of folly. There is no sense in it by worldly conventional standards: his solidarity with outcasts, his extreme demands, his polemic against the rich and devout, all culminating in his death as a rebel and criminal. It is quite unreasonable. Christ is a fool, a symbol of contradiction, of the foolishness of God. And those who follow his way become sharers in his folly. They become 'fools for the sake of Christ' (1 Corinthians 4:10).
Sadly it is only in the Eastern Orthodox tradition (and particularly in the Russian tradition) that the status of the holy fool is recognised liturgically and that folly for Christ's sake is seen as an integral part of spirituality, consciously celebrated and revered. The first saint to be recognised as a fool was St Simeon Salos, a Palestinian monk who died at the end of the sixth century. He threw nuts at the candles during the liturgy and ate sausages publicly on Good Friday. St Andrew the Fool walked naked through the streets of Constantinople and behaved as a beggar. The fools reappeared in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Russia. The most famous of the fools of Russia, St Basil the Blessed who lived during the sixteenth century, made Tsar Ivan the Terrible eat raw meat, consorted with prostitutes, threw stones at the houses of respectable people and stole from dishonest traders. He too ate sausages on Good Friday and walked naked through the streets of Moscow. The fools were often nomads and pilgrims, always figures of the absurd. They appeared particularly during periods of complacency in Church and society. Essentially the holy fools kept alive the scandal of the naked, accursed saviour who was killed outside the camp.
In the west, the Cistercians maintained the tradition of folly for Christ's sake. William of St Thierry (1085–1148), in his book The Mirror of Faith, says that Christ's wisdom is mad and that Christians are called to 'holy madness' (sancta ... amoris insania). Francis of Assisi was called to be a 'new fool' in the world, while Irish tradition is filled with accounts of wild and strange men who were possessed of deep perception and insight. Nor are the holy fools extinct. On Good Friday 1994 – also April Fools' Day – Father Carl Rabat, dressed as a clown, hammered on a Minuteman III missile in North Dakota, for which he was sentenced to five years in prison.
John Saward, whose work Perfect Fools is the authoritative study of folly for Christ's sake in east and west, argues that the holiness of the fools shows itself most in their solidarity with the outcasts of society. They are not content with 'social work' but identify completely with the wretched of the earth. They see Christ present in beggars, lepers and prisoners, and particularly in moral and mental outcasts, whose behaviour makes them intolerable in conventional society and among the comfortably devout and pious. But the fool belongs also to the tradition of prophecy, and points to the madness and evil of a world system organised apart from Christ, apart from love and mercy. So the fool stands in all ages as a scandal and an offence to respectable religion, stands as a constant and disturbing reminder of the Christ who was crucified outside the gate (Hebrews 13:12).
I believe that in some way we are all called to be fools for Christ's sake, and that the word of the cross will not make sense apart from this willingness to take the form of a fool. We come always before the cross as fools, as disciples of that messianic fool who entered Jerusalem on an ass and died in apparent failure as an act of supreme folly. Religion goes disastrously astray when it ceases to be a sign of contradiction and becomes the cement for social conformity. The foolishness of God is then replaced by capitulation to the values of the world. A Church which owes its origins to the cross cannot, if it is to be true to its nature, be the slave of worldly norms and stereotypes. Conformity to the world is the betrayal of its foundation in folly and contradiction, and of its necessary role as a community of contrast and of dissent.
So we are urged to be transformed, not conformed (Romans 12:2), an injunction which the Church seems constantly to be in danger of reading in reverse! The temptation to conformity and to 'rationality' recurs in every generation in different forms. The Church is urged to adjust, to 'come to terms with', the values and assumptions of the dominant culture instead of challenging and critiquing them in the name of the Jesus who came to bring a krisis to the world and its systems (John 12:31). The temptation to conformity must be resisted if the scandal of the Church under the cross is to be sustained.
THE SCANDAL OF INCARNATION AND PASSION
There are many theories about how the saving work of Christ takes effect but none of them is quite satisfactory. None approaches the heart of the mystery which is best embodied in symbol and sacrament. The symbol of the dying Christ is both tragic and comic, terrible and, by conventional standards, ridiculous. It represents failure and foolishness. Yet out of this foolishness comes a strength and a source of wisdom which is beyond secular reason to comprehend. I do not mean by this that Christianity is fundamentally irrational. Clearly in order to take the step of faith in Christ at all one must believe that it is, in some sense, a 'reasonable* step to take. But as one moves closer to that which draws us and transforms us, it is mystery, not rationality, which takes over. In the end, it is faith and love, not thought, which attracts us to this strange figure on the cross.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from WE PREACH CHRIST CRUCIFIED by Kenneth Leech. Copyright © 2005 Kenneth Leech. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface.................... vii
1. Foolishness to the Greeks.................... 1
2. Healed by His Wounds.................... 20
3. A Kingdom not of This World.................... 39
4. The Love of God Poured Out.................... 53
5. The Darkness where God Dwells.................... 69
6. Christ Our Passover.................... 84
References.................... 99