Who Died on the Cross?
Who hangs on the center tree at the Place of the Skull? That’s the question of Good Friday, the conundrum of the cross. It’s also the scandal of Jesus’s crucifixion, in the original sense of scandal. The identity of the crucified is the stone on which the Church has stumbled again and again.
Start from what seems an obvious, commonsensical premise: Whoever that is hanging on the tree, it can’t be God. God’s not like that. God gleams with glory, but that thing on the tree is ugly, mangled, distorted, barely human much less divine. God is placid, immoveable, without passion. That one, that thing, shrieks in agonized dismay, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God is powerful, but that thing is impotent. Above all, God doesn’t die. For polytheistic Greeks, the gods are “immortals,” precisely the deathless ones. For Greeks of a more philosophical bent, time is death, God is immune from the ravages of time, and therefore, God is immortality, pure eternity itself. Dying is the one thing God doesn’t do.
That can’t be God. But then again, that thing can’t be exactly human either. After all, Jesus is our Savior, and man cannot save himself. That thing on the cross must be some creature, but to save us, he must be a very, very exalted creature, the highest creature there can possibly be. There you have it: The logic and the confession of Arianism. It’s all so obvious and commonsensical, but the Church’s bishops searched the Scriptures, fought and argued, and determined that Arianism is false. Arians can’t speak the gospel because they misidentify the crucified.
So the Church rejected Arianism. Yet we still can’t say—surely not!—that the dying one is God. That would upend everything we know about God. Nicaea says there’s no gap between God and Jesus, so, as Robert Jenson put it, we’ve got to move the gap a notch. The incarnation, the double-naturedness of Jesus, offers a way out. That’s God on the cross, but God can’t die. What passes through death must be the man-bit of Jesus, not the God-bit. The Son goes to the cross bearing his humanity, and there he and the Father sacrifice his humanity for our salvation. A brilliant solution. It’s not Arian: Jesus is God himself, taking human nature. But we can keep our assumptions about God intact. We can say Jesus is God without saying God passes through death. What a relief.
But that’s the logic of Nestorianism, and the bishops eventually rejected Nestorianism as a heresy along with Arianism. Searching the Scriptures, they determined that the Bible doesn’t allow us to say Jesus is a creature, nor does it allow us to separate Jesus’s divinity from his humanity. If you’re looking for evidence of the Church’s miraculous character, here it is. Arianism and Nestorianism make sense. They assume obvious, commonsensical things about God. But the Church went for nonsense instead. She rejected the safe, obvious, traditional option.
Faced with the choice between clinging to common sense and upending everything they thought they knew of God, they decided to go with the latter. To be true to the gospel, the Church determined, meant that she had to embrace the wild, the counterintuitive, the revolutionary. To be true to the gospel, we must say God himself assumed our mortal humanity in order to pass through death. To be true to the gospel, we must proclaim the death of death through the death of God.
They didn’t believe, of course, that the eternal Son passed out of existence for three days. Even human beings don’t pass out of existence when we die. At its heart, death is separation from God. Life is knowing God; death is estrangement from him. That death is humanity’s curse, and that’s the curse the Son of God assumed for our sake. The Son of God, God from the beginning, God from God and God toward God, whose very being is to be from and with the Father—that Son suffered our Godforsakenness.
Over the centuries, the gospel has been domesticated, polished up for polite society. Many think orthodoxy is tired, safe, obvious. They think the God of the gospel is another run-of-the-mill deathless one, only much, much bigger. Forget about atheists and agnostics: Many Christians think this way. Chesterton was right: “To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”
Orthodoxy is the wild, whirling, graceful rider because the God it proclaims and reveals is the God dead and living, who rides the wings of the wind, who walks over the raging waves, who touches lepers and eats and drinks with sinners, who submits to death on a cross, who marches straight into the gloom of hell to clear it out, the God who undoes our Godforsakenness by taking it on himself.
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