Cursed

Cursed—March 14, 2018

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’— in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith."  [Gal. 3:13-14]

The stakes are so much higher than we thought.

When we hear the word “curse” these days, I suspect we tend to assume that means “potty talk,” profanity, or words that might get bleeped on television or radio.  “Don’t curse,” stern parents warn their children when out in public, as well as the ever-popular sentence preachers get to overhear: “Don’t curse in church—especially not in earshot of the pastor!” We might picture childhood infractions saying a taboo word and being punished with soap in our mouths (I can’t help but picture that scene from A Christmas Story where Ralphie blurts out, “Oh, fudge!” and then the adult version of himself narrates, “But it wasn’t, ‘fudge’,” followed immediately by a scene of child Ralphie with a bar of soap in his mouth.)  In my own family storytelling, my grandfather’s rule of thumb about words of profanity basically boiled down to saying, “If you can’t find some other way to get your point across without having to use profanities, it’s a sign you are not intelligent enough to find another way to say it.”  That sufficed for my childhood instruction, even if it seems quaint in this era of gross public profanity and vulgarities spewed from bully pulpits.  But that was never really what “cursing” was all about.  God is much less upset by potty talk than the prim-and-proper folks let on, even if my grandfather was right that profanities reveal a lack of refinement.

Beyond the talk of profanities, we don’t think much of cursing at all. Much like our culture today tends to see “blessing” as just a sort of relic of civil religion where we say nice, vaguely inspirational words because it’s nice to say them, we tend to treat talk of “cursing” as empty nonsense—the sort of thing that people who believe in astrology and email forwards subscribe to, but nothing of real substance.  We tend to put “curse” talk in the category of “magic,” and we have all learned that magic is nonsense, so we figure that any talk of being “cursed” is hokum as well.

But the stakes, as I say, are much higher than we thought. Cursing is about invoking the power of death, and calling upon whatever other powers one believes can actually wield the power of death.  At least from a biblical standpoint, to be “cursed” is to have the powers of evil unleashed upon you, and the powers of life removed from you. To be cursed is to be written off and cast aside by God.  To be cursed is to be at odds with the power of life itself. It is no laughing matter.

That’s why it’s a big deal that in Israel’s Law, in the Torah itself, there was a declaration that anyone hung on a tree was “accursed.”  That kind of action is about as cruel and dehumanizing as possible—not just to kill someone by hanging them, but to leave the body strung up as a warning to others. In fact, in the original commandment from Deuteronomy, the rule was that if someone convicted of a capital crime was hung on a tree, they were still supposed to be buried by sundown because it was considered defiling to the land itself to leave dead bodies of accursed criminals hanging.   Being hung on a tree was already so horrible a fate that in the eyes of the Law you were already accursed by God for whatever you had done that led you to getting strung up in the first place.

So now that we are clear that all this fuss about being “cursed”—both in the Old Testament and here in the New from Paul’s letter to the Galatians—is not merely about saying four-letter words, but about invoking shame, scorn, and death on those seen as the most vile and despicable, now maybe we can get into the right frame of mind with Paul’s point.  Paul notes here that, simply as a matter of fact, being crucified is basically being hung on a tree, and that by God’s own law, Jesus is accursed by the same commandment from Deuteronomy that said, “Cursed is anyone hung on a tree.”

That should sound scandalous to our ears—even more than the idea of a crucified Messiah doesn’t make sense, the idea of God-in-the-flesh being accursed by God is outrageous.  It sounds like a contradiction, and a violation of God’s holiness. And yet, that’s precisely what Paul says about Christ at the cross—that Jesus absorbs the scandal, the shame, and the accursedness into himself, precisely because he is God’s way of redeeming us.

In the cross, God takes the poison into God’s own life.  Not just death, but a particularly godforsaken kind of death.  Paul and the rest of the New Testament think it is significant that Jesus doesn’t die at the ripe old age of ninety-six, surrounded by children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, content with his feet propped up on a beach chair in the sun and surf, having just won the “Man of the Year” award from his local civic organization and honored by all his neighbors and friends.  Jesus dies too young, no progeny and inheritance, no grieving spouse, condemned by the political leaders of the day who were convinced that HE was the real danger, cast out by the religious leaders of the day who called him a troublemaking blasphemer that attacked their most cherished religious symbols, and on top of everything cursed.  And yet amazingly, Paul says, that’s where you find God. 

We will want to be careful then, ourselves, just whom we decide to label as “accursed,” and whom we want to label as “enemies of God” or “damned, and we had better be especially careful before we draw any hard lines between the “good” and “blessed” people (like us, we assume), and the “bad” and “accursed” people, folks who, we like to assume, either hate God or are hated by God, or both. If we start drawing lines and putting up barriers to keep the “cursed” from getting too close, we will have to party company with Jesus himself—the One who takes the Curse, all of it, into himself.

See? The stakes are a lot higher than four-letter words and bars of soap.

Lord Jesus, you who bore curse for us—our words fail and our minds fall short when we try to understand all you have done for us.  Suffice it today, simply to say thank you.  Thank you for being the accursed one.  Thank you for absorbing the scorn and shame.