It is a wisdom that none of the masters of this age have ever known, or they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. - Corinthians 2:8
Imagine yourself in the Palestine 2100 years ago and you want to start a new religion. Seems strange, as there was no shortage of religions in the world around you. Obviously, there were the Jews with their belief in one God, whose name they did not dare to utter, so they called Him with an unpronounceable YHWH. They worshiped him in Jerusalem in their most sacred temple and the sacrificial blood of the lambs invoked his blessings. They waited for his Messenger, a Saviour, who would restore the slaved Jews to the old glory of a chosen nation. They called him the Messiah.
Then there were the Romans, the mighty conquerors of the ancient lands. Their many gods controlling storms, oceans, marriages, professions… had to be kept always happy. Your luck was linked to their happiness, so to be pleased, they too required sacrifices and precious gifts. Further north over the Mediterranean Sea were the Greeks with their own pantheon of Gods residing on the Mount Olympus…. Then there were Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Syrians….
YHWH, Jupiter, Zeus all of them competed for the hearts and minds of their followers, who burnt for them animals and incense, offered gold in return for Gods’ favours and averting bad luck. All that the believers wanted was control and predictability. The Gods were to be feared, every time they appeared on the scene, it was not good news to the people. Thus most religions worked out words and rituals to placate the angry Gods and, by doing so, hoped to keep their lives and history predictable.
Now, what God would you choose for your new religion? What would be his throne and what crown would beautify his head? What rituals would wheedle his favours and what miracles confirm his sovereign power over the Earth and the Heaven? Would you, in all your new religion marketing strategy and “out of box thinking”, ever come up with an idea of a God with a cross as a throne, head crowned with thorns, scourged and nailed naked to two wooden beams, stinking of blood, sweat and tears? And would you call this an avatar of LOVE??? A God abhorred by the Romans and a blasphemy to the Jews? I would not.
Well, exactly such a God a small group of Jews chose 2000 years ago as their God. His name was Jesus and they called him the Christ, the Anointed One. Could they be more absurd in claiming that in Him, the Crucified lied the God’s secret, unknown since the beginning of time and revealed to them: “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”(1 Corinthians 1:20-25).
No wonder that around the end of the second century someone has scratched on a Roman wall a graffito of a man worshiping a donkey-head figure on the cross. Was it a mockery of a crazy sect worshiping a symbol of foolishness? Possibly. Whatever it was, today it is the first known representation of the crucifixion. Not an encouraging start in a new religion indeed.
In fact the image of a bleeding on the cross God was just too much for the early Church theologians. They had to struggle hard in trying to reconcile the nature of an Omnipotent God with the helpless figure hanging on the cross. Was this God Jesus Christ just divine? Was He fully divine and a little bit human? Or maybe he was equally and perfectly both human and divine? The raging horror of the crucifixions and Roman persecutions of the early Christians - until the Emperor Constantine proscribed it in 314 A.D., left a lasting imprint on the Christian memory so that, cross representations remained a rarity for the first six centuries. Then the cross image emerged as another affirmation of Christ’s humanity in the continuing struggle with those who saw only his divinity. It competed with Christ hovering on the cross, often wearing a long robe, eyes open and head erect, unbloodied by nails, his feet resting firmly on the platform. This triumphant Christ must have indicated the difficulty of expressing the death of the Son of God. Between the eighth and the tenth century the doctrine of the substantial unity of Christ’s full human and full divine natures became sufficiently assimilated and established. From now on His death can coexist with His victory. Gradually a loin cloth replaces the robe, his eyes close, head drops to one side, blood flows from the wounds, his weight hangs from the arms, legs twist and feet are nailed to the wood. This naked man nailed to a cross becomes a symbol of humanity on the rack and, according to C.G. Jung, perhaps the deepest archetypal symbol in the Western psyche.
Today, twenty centuries after His death, Christianity still claims to have the privilege to name the Divine secret. That does not automatically make Christians chosen nation and better people. As history has shown our patterns of violence and hatred pretty well match and in time surpass those of non-Christians. Neither does this privilege, though many would have wished for it, makes Christianity the only way through which God revealed Himself to the humanity. Nevertheless it is still amazing that this “failed” God made it after all. This we Christians call the folly, the scandal or the mystery of the Cross, or as Ravi Ravindra puts it in Indian vocabulary, the “Yoga of the Cross”. Let us try and unveil a bit of this mystery.
A Franciscan monk Fr. Richard Rohr writes: “The doctrine of the cross is the great interpretative key that makes many things clear, at least for Christians, but perhaps also for history. It's no accident that we have made the cross the Christian logo, because in the revelation of the cross, many great truths become obvious and even over¬whelming, yet not so obvious beforehand.”* What are these great truths that Fr. Rohr speaks about?
Human history from its biblical archetypes of Cain and Abel is in its major part a continuing succession of violence and bloodshed. It has always been determined by the masters of the age telling us whom to fear and whom to crucify. Millions of soldiers and innocent victims have given their lives believing in their lies. Recently, a modern interpretation of this human addiction to violence was suggested by Rene Girard, a contemporary French anthropological philosopher. His scapegoat theory describes how the scapegoat sacrifice became the foundation of the human culture, and how religion emerged as a necessity in human evolution to control the violence that comes from rivalry. “We usually dealt with human anxiety and evil by sacrificial systems, and that has largely continued to this day. Something has to be sacrificed. Blood has to be shed. Somebody has to be killed. Someone has to be blamed, accused, attacked, tortured or imprisoned—or there has to be capital punishment—because we just don't know how to deal with evil without sacrificial systems. It always creates religions of exclusion and violence, because we think it is our job to destroy the evil element.”* This is the tit-for–tat, eye-for-eye, a hard-to-die paradigm which Gandhi used to say would make the whole world blind. To deal with our human fear and violence and run away from our “shadow” we learned to project the evil outside - to our neighbor and God himself. “We end up making God very small and draw the Godhead into our own ego-driven need for retribu¬tion, judicial resolution and punishment. Yet that's exactly what Jesus came to undo!”* This was the sin of the world to be taken away, the seeing us as separated from God by exposing it as different from what we imagined. It led Him on the Way of the Cross and since then Christianity became “the only religion in the world that worships the scapegoat”*.
Most Christians today would agree that the death of Jesus was a heroic sacrificial payment of a cosmic debt to His Father. What this opinion leaves unsaid is that it unwillingly makes God the Father into a blood thirsty Chief Sacrificer. The contemplative Christian tradition has always insisted that this exactly is NOT, not the reason of Jesus’ incarnation and death on the cross. A Benedictine monk Fr. John Main, who revived the long forgotten Christian Meditation tradition, after learning to meditate from a Hindu Swami Satyananda, said: “When we look at the cross we should not think 'we are saved by the suffering of Christ' but 'we are saved by the love we see here’”. The meaning of the Cross is much deeper and much more mysterious then just an easy to grab for a violent mind atonement theory. “Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity; Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God. This grounds Christianity in love and freedom from the very beginning; it creates a very coherent and utterly attractive religion, which draws people toward lives of inner depth, prayer, reconciliation, healing…Nothing "changed" on Calvary, but everything was revealed so we could change!... Those who "gaze upon" the crucified long enough— with contemplative eyes—are always healed at deep levels of pain, unforgiveness, aggression and victimhood. It demands no theological education at all, just an "inner exchange" by receiving the image within and offering one's soul back in safe return. If all these human crucifixions are leading to some possible resurrection, and are not dead-end tragedies, this changes everything. If God is somehow participating in human suffering, instead of just passively tolerating it and observing it, that also changes everything—at least for those who are willing to "gaze" contemplatively.”*
After Jesus the game for the world crucifiers was over. The new game began whose name was God’s Nonviolence and Forgiveness. The new image of God we have is not a Platonic idea or a Form, nor a mythical creation of our imagination, but boundless Love that empties himself in order to first unite us within and then unite us with Himself in love. This is only possible if God enters fully into the human condition - with its limitations, its sinful aspects and its suffering. All this is evident in the Cross. The necessary thing is for us to understand and see it correctly – and this knowledge transforms us moment by moment.
As Ravi Ravindra puts it from the perspective of Indian mysticism: “As far as Jesus is concerned, the right preparation consists in dying to self-will and in denying the self, so that the person can obey the will of God. His yoga consists of this and the cross is the supreme symbol…spiritual significance of the cross cannot be exaggerated…. Every moment, whenever we are present to it, we are at a crossing; at this point of crossing we choose whether to remain in the horizontal plane of the world or to be yoked to the way of Christ and follow the vertical axis of being.”
Finally we arrived at the last Station of the Cross - The Resurrection. We cannot – says Fr. Laurence Freeman, the Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation - separate the Cross from the Resurrection. The way Jesus died (forgiving his enemies, plunging to the depth of human despair but not losing faith with God) and the deepest identity He had in his human nature with the Father God had to lead to His resurrection from the dead. Since then He lives in us, universalised through the gift of His Spirit, the Spirit of God. This understanding makes sense within the framework of the Christian idea of God as Trinity- not just Supreme Being but Being as Communion - the Love of the three Persons in One God. Jesus is the second Person and He was this Word that became flesh, a unique individual in the human history, not the Father or the Spirit. But where One is the other Two are also. So union with Jesus - through faith, love and hope - is union with all Three, with God. The Christian sees Jesus as the incarnation of the universal Word that exists from the beginning. This incarnation however does not negate, replace or in any way diminish other religious traditions through which God has revealed Himself to humanity.
- Andrzej Ziolkowski
Bibliography:
• * From “Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality”, copyright 2008 by Richard Rohr. Reprinted with permission of St. Anthony Messenger Press, 28 W. Liberty St., Cincinnati, OH 45202.
• Ravi Ravindra “The Gospel of John in the Light of the Indian Mysticism”
• Works of John Main and Laurence Freeman
About the author: Andrzej is a Catholic, a Polish living in Singapore. He has great interest in exploring all religions as paths to the One Universal Truth. He is a member of the World Community for Christian Meditation (www.wccm.org).
Imagine yourself in the Palestine 2100 years ago and you want to start a new religion. Seems strange, as there was no shortage of religions in the world around you. Obviously, there were the Jews with their belief in one God, whose name they did not dare to utter, so they called Him with an unpronounceable YHWH. They worshiped him in Jerusalem in their most sacred temple and the sacrificial blood of the lambs invoked his blessings. They waited for his Messenger, a Saviour, who would restore the slaved Jews to the old glory of a chosen nation. They called him the Messiah.
Then there were the Romans, the mighty conquerors of the ancient lands. Their many gods controlling storms, oceans, marriages, professions… had to be kept always happy. Your luck was linked to their happiness, so to be pleased, they too required sacrifices and precious gifts. Further north over the Mediterranean Sea were the Greeks with their own pantheon of Gods residing on the Mount Olympus…. Then there were Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Syrians….
YHWH, Jupiter, Zeus all of them competed for the hearts and minds of their followers, who burnt for them animals and incense, offered gold in return for Gods’ favours and averting bad luck. All that the believers wanted was control and predictability. The Gods were to be feared, every time they appeared on the scene, it was not good news to the people. Thus most religions worked out words and rituals to placate the angry Gods and, by doing so, hoped to keep their lives and history predictable.
Now, what God would you choose for your new religion? What would be his throne and what crown would beautify his head? What rituals would wheedle his favours and what miracles confirm his sovereign power over the Earth and the Heaven? Would you, in all your new religion marketing strategy and “out of box thinking”, ever come up with an idea of a God with a cross as a throne, head crowned with thorns, scourged and nailed naked to two wooden beams, stinking of blood, sweat and tears? And would you call this an avatar of LOVE??? A God abhorred by the Romans and a blasphemy to the Jews? I would not.
Well, exactly such a God a small group of Jews chose 2000 years ago as their God. His name was Jesus and they called him the Christ, the Anointed One. Could they be more absurd in claiming that in Him, the Crucified lied the God’s secret, unknown since the beginning of time and revealed to them: “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”(1 Corinthians 1:20-25).
No wonder that around the end of the second century someone has scratched on a Roman wall a graffito of a man worshiping a donkey-head figure on the cross. Was it a mockery of a crazy sect worshiping a symbol of foolishness? Possibly. Whatever it was, today it is the first known representation of the crucifixion. Not an encouraging start in a new religion indeed.
In fact the image of a bleeding on the cross God was just too much for the early Church theologians. They had to struggle hard in trying to reconcile the nature of an Omnipotent God with the helpless figure hanging on the cross. Was this God Jesus Christ just divine? Was He fully divine and a little bit human? Or maybe he was equally and perfectly both human and divine? The raging horror of the crucifixions and Roman persecutions of the early Christians - until the Emperor Constantine proscribed it in 314 A.D., left a lasting imprint on the Christian memory so that, cross representations remained a rarity for the first six centuries. Then the cross image emerged as another affirmation of Christ’s humanity in the continuing struggle with those who saw only his divinity. It competed with Christ hovering on the cross, often wearing a long robe, eyes open and head erect, unbloodied by nails, his feet resting firmly on the platform. This triumphant Christ must have indicated the difficulty of expressing the death of the Son of God. Between the eighth and the tenth century the doctrine of the substantial unity of Christ’s full human and full divine natures became sufficiently assimilated and established. From now on His death can coexist with His victory. Gradually a loin cloth replaces the robe, his eyes close, head drops to one side, blood flows from the wounds, his weight hangs from the arms, legs twist and feet are nailed to the wood. This naked man nailed to a cross becomes a symbol of humanity on the rack and, according to C.G. Jung, perhaps the deepest archetypal symbol in the Western psyche.
Today, twenty centuries after His death, Christianity still claims to have the privilege to name the Divine secret. That does not automatically make Christians chosen nation and better people. As history has shown our patterns of violence and hatred pretty well match and in time surpass those of non-Christians. Neither does this privilege, though many would have wished for it, makes Christianity the only way through which God revealed Himself to the humanity. Nevertheless it is still amazing that this “failed” God made it after all. This we Christians call the folly, the scandal or the mystery of the Cross, or as Ravi Ravindra puts it in Indian vocabulary, the “Yoga of the Cross”. Let us try and unveil a bit of this mystery.
A Franciscan monk Fr. Richard Rohr writes: “The doctrine of the cross is the great interpretative key that makes many things clear, at least for Christians, but perhaps also for history. It's no accident that we have made the cross the Christian logo, because in the revelation of the cross, many great truths become obvious and even over¬whelming, yet not so obvious beforehand.”* What are these great truths that Fr. Rohr speaks about?
Human history from its biblical archetypes of Cain and Abel is in its major part a continuing succession of violence and bloodshed. It has always been determined by the masters of the age telling us whom to fear and whom to crucify. Millions of soldiers and innocent victims have given their lives believing in their lies. Recently, a modern interpretation of this human addiction to violence was suggested by Rene Girard, a contemporary French anthropological philosopher. His scapegoat theory describes how the scapegoat sacrifice became the foundation of the human culture, and how religion emerged as a necessity in human evolution to control the violence that comes from rivalry. “We usually dealt with human anxiety and evil by sacrificial systems, and that has largely continued to this day. Something has to be sacrificed. Blood has to be shed. Somebody has to be killed. Someone has to be blamed, accused, attacked, tortured or imprisoned—or there has to be capital punishment—because we just don't know how to deal with evil without sacrificial systems. It always creates religions of exclusion and violence, because we think it is our job to destroy the evil element.”* This is the tit-for–tat, eye-for-eye, a hard-to-die paradigm which Gandhi used to say would make the whole world blind. To deal with our human fear and violence and run away from our “shadow” we learned to project the evil outside - to our neighbor and God himself. “We end up making God very small and draw the Godhead into our own ego-driven need for retribu¬tion, judicial resolution and punishment. Yet that's exactly what Jesus came to undo!”* This was the sin of the world to be taken away, the seeing us as separated from God by exposing it as different from what we imagined. It led Him on the Way of the Cross and since then Christianity became “the only religion in the world that worships the scapegoat”*.
Most Christians today would agree that the death of Jesus was a heroic sacrificial payment of a cosmic debt to His Father. What this opinion leaves unsaid is that it unwillingly makes God the Father into a blood thirsty Chief Sacrificer. The contemplative Christian tradition has always insisted that this exactly is NOT, not the reason of Jesus’ incarnation and death on the cross. A Benedictine monk Fr. John Main, who revived the long forgotten Christian Meditation tradition, after learning to meditate from a Hindu Swami Satyananda, said: “When we look at the cross we should not think 'we are saved by the suffering of Christ' but 'we are saved by the love we see here’”. The meaning of the Cross is much deeper and much more mysterious then just an easy to grab for a violent mind atonement theory. “Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity; Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God. This grounds Christianity in love and freedom from the very beginning; it creates a very coherent and utterly attractive religion, which draws people toward lives of inner depth, prayer, reconciliation, healing…Nothing "changed" on Calvary, but everything was revealed so we could change!... Those who "gaze upon" the crucified long enough— with contemplative eyes—are always healed at deep levels of pain, unforgiveness, aggression and victimhood. It demands no theological education at all, just an "inner exchange" by receiving the image within and offering one's soul back in safe return. If all these human crucifixions are leading to some possible resurrection, and are not dead-end tragedies, this changes everything. If God is somehow participating in human suffering, instead of just passively tolerating it and observing it, that also changes everything—at least for those who are willing to "gaze" contemplatively.”*
After Jesus the game for the world crucifiers was over. The new game began whose name was God’s Nonviolence and Forgiveness. The new image of God we have is not a Platonic idea or a Form, nor a mythical creation of our imagination, but boundless Love that empties himself in order to first unite us within and then unite us with Himself in love. This is only possible if God enters fully into the human condition - with its limitations, its sinful aspects and its suffering. All this is evident in the Cross. The necessary thing is for us to understand and see it correctly – and this knowledge transforms us moment by moment.
As Ravi Ravindra puts it from the perspective of Indian mysticism: “As far as Jesus is concerned, the right preparation consists in dying to self-will and in denying the self, so that the person can obey the will of God. His yoga consists of this and the cross is the supreme symbol…spiritual significance of the cross cannot be exaggerated…. Every moment, whenever we are present to it, we are at a crossing; at this point of crossing we choose whether to remain in the horizontal plane of the world or to be yoked to the way of Christ and follow the vertical axis of being.”
Finally we arrived at the last Station of the Cross - The Resurrection. We cannot – says Fr. Laurence Freeman, the Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation - separate the Cross from the Resurrection. The way Jesus died (forgiving his enemies, plunging to the depth of human despair but not losing faith with God) and the deepest identity He had in his human nature with the Father God had to lead to His resurrection from the dead. Since then He lives in us, universalised through the gift of His Spirit, the Spirit of God. This understanding makes sense within the framework of the Christian idea of God as Trinity- not just Supreme Being but Being as Communion - the Love of the three Persons in One God. Jesus is the second Person and He was this Word that became flesh, a unique individual in the human history, not the Father or the Spirit. But where One is the other Two are also. So union with Jesus - through faith, love and hope - is union with all Three, with God. The Christian sees Jesus as the incarnation of the universal Word that exists from the beginning. This incarnation however does not negate, replace or in any way diminish other religious traditions through which God has revealed Himself to humanity.
- Andrzej Ziolkowski
Bibliography:
• * From “Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality”, copyright 2008 by Richard Rohr. Reprinted with permission of St. Anthony Messenger Press, 28 W. Liberty St., Cincinnati, OH 45202.
• Ravi Ravindra “The Gospel of John in the Light of the Indian Mysticism”
• Works of John Main and Laurence Freeman
About the author: Andrzej is a Catholic, a Polish living in Singapore. He has great interest in exploring all religions as paths to the One Universal Truth. He is a member of the World Community for Christian Meditation (www.wccm.org).
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