There is No Deeper Magic at Work

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Jesus is Nailed to the Cross — Mark 15.24-25

When I was a student in seminary Princeton, I took a course on the Gospel of Mark. Our professor, Dr. Donald Juel made sure that by the end of the semester Markʼs was our favorite of the four Gospels. It even became my favorite book of the Bible.

Dr. Juel began the first class of the course with a simple question,

“What would you say about a book that spent one-sixth of its story narrating the death of the main character?”

A classmate of mine responded, “Iʼd say that it sounded like the author was a person who had not come to terms with the death of someone they loved.”

Dr. Juel followed with another question, “Isnʼt it ironic that even though Jesus was only dead for two days, not even two full days, his followers had such incredible difficulty coming to terms with that death? Jesus didn’t stay dead, but his followers never could quite settle that death.Why is that, do you think?”

Our class spent a long time with that question.

And so has the Church, if only implicitly.

Take the Church’s dogma, for instance. The Nicene Creed or the creed attributed to the Apostles both hammer away at the fact of Jesus’s death, going so far as to name the God-who-is-Human’s executioner in our profession of faith, “…crucified under Pontius Pilate.”

Yet the creeds do not venture to assert the meaning of his death.

The creeds make a matter of orthodoxy such doctrines as the incarnation, the virgin birth, and Christ’s bodily resurrection, but they say not a word about how exactly the Father saves us through the Son in their Spirit. For example, there are no assertions in the creeds such as, “Jesus died in our stead” or “The Son satisfied a debt to the Father we could not pay.”

On the basis of the creeds, you can deny any explanation of the atonement or all of them together. You can deny even the possibility of an explanation and remain a perfectly orthodox believer.

We boast in the cross, Martin Luther writes, because in nailing him to the cross, God has nailed all our sins there once and for all. They’re forgotten in his body. Luther may be right. Indeed it’s a matter of simple theo-logic. If the wages of sin is death, then Jesus, who is without sin of his own, must be bearing another’s sin in him. Otherwise, try as we might, it would be impossible for Jesus to die.

Luther may be right that, as Pilate’s goons nail Jesus to the tree, the Father simultaneously nails all our sins into blessed oblivion. However, a straightforward reading of the passion story will not allow us to draw such a conclusion.

Mark, for example, makes no such interpretative move. 

Mark imputes no meaning to the death of Jesus.

Mark is even reticent to provide any details about the manner of his death. One of the tradition’s Stations of the Cross is entitled “Jesus is Nailed to the Cross,” yet the Gospels themselves omit the grisly detail. “And they crucified him,” is all the evangelists dare to report.

The Gospel writers do not project any theories onto the narrative of Jesus’s death. The Gospel writers do not peek behind the narrative of Jesus’s death to find a deeper concept or a universal principle at work. The Gospel writers do not show a deeper magic at work in the Son’s suffering.

What the Gospel writers do is bind the story of Jesus’s death and the story of Jesus’s of resurrection together into one single narrative.

Thus, it’s not merely that you must go through Good Friday in order to get to Easter Sunday; it’s that the crucifixion has no meaning at all apart from the resurrection. The Gospel writers description of Jesus’s death is already drawn by the light of the resurrection. Peter preaches just so in the Book of Acts, “You all killed him, but God raised him up.”

That is, the crucifixion is God’s salvific action because God overcomes it by the resurrection.

Mark spends one-sixth of his Gospel narrating the suffering and death of Jesus because the suffering and death of Jesus were not understood to be saving. They were recognized as a problem to resolved. After all, God’s own law stipulates clearly, “Anyone who is hanged on a tree is under God’s curse.” Therefore, the Gospel writers not only bind the cross to the empty tomb, they also integrate both into the sweeping narrative of Israel’s scriptures. Given that God’s promise to exilic Israel had in fact happened to the one man— God had raised him from the dead— given that God had fulfilled his promise, then it followed, even if shockingly so, that this one man’s crucifixion must have been in continuity with the plot of Israel’s entire history.

Accordingly, the first Christians heard Jesus’s thirst upon the cross as the Psalmist’s thirst. Israel’s cry of dereliction in Psalm 22 becomes his own plea, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Even the way in which the passion story ends recalls Zechariah’s terrible prophecy,

“Awake, O sword, against my shepherd…that the sheep may be scattered. I will turn my hand against the little ones…When they look on the one whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him.”

If we want to know how the Son’s death can have reconciled straying sheep to the Father, the Gospels provide us no theoretically developed answer. That it does so the Gospels simply assume in light of the Old Testament scriptures. And so there can be no explanation to Jesus’s death. There can only be a stubborn return to the story. “Therefore what is required as the crucifixion’s right interpretation,” Robert Jenson writes, “is for us to tell this story to one another and to God as a story about him and about ourselves. The passion must live in the church as the church’s account of herself and her God before God and the world.”

Hence, we ought to pray that we will never be any different than Mark and the first disciples.

If we ever did finally come to terms with Jesus’s death, we will have strayed like sheep, failed rather than triumphed.

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