Christ crucified

Christian Century, March 7, 2001 by S. Mark Heim

Why does Jesus' death matter?

WHY IS THE DEATH of Christ significant? Some of the church is sure it knows the answer, while much of the rest of the church is deeply uncomfortable with the question. The publicized comment by a feminist theologian at the "Re-imagining" conference a few years ago is only one example of the discomfort: "I don't think we need a theory of atonement at all. I don't think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff ..."

That statement sparked a lot of reflex outrage, which seemed to confirm that a very sore point had been touched--as if to say, "This is a painful topic, and we don't appreciate your bringing it up." Much of the positive response to the "re-imagining" statement bore the mark of relief and recognition: "So I'm not the only one who never got it or bought it."

The meaning of Christ's death is hardly a peripheral issue. No image calls Christianity to mind as a cross or crucifix does. Christian faith is incoherent if there is not something special about the death that image represents.

Protestants historically take their stand on the confession that they can be reconciled with God because of the sacrifice of Christ: "We preach Christ, and him crucified." Roman Catholics point to the same event as the sacramental center of Christian life, with the words from the Gospel of John, "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world." Eastern Orthodox position the significance of the death in relation to resurrection, proclaiming in the Easter liturgy that "Christ has risen from the dead, by death trampling upon death and bringing life to those in the tomb." The Gospels, the heart of Christian scripture, are in large measure passion narratives. The central Christian liturgical act, the celebration of the Lord's Supper, points insistently to the death. The peak of the Christian year, at Good Friday and Easter, revolves around it.

The pattern is seeded through the forms of every Christian tradition. The hymn "There Is a Green Hill Far Away" contains the familiar line: "He died that we might be forgiven, he died to make us good, that we might go at last to heaven, saved by his precious blood." The Book of Common Prayer prescribes statements before reception of each element in communion. The content if not the wording is familiar to most Christians. "The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for you ... Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your heart by faith, with thanksgiving. The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for you ... Drink this in remembrance that Christ's blood was shed for you, and be thankful."

Belief that Christ's death has fundamentally changed the world seems so integral to the grammar of faith that its absence amounts to a debilitating speech defect. A church that falls silent about the cross has a hole where the gospel ought to be.

But silence, or discreet mumbling, on this subject is far from unusual. This is nowhere so notable as in the celebration of the Lord's Supper. In many Protestant congregations this event has become a solemn ritual affirmation of the spiritual equality of the participants, their mutual commitment to one another, and their shared hope for a future society with a just distribution of resources. Even the Roman Catholic Eucharist, once steeped in sacrificial emphasis, can now be encountered in forms that seem primarily celebrations of community, with a moment of silence, as it were, for the untimely demise of our late brother.

In many instances these changes in ritual practice reflect important efforts to recover a liturgical fullness which a narrow focus on sacrifice had distorted. So, for instance, the landmark ecumenical document Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, developed by the World Council of Churches' Faith and Order Commission, treats the meaning of the Lord's Supper under five headings: thanksgiving, memorial of Christ's death and resurrection, invocation of the Spirit, communion of the faithful, and feast of the future fulfillment of God's reign. Each denomination can find elements in the list that have been absent or stunted in its own practice. But often such elements have been embraced not so much as a welcome broadening of a particular tradition as a welcome way of changing the subject.

Certainly Christian faith is as unimaginable without Jesus' life (his actions and teaching) as without his death. No clear notion could be formed of Jesus' death without a concrete life as the context and presupposition for it. From the early time that gospel became the primary Christian scriptural form, the seamless unity of the life and death was clear. Christians err when they give the impression that the only truly important thing about Jesus' life is its end.

At the same time, modern attempts to construct a view of Jesus that omits any emphasis on the death--focusing instead on a message or practice Jesus taught without reference to his own fate--are implausible as history and often lack distinctive Christian character. John Dominic Crossan's strained reconstruction of the historical Jesus is a case in point, and a highly popular one. It goes to the extreme of insisting the disciples knew virtually nothing of the facts of Jesus' death and stitched together the better part of the Gospels in an inspired burst of scriptural imagination. In other words, the cross is not a crucial event whose meaning in any way constitutes Christian faith. The Christian faith, says Crossan, is not Easter faith. Not based on a resurrection afterwards, it has no need of a cross beforehand. Meaning comes entirely from other parts of Jesus' life: his healings, his social egalitarianism, his disdain for spiritual middlemen. Early Christians drew on this vision to "invent" the story of the cross in the Gospels as one metaphor, as it were, for the message. If that image doesn't work for you, or competes with the real message, drop it. Nothing essential is lost.