Jesus the Human Shield

Jesus the Human Shield—March 21, 2018

“[Christ] has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.” [Ephesians 2:15-16]

Why the cross?

It’s a question that keeps getting tossed around by Christians, and there are all sorts of ways of answering it:  why did Jesus go to the cross?  What was accomplished by it?  What difference did it make?  Why did Jesus—and since Christians confess that Jesus is none other than God-with-us, we also have to ask, why did God—submit to a shameful public execution at the hands of a cruel and decadent empire in a backwater province?

And usually one of the first answers, if not the first answer, that gets offered up is to say, “For our sins.”  Okay, fair enough.  Poke at that answer a little more to find out what people mean by it, and usually the answer comes, “Well, our sins alienate us from God, and so Jesus’ death on the cross makes things right between us on the one hand and God on the other.”  And so we talk about Jesus’ death being like the sacrifices of the Old Testament, or Jesus’ death being like a ransom or the payment of our debt to God.  And there are certainly good, solid reasons for saying all of those things.

But there’s more to it, too.  Paul says that the cross wasn’t just the way God dealt with the estrangement between us and God; it is also the way God absorbs the hate between us humans.  Jesus’ death on the cross is the starting point for a new kind of humanity, where the old lines that divided us are erased away, and the animosity that kept us killing each other and hating each other is all absorbed into Jesus’ body.

To hear today’s verses from Ephesians, it’s almost like Jesus says to all of humanity (myself included), “You need someone to hate?  You need someone to pick on?  You need someone to pour out all your vilest, angriest, most vitriolic and venomous words and thoughts? Fine.  I will take it.  I will drink that cup of your poison myself.  If you have to throw punches, instead of taking aim at your brother next to you, I will take the hit.  And when you are done and all tired out from flailing your arms around, maybe you can see that the person next to you is my beloved, too, and my gift to you, as well.”

In the first century, the book we call Ephesians was especially concerned with the hatred and animosity that divided Jews and Gentiles (everybody else who wasn’t Jewish), and the tension for the early Christians between those who had grown up in Judaism keeping the Law of Moses, and those who had grown up worshiping any of the myriad Greek and Roman gods.  “How dare these dirty pagan upstarts claim a place at the table when their lives are so obviously stained by the sinful world they grew up in?” said one party.  And that was met with an equally angry retort of, “How dare these narrow-minded ritualistic hypocrites try and keep us out when they can’t even keep the law themselves that they want us to follow?”  Well, you can see how there would be friction between two groups like that, each one sure that the other is the problem.  It’s so easy to scapegoat in life—to find someone else to blame your troubles on, someone else to cast as the villain, so that you can cast yourself as the poor, put-upon, noble and righteous victim. 

My goodness, you don't have to go more than five minutes on Facebook or Twitter or anywhere else on social media before someone you have "friended" or "followed" has lobbed some angry, often pre-packaged, talking-point-style bit of invective aimed at "those people" who are supposedly "the real problem in society."  Technology has done nothing so efficiently in this internet age of ours as making it easier to hate people without really knowing them and to convince ourselves we are right without really knowing what we are talking about.  

Paul says that Jesus has come to defuse both sides of that.  Jesus absorbs the hate.  Jesus forces us to direct our fire at him, and then to see that this is precisely what we have done.  As Frederick Buechner so aptly puts it, "The worst sentence that Love can pass is that we behold the suffering that Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal.  The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one." 

Jesus takes the hit—he places himself as the divine-human shield that protects the ones I was shooting at by taking the bullet himself.  And then he shows me exactly what my hate has done—sent him to a cross.  Jon Foreman sings in a haunting solo song called “Revenge,” these words: “Love had descended and stolen our pain away… We consumed Heaven’s Son, I drew first blood, I drew first blood; my hate was undone, I drew first blood, I drew first blood.”  The idea is revolutionary; it is radical; it is gospel. 

God has dealt with our estrangement—not only our estrangement from God because of our sin, but our estrangement from each other, which is itself a sin—at the cross.  Like sucking the venom out of a snake-bite into one's own mouth, Jesus has consumed into himself all the worst, most awful things we could do, so that we would no longer kill and hate each other.  The trouble is, so often we refuse to believe that the poison is gone and we keep attacking each other for fear we will be attacked.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Paul tells us the cross is God’s way of breaking that cycle that keeps us hating and killing each other.

If God is so willing to step in to break up the fights between us, even if it means our punches land on Jesus rather than our intended targets (each other), why do we have such a hard time laying down our arms?  Why do we insist on fueling our hate of each other, when God was willing to be swallowed up in a death between thieves in order to quench our hate and steal away our pain?

Today, let us dare to believe the cycle is broken.  Today, let us give up our arms and lay down our weapons.  Today, let us live as if it were true that Jesus has absorbed our hostility, that our hate really is undone.

Lord Jesus, allow us to love the way you love, without fear, without grudges, without poison in our veins.  Take the hatred from us, and make us new.