THE CROSS INA A SECULAR WORLD

...Furthermore, if the suffering of Jesus is seen as God's deliberate choice, a choice freely accepted by Jesus, then suffering can easily be valued for its own sake...

...In this way the symbol of the cross invites thought: Who is this God and can we accept him...

...The death of Jesus can never be understood if it is not understood politically...

...For our history today is still the largely suffering history of God...

...For us and for our world the victory is incomplete-it is not yet...

...This, however, is only one side of the picture...

...The Christian God has often been pictured in this way-one who, to satisfy his justice, decreed that his only Son should suffer in our place...

...The God whom he called Father did not come to save him...

...This is true not in the Marxist sense-that Christianity justifies slavery and oppression-but in the sense that God has sided with those in bondage...

...Yet these authors are also aware that the history of the cross in Christian theology and piety is at best ambiguous, that the symbol of the cross is so easily perverted, and that the Christian can be led to embrace a concept of God which is theologically idolatrous and psycho-' logically destructive...

...In this way the symbol of the cross is not so much a symbol for a past event but rather a summons to our present mission...

...but Pilate correctly perceived that Jesus's presence was a threat to the state...

...As Simone Weil once remarked, "Christianity is a religion for staves...

...Christologically, we can look at the cross in the context of Jesus's preaching and ministry...

...The symbol of the cross reminds us that as the passion story goes on, we must participate in it, struggling to free men and women from the oppressions that enslave them...

...So, the evangelist puts on Jesus's lips the words of the psalmist, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me...

...If God therefore is responsible for the sufferings of the innocent, God is made into a demon, and to worship such a God is to worship an executioner...

...His "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's" was no mere doctrine of peaceful co-existence of church and state...

...Rather it is to locate the passion story as it continues in our world...

...The cross of Christ has always been and should continue to be an offense...

...Thus, as the Third World is teaching us, the cross has become a truly revolutionary symbol...

...These two events are really two aspects of the one mystery of faith...

...His cross is a symbol that he has become one with us in this...

...He taught that his hour was the world's great crisis-a crisis so overwhelming that it would bring about a reversal of all ordinary standards of conduct: the last shall be first and the first last...

...This was a challenge that necessarily precipitated the events that led to Calvary and to the cross...

...The suffering of Jesus is not the result of a divine decision but of a human decision...

...Yet documents like the Hartford Statement, issued by an ecumenical gathering of theologians last year, have alerted us to the dangers of an unbridled liberalism and have warned that the church must not surrender to the prevailing secularism of our culture...

...he shares his table with tax collectors and associates with the likes of prostitutes...

...His resurrection is a promise that we will not undergo this darkness alone, but it is not a promise that God will remove the darkness...

...Nevertheless this Holy Week there are signs that a one-sided liberalism which prevailed in some Catholic circles during the sixties may not completely have the day in the seventies...

...Jesus was setting himself above the law and above Moses...

...But, as Paul reminded his communities, this is impossible...

...The cross of Jesus understood in the context of his message can be viewed as nothing other than a theological crisis...

...In the cross of Jesus God once and for all sided with the wretched of this earth-those beyond human hope...

...From this perspective the cross is not something that God directly willed nor that Jesus deliberately sought...

...These questions are implicit in the cross and bring us to the deepest darkness of Golgotha...

...He endured with us the death of sin, i.e., death experienced as abandonment and separation from God...

...Rather, it is something that happened to Jesus because of human sinfulness and because of his fidelity to his mission...

...Christian faith therefore asks whether we can accept such a God -a God who is free to keep silent even in the midst of our sufferings...

...Liberal theology has always recoiled from proclaiming the cross, so much so that H. Richard Nicbuhr once spoke of the God of liberalism as a God without wrath "who brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without the cross...

...His death constitutes the crisis of everything he stood for...

...The Christian then desires nothing more than to suffer with Christ suffering, a suffering often conceived in an individual, private and purely internal way...

...What is at stake is his God and our God...

...Our God is not the executioner but the fellow sufferer...

...We do not preach the cross in order to exalt the value of suffering...

...Christian faith affirms that God overturned the defeat of the cross in the resurrection...

...We preach the cross because it is this Jesus and no other who was raised...

...Jesus is risen from the dead, and with his resurrection has dawned the sure hope of God's final victory over evil...

...Was his proclamation of God's impending rule merely the work of a religious fanatic...

...But, not only is this kind of sorrow psychologically difficult to achieve, it also overlooks the once-for-all character of Jesus's death...

...As theologians are suggesting today, the cross points to a God who is involved in the suffering of his world...

...The Christian answer is partly in the darkness of Golgotha, where Christian faith first wrestled with the silence of God...

...sinners shall enter the Kingdom before the righteous...

...I suggest two lines of reflection: one Christological, the other theological...

...Catholics of this generation know that Christian faith does not call for a withdrawal from this world and its problems...

...Jesus came preaching the advent of God's Kingdom, proclaiming a free offer of grace at the last hour-God's final offer of mercy...

...Here was a challenge to the religious leaders of Judaism...

...For it is not easy to answer a Camus, or a Rubenstein who believes that the God of history was consumed in the flames of the death camps...

...Was he truly a blasphemer...

...The Jesus of history died once and his death was seen by the early Christian community as the dividing line between this world and the world to come...

...Jesus died accursed by the law, but he also died a political death-executed on a Roman cross as a political agitator...

...The cross of Jesus reminds us of this fact until he comes again...

...To identify with the passion of Christ today is not to try to conjore up an emotional experience reproducing the sufferings Jesus endured long ago...

...And there are other signs that the church's preaching may be gradually focusing anew on the symbol of the cross...

...The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner...

...As Moltmann has soberly noted, a theology after Auschwitz would be impossible had not the Schema of Israel and the Our Father been prayed in Auschwitz itself...

...Camus's decision for a godless world where men and women struggle against a universe in which innocent children suffer and die constitutes a challenge which cannot be ignored...

...But Christian faith also affirms that this same God remained silent as Jesus hung upon the cross...

...Jesus's sense of abandonment is part of the Christian response, but a theology of the cross invites further reflection...

...What then does it mean for the church to proclaim the crucified Christ, and in what sense is the cross a saving event for us...

...Seen in the context of Jesus's preaching of the imminence of God's rule, this teaching relativizes and radically undercuts the supreme authority of the state...

...Rather he participated in it...

...Ignatius Loyola, for example, in the Spiritual Exercises urges the retreatant to contemplate the sufferings of Christ in this way: "The special grace to ask for in the passion is sorrow with Christ in his sorrow, a broken heart with Christ broken-hearted, tears and interior suffering for the great suffering Christ endured for me...

...The cross is the final answer to Job's dilemma: God does not instigate our sufferings, nor did he decree the suffering of Jesus...

...In our own time we are profoundly aware of this darkness in the atrocities of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Lebanon and Northern Ireland-times when man's capacity to brutalize his fellow man has made the God question all the more acute for men and women of our generation...

...So, it is no surprise that Jesus's ministry ended in his execution...

...But thus far the victory has appeared in one man only-Jesus of Nazareth...

...Even since Ignatius of Antioch first dared to speak of the "passion of my God," Christian theology has had to reflect on God's presence in the cross of Jesus, and Christians who believe in the Trinity and who confess Jesus to be the Son of God have had to explore the meaning of God's involvement in the suffering of Jesus...

...This Lent and Holy Week, Christian preachers are faced once again with the task of explaining anew the saving events of our faith, the death and resurrection of the Lord...

...To proclaim his cross is to place ourselves with the wretched of the earth today...

...THE CROSS A SECULAR WORLD JOHN J. O'DONNELL There are dangers in the church's proclamation of the cross The question of the cross presents itself with even greater urgency in a time when we instinctively shy away from the negative aspects of life, when we seem bent on affirming the life-force in all its dimensions, when self-affirmation rather than self-denial, this world rather than the world to come, immanence rather than transcendence tend to characterize the religious spirit of our day...

...Jesus has fully entered into our human condition, he has suffered with us the dark night of the soul...

...Obedience to Caesar is not an act of submission...

...for Jesus not only died a political death, rejected by his own people, he died in the unbroken silence of God...

...He alone died as God's final prophet sent to proclaim the Kingdom in word and deed...

...Christianity becomes a religion which glorifies suffering-in short, a masochistic cull...

...Recent books like Dorothee Solle's Suffering, Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God and Christopher Mooney's Man Without Tears-with its treatment of the themes of failure, old age and death- all point to a renewal of the theology of the cross...

...To try to relive in our own consciousness the sufferings he endured is to seek to know him according to the flesh...

...The Jesus who hangs on the cross is not the medieval figure of the king robed in glory but the twisted figure of Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, the Jesus who resists all attempts to be made acceptable, whose cross is, as Paul said, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks but, to us who are called in faith, the power and wisdom of God.power and wisdom of God...

...The most pernicious one was recognized as early as the book of Job: Job's friends believe that suffering and misfortune are the result of sin, whereas the whole thrust of Job's dialogues with his companions is that he is not guilty but righteous...

...We do not preach a sadistic God who desired to give up his own Son to death, even for our sakes...

...From all we know, Jesus was not a Zealot and he rejected violence...

...As such his cross cannot be repeated...

...Rather, like Jesus's silence before Pilate, it is a sign that the kingdoms of this world have already been judged and will soon meet their day of reckoning...