Reading the Sign Rightly--May 11, 2022

Reading the Sign Rightly--May 11, 2022

"For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart'." [1 Corinthians 1:18-19]

We used to have a running joke when I was in high school and college about those traffic signs you would see in residential neighborhoods that read, "SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY."  We would pretend that the sign was instructing us to look for children floating through the air as they leapt across the street at half-speed, like they were moving in slow-motion in one of those time-lapse videos.  (Look, I never said it was a particularly funny joke. I dealt in dad jokes decades before I was a dad.)

Now, someone being overly literal could read the sign that way--you could, I suppose, read the sign to be a warning that the children are the ones moving slowly as they play. But of course, the actual meaning is just the opposite:  YOU, the driver reading the sign, are supposed to go slowly. And why?  Because there are children in the neighborhood, and they, being children, are likely to be running around pretty fast as they play and also unlikely to be paying attention to cars coming along as they do.  The fact of the sign's wording is the identical no matter what, and it could technically be read either way, but only one of those two ways might actually lead to saving someone's life.  And in a way, that's how you know it's the correct reading, the correct interpretation or "take" on the meaning of the sign's message.

The cross of Jesus is much the same, to hear Paul tell it.  The fact of Jesus' crucifixion was never in dispute.  The powers of the day (the Roman Empire, aligned with the Respectable Religious Leaders around Jerusalem) brutalized, tortured, humiliated, and then executed Jesus on an imperial death-stake, much as they did to countless others that the Empire wanted to make an example of.  That much was certain.  The question Paul raised, however, was, "How are we supposed to interpret this event?" In other words, "How are we supposed to 'read' the cross?"

The conventional wisdom--and the official position of the Empire, by the way--was that the meaning of the cross was simple and final:  the Empire won, and Jesus lost.  The crucifiers are the winners, said Rome, because they took this person deemed a potential threat and they annihilated him.  The Empire believed--and shouted loudly so that everyone else would believe as well--that the cross of Jesus was proof of its own greatness and power, because they had done their worst to this homeless itinerant rabbi and snuffed out his claims of another kingdom, greater than Rome's. But Paul begged to differ.  He insisted that the fact of the cross has to be read differently--and that Rome was getting the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus completely wrong.

Paul insists that the cross of Jesus doesn't reveal Jesus' defeat at all--just the opposite.  It reveals the surprising victory of Jesus, who exhausts the worst possible thing that the powers of the day could do to him, and broke that power open between Friday's cross and Sunday's empty borrowed grave.  The cross doesn't show the empire's strength, but rather its impotence--all the empire knows how to do is to kill and smash and destroy, like a toddler throwing a tantrum.  And at the very same time, the cross reveals God's quiet strength in the willingness to be made vulnerable, weak-looking, and defeated in the broken body of Jesus.  The cross reveals that God has a different kind of power than the one that Rome recognizes, but ultimately God's kind of power can exhaust and outlast all of Rome's efforts.  

That's just it:  Rome looked at the cross of Jesus and said, "We killed him.  We are the winners."  But Paul insists we look at the cross and see, "Jesus laid down his life for them, even when they had made him their enemies.  That's Jesus' victory--and it even redeems his killers."  Jesus' kind of victory in the cross will not let our evil, our violence, and our rottenness be the last word about us--rather, the last word over us will be Jesus' own prayer of mercy, "Forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing."

These are two completely different readings of the same exact set of facts.  The sign is the same, but the question of what it means can point in two completely different directions.  Either Rome is right, and Jesus is just one more victim of humanity's wicked need to dominate and destroy.  Or Jesus is right, and the cross turns out to be God's way of absorbing the worst we can do, exhausting the power of our evil, and exposing the emptiness of our impulse to build empires and dominate one another.  The cross is either proof that might makes right and you have to make an example of your enemies before they rise up to stop you, or the cross is the end of that kind of deathly logic and the victory of God's own self-giving, enemy-embracing love.  You could, I suppose, interpret the cross either way--but Paul is insistent that only the second one is correct, over against all of Rome's protests.

To folks stuck in the logic of empires (past and present), the cross is something to be embarrassed about if you are Jesus, and something to gloat about if you are the one holding the hammer.  To the followers of Jesus, however, the cross is the sign of the victory of the One who took the nails, because it breaks the power of those who use death to intimidate, and it reconciles even with the enemies of God.

We are going to head out into a world that "reads" the signs around us one way, and we are called to be people who interpret it differently.  The cross cannot become a symbol of our dominance over other people, or the logo for a new empire.  That's like reading the "SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY" sign and expecting kids galloping at half-speed across the street.  The truthful way to read the sign of the cross--and to rightly read the whole world in light of it--is to see it as God's act of love to endure our worst and triumph over it in mercy and faithfulness.

Now our calling is to see the world differently, through the true meaning of the cross, and to live differently in that world because of it.

Lord Jesus, bring our vision into focus through the lens of your cross.