The Impossible Curse

The Impossible Curse—March 12, 2019

“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.” [Galatians 3:13-14]

Two millennia ago, outside the city gates in a backwater province of the empire of the day, something impossible happened.

God—the Source of blessing, the One rightly addressed as, “Blessed are you, O Lord, our God,” the One, as the old doxology puts it, “from whom all blessings flow”—that God, becomes cursed. 

If that doesn’t sound impossible enough, let me try it this way: on a Roman execution stake in occupied Palestine, the Holy One absorbed all the unholiness, impurity, and profanity the world had to dole out.  All of it.  Down to the last drop.

The Blessed One becomes accursed.  The Holy One takes all of our unholiness.  That, and nothing less, is what the cross of Jesus is all about.

Maybe in our day, in a culture that doesn’t find talk of “blessing” and “curse” very fashionable, and in which “holiness” and “unholiness” perhaps seem foreign and strange to many ears, this doesn’t seem like an important point.  But let’s allow this tea to steep just a bit: the apostle Paul has a plan to blow our minds open with these couple of sentences from his letter to the Galatians.

See, sometimes, you’ll hear folks—religious-sounding folks, mind you—say things like, “God is holy, and therefore, God cannot tolerate being in the presence of anything sinful, unclean, or unholy.”  And in a sense, I get it.  If I have just cleaned the kitchen and bleached the countertops, I don’t want you bringing in a dead raccoon carcass and laying it out where I was about to start preparing the chicken cordon bleu.  The roadkill is unclean, unsanitary, and unsafe to leave where food will be prepared, and we would all rightly protest using the same counter for a raccoon autopsy and meal preparation at the same time.  

So, sure, take that sense of disgust you have brewing inside your gut right now over my unpleasant mental picture and multiply it by infinity, and we can find ourselves extrapolating that God, who is infinitely holy, must be infinitely disgusted at all the ways we wallow in cruelty and self-centeredness, the ways we let our lives get infected with complacent tolerance of hatred, the smiles on the faces of lynch-mobs who strung up black bodies convinced they were doing good, the terrible ruthless efficiency of gas chambers and concentration camps, the many ways we love things and use people, and the ways we abuse and pollute our relationships with each other and with creation.  If we think in those terms, sure, it makes sense to say that a God who is holy cannot abide what is un-holy, any more than you would let someone plop down some roadkill on your kitchen counter before supper time.

And yet—and this is the really, beautifully, impossible thing about it—here’s the apostle Paul saying that in Christ Jesus, we have nothing less than God-with-us becoming the godforsaken, the Holy One absorbing all the unholiness there is, the Blessed One becoming an object of curse for us.  Jesus doesn’t just let the dead raccoon up on the counter—he become the roadkill, so to speak.  Jesus, Paul says, takes on all the revulsion, the shame, the disgust there is to be found, into himself at the cross.

Mind you, this is the same as saying that a holy God chooses to become unholy for our sake—in particular, for the purpose of welcoming in outsiders (Gentiles) who had been labeled “unholy” by their very birth and identity as Gentiles, so that all can belong.  So whatever God’s “holiness” means, it can’t be like an allergy, a weakness, or a limitation on God’s part, like someone who can’t be in a room with peanut products.  God chooses to absorb the ugliness and scandal of being lynched.  That can’t be reduced to a neat and tidy bit of accounting, the way we sometimes talk about the cross as a divine bank transaction.  If you give me a million dollars to pay my debt, you take a loss, but you are still the respectable hero of the story.  If you sacrifice your life for me in battle, you still get to be remembered in glory and honor.  But God does something scandalous at the cross.  God absorbs all the revulsive, disgusting stuff there is to be doled out, and bears our revulsion when we look at Christ the Crucified One. 

And maybe that is the real sacrifice that happens at the cross—the real burden that God chooses to bear. God chooses NOT to look heroic—not a bit.  God chooses to save us in such a way that while Christ is doing the saving, everyone around him was damn sure he was godforsaken.  The empire convicted him of being a troublemaking seditious enemy of the state.  The Respectable Religious crowd was certain he was a blasphemous rule-breaker tainted by eating at the tables of sinners.  And the folks standing by were all sure that he couldn’t be the Messiah they were waiting for, because in their books, messiahs didn’t die ugly deaths—they killed their enemies as the marched on to victory.

The cross takes all of our expectations of where God is supposed to be and how God is supposed to behave and turns them all upside down.  And when all of our old notions of holiness-as-allergy have fallen out like loose change, what is left is the Gospel: the God who is not afraid to be infected with all of our shame, curse, and uncleanness, making our cries of “Crucify him!” into the end of all that accursed stuff once and for all.

It all sounds a bit impossible.  It should.  Any way of talking about the cross that sounds perfectly reasonable with neat-and-tidy diagrams is surely a human invention.

Today, let it just sink in that at the cross, the Blessed One from whom all blessings flow absorbed all the curse we could throw, and held it there, strung up on a tree so that nobody would have to get strung up again.

Lord Jesus, you who became a curse for us, give us the grace simply to take it in what you have done for us, beyond our ability to diagram, contain, or explain it.