The Crucifixion Puts Jesus’s Life and Teaching to the Test

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Jesus Speaks to the Women — Luke 23.27-31

Not all who witnessed Jesus’s trial and torture jeered at him or colluded with the authorities or turned a blind eye to the whole sordid affair. According to Luke, as Jesus trod his beleaguered path to Calvary, a multitude of women trailed behind him, mourning and lamenting for him.

Their public sorrow in his train is the closest anyone in the passion story comes to protesting, “Do not crucify him!” Yet hearing them weep, the Lord Jesus does not express gratitude for their solidarity.

He turns to them and tells them they should instead weep for themselves and their children. Echoing the prophet Hosea, Jesus says, “If they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” In the context of impending crucifixion, it means, “If Jesus is not spared the cruelty of the cross, how can God’s unfaithful people possibly hope to escape divine judgment?” Jesus’s sermon to the Daughters of Jerusalem is the seventh time in Luke’s Gospel that he has prophesied looming doom for Jerusalem and her temple.

Put differently, Jesus teaches and preaches his message to the last.

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Just so, this is another predicate the Gospel narratives will allow us to draw from the death of Jesus:

The crucifixion puts Jesus’s life and teaching to the test.

Such a premise requires that we remember what is so widely forgotten among believers.

Namely:

The cross was important to the first Christians precisely because the cross was a problem for them.

Therein is the irony of the Passion.

Much of the tradition’s best and most beautiful art centers on Good Friday, yet— perhaps surprisingly— the crucifixion does not so center in the understanding of the primal Church. The Gospel message is not “Christ and him crucified.” The Gospel message, as Peter makes clear in the first Christian sermon, is Jesus, whom we crucified, has been raised from the dead. The good news is the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. Indeed a fatal flaw in nearly all so-called atonement theories is that they have no need for this central claim of the first Christians, “God raised Jesus from the dead.” Rather than understanding the crucifixion as saving in and of itself, it’s more biblically accurate to say that the crucifixion was not an original element of the faith. For instance, the reason the passion story makes up the bulk of all four Gospel narratives is that the crucifixion was a problem to be accounted for not a punishment to be indulged or delighted in.

Again, in Peter’s first Christian preaching:

The cross is not what God undergoes in order to reconcile us; the cross is what God overcomes in reconciling us.

Granting the fact that the crucifixion is not an original element of the Church’s proclamation, we can nonetheless make an essential claim about the cross: Jesus’s death puts his life to the test. The high priest himself speaks the truth of what is at stake in Jesus’s suffering and death, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus answers only with an enigmatic, “I AM.” Thereupon the the priests enlist the pagan Pilate to condemn him to crucifixion. In so doing, they pose their question to the Blessed One himself, “Is he the Messiah, the Son of God?” Jesus teaches to the last.

And in the end, his death puts his teaching to the test: Would the Father acknowledge this Jesus as his Son?

Those who ridicule Jesus on Golgotha are not wrong in their reasoning. If he is in fact the Blessed One’s Son, then the Father should rescue him from his plight, deliver him from this ghastly death. But the Father lets the question linger to extremity, handing over the Son, who surrenders their Spirit, to death.

“Is he the Messiah, the Son of God?”

“Yes,” the Father answers with an empty grave.

The Father answers the question that the Son’s death puts to his life.

And to his teaching.

Yes, Jesus is the Messiah.

Yes, Jesus is in the Trinity.

Yes, the Kingdom is at hand wherever he is present.

Yes, the Son is your salvation.

Yes, the poor are blessed.

Yes, the peacemakers are called children of God.

Yes, the merciful will be shown mercy.

Yes, those who hunger and thirst for justice will be filled.

And yes, woe to you who are rich and full and well-regarded.

As Robert Jenson writes,

“The crucifixion put [the question] up to the Father: Would he stand to this alleged Son? To this candidate to be his own self-identifying Word? Would he be a God who, for example, hosts publicans and sinner, who justifies the ungodly? The resurrection was the Father’s Yes. We may say: the resurrection settled that the crucifixion’s sort of God is indeed the one God…Or, the crucifixion settled who and what God is; the resurrection settled that this God is. And just so the crucifixion settled also who and what we are.”

The Father answers the high priest’s question with an empty grave.

Therefore, we know what the weeping Daughters of Jerusalem cannot know.

What Caiphas cannot know.

The bloodied one before them who speaks (rightly) of divine judgment is the Judge about to be judged in their stead.

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