Holy Week. What’s Up with This Cross?

“Misery loves company” does not work. It does not get the job of salvation done. Consolation is not salvation. Consolation, however, is not nothing. I want someone to be holding my hand as I die. But it will not save me. Christian proclamation (preaching, teaching) is filled these days with either a message that closes its eyes to the suffering and pumps steroids into pipe dreams of prosperity, a kind of warped Epicureanism, or, on the other hand, recognizes the suffering and gives comfort but no solution, that consolation I just mentioned, a kind of warped Stoicism.

The Prosperity Gospel is attractive to many but so crassly self-serving that many, I wish more,  see it’s vanity and leave it alone. The Consolation Gospel seems self-less enough and certainly honest in its recognition of suffering so it gets a lot of traction in the church today. “God is present in our suffering’ is the way it is often expressed.

But if Prosperity is Vain and Consolation is Empty, where does that leave us?

At the cross outside the walls of Jerusalem, where we have to suffer the fact that God does not show up to save anyone. God does not even show up to save God.

Jesus’ execution is animalistic in its cruelty and pathetic in its tragedy. This is how we treat one another and this is what becomes of us?

Yes, it is humanity on full display. Those of us here in this 21st Century with full knowledge of what happened in the 20th century of two World Wars, the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb should recognize the Cross all too well.

To be a “theologian of the cross,” something that Martin Luther named in his Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 with theological acumen and then added in some philosophical grandeur, is not to theologize about what could be happening in some divine mechanistic or organic fashion (like the most popular Christian atonement theology today called “substitutional atonement,” an extremely logical, but alas, inadequate theory invented by Anselm in the 12th century C.E.). No, a theologian of the cross looks at the cross and “says what a thing is” (again, see the Heidelberg Disputation). One does not look at this Golgotha execution and see some divine wisdom or, Lord help us, “plan,” displayed, hiding behind the appalling misery. One looks and sees a man dying for living for distributive justice and then, as a theologian of the cross and not only a distraught on-looker, declares, and not dispassionately, that this politically powerless but spiritually powerful victim of state political power violence is, well, God!

One, of course, cannot prove this. All one can do is declare it. It is the Promise given in Jesus name today that the Church declares: “You Have Enough, You Do Enough, You Are Enough, because of Jesus Christ,” which, using some other language, says the same thing as “I baptize You,” and “This is My Body and Blood, Given for You,” and “You Are Forgiven.” Saying that this executed Palestinian Jew is God can only be declared and believed. It cannot be proven.

This man is God. Do you believe this?

You are forgiven. Do you believe this?

You Have Enough, You Do Enough, You Are Enough. Do you believe this?

Do not make Jesus’ execution to be more than it is. But, too, don’t make it less than it is. It is the “power of God for salvation,” as Paul declared (Romans 1:16).

It’s Holy Week 2025. It’s Maundy Thursday. Friday’s coming, and so is Sunday!