Is the Cross Really All That Important? #1

Now, where to start…hmm…well I think from the beginning is a very good place to start:

No, not that beginning silly – no we are going to start with my beginning.  My beginning as a Christian that is.  From the beginning of my walk with Jesus, back some 16 years ago now, I would have to say my training in the faith centered around what Jesus did on the cross.  Let’s take a look at this now to see what I mean:

* I was a lost and hopeless person – until I came to the cross.

* I had a horrible childhood with lots of trauma and resulting scars – until I came to the cross.

* I couldn’t beat the current sins in my life – until I was willing to take them to the cross.

* I have damaging self-talk that keeps me in bondage to bad relationships; depressive and anxiety filled episodes; and a life resigned to emptiness – until I am able to lay it down at the cross.

I am sure I could come up with more if I really tried – and I am sure you could add a few personal ones of your own.  The point being is this: that the current thoughts in the Christian world – at least the one I had been “raised” in — was that if I would just take whatever I was struggling with in my life and lay it down at the foot of the cross, or write it down on a piece of paper and let the church nail it to the cross – that like magic…POOF my struggle, my sin, my memories would just disappear and I would be all clean and shinny and new.

Yet, I know for myself up until about 1.5 years ago – I would try these steps to no avail.  I was still caught in bondage, I was still for the most part in denial that I was caught in bondage – and I was fairly miserable – unbeknownst to even myself.

So, what happened one and a half years ago to start changing this story?  Well, a lot of things – things I have shared on this blog.  First, I was in a lot of emotional pain, which manifested itself in physical symptoms of depression and anxiety, anger and irritability, inability to focus and carry through on things.  Basically – I was finally in enough discomfort in my life to get serious about making changes.

Then I started praying that prayer for God to open my eyes, to let the “scales” fall off and to shine His light on the things that needed to be dealt with.  I found my abuse recovery class, Life Skills, and their program that has been a life saver time and again.  I started having some “break throughs” in my counseling sessions because of this class.  Pieces of the random puzzle of my life started to click.  

At about the same time, I had been led out of my past church back to Menlo Park Presbyterian – where John Ortberg is preaching the word…but in a much different manner than I had ever heard.  If you would have asked me back then – I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what the main difference was between him and my old pastor.  But now I would say it was the difference between legalism and GRACE.  

In listening to him and the other pastors on staff, I started to uncover that the Bible was filled with much more about Jesus than just “preparing for the road to the cross”.  I know, I know – we all know this…but for some reason I had never really understood or never internalized Jesus’ earthly life and how that was to impact my earthly life in the here and now.  I had been trained with songs that preach “He came from Heaven to Earth to show the way…from the cross to the grave…from the grave to the sky…” thinking that all this side of heaven amounted to was just to get into heaven — or something along those lines.

IN THE MIDDLE
Along came Rob Bell’s book Love Wins.  With this book and a combination of sermons and talks I found online, I was exposed to an entire different way of thinking about heaven and hell…based on the same Bible that gave me the rapture and the Left Behind series.  I was literally shocked to realize that there wasn’t only one way to interpret scripture…but multiple ways.  I recently made a new friend of a certain lineage that matches Jesus – and she explained that in a traditional Jewish Torah, that there could be up to as many as 4+ different camps of interpretations commenting on the text.  Why don’t we have this in our modern Bibles?

As I continued down this new path, I started to realize that perhaps part of my problem of surrendering my old life wasn’t that I hadn’t laid it down at the cross…but that I hadn’t ever officially owned my old stuff as part of who I was, as part of my identity – of my humanity.  In the past, I had tried to discard my baggage as irrelevant.  The fact is, saying that the “cross took care of it” made it even more irrelevant – like it never happened.

I started to take a hard core look at Jesus and his “ministry” among the people.  It dawned on me that He spent 3 years or there about with the people; He spent 1 day/night on his road to the cross and less than an 8 hour work day on the cross.  Yet, looking back at my “career” as a Christian it seemed as if so much emphasis was placed on the Cross that it overshadowed the rest of his life…as if the Cross was the single greatest act of His life (that is before He was resurrected).

If he spent 3 years preaching among the people – didn’t that amount to something, or a lot of somethings that perhaps I should be analyzing in greater depth, trying to understand in a deeper manner?  If all He needed to do was to live a sinless life in order to be the spotless sacrifice and then die on the cross to save us for heaven…then why did he need all that time to live amongst his brethren?  What was the point of all that?

As I started to think and mull this over more, as I started reading the Gospels again – I started to realize that Jesus NEVER ignored or downplayed our earthy confines of our human bodies.  He never downplayed our desires and our appetites…but embraced them in a different way that allowed Him to be in control over them…showing us how to be in control over our own desires and appetites.  He did this with his feelings and thoughts as well.

In this process, I came to realize that His earthly life was JUST as significant as the cross.  By viewing His earthy life as more than just a means, as more than just an avenue to the cross…I realized that it gave me meaning and significance to my current life and problems and joys and aches.  The life he led on earth and the way he treated others no longer meant just that this was the way things would be ONE day in heaven…but that they could be this way now.  In fact, I felt the call that I was to be living exactly like this in order to do the work of restoring the Garden to Eden…to live and work NOW towards restoring the Kingdom HERE…so that God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

GOING FORWARD

For the most part, what I have said above is really nothing new.  I have known my entire “Christian” life that Jesus came down to earth, not considering equality with God something to be grasped, forsaking His place in Heaven in order to be one of us.

However, when I stopped focusing on the cross as being the SOLE reason He came…and started focusing my mind on backing up:
 ~ from the scene of “The Cross”
  ~ from scene of “The Road to the Cross”
    ~ from the notion that this is where everything that needs to happen happened….
…..when I changed my thinking to encompass the entirety of the life of Jesus – I saw something entirely different.  Call it semantics if you will…however, this little flip of letting the cross become equal to the life of Jesus…well what can I say?

I was changed.  I went from experiencing God in random moments of talking about him, worshiping him, serving others for him…to living with God.

I was changed.  I went from distancing myself from my past to embracing my past and my humanity as part of who I am – that it was integral to accept my past in order to find Christ and be identified with Him.

I was changed and am being changed.  I am going from a hidden judge to a hippie lover – looking for opportunities to LOVE recklessly by allowing others to be themselves…to allow them to be fully seen and known in my midst.

Now I see that Jesus did not come to Earth to ignore anything about our earthly bodies, minds and specifically the soul*.  He made us – every single part of us  – from our appetites/desires for food and sex and companionship and comfort and significance and community.  He made our hearts to beat for more than just pumping blood.  He made our minds for more than just controlling systems.  He made them ALL…in  His image He made them…and when we humans were done – He called their art project “very good”.

Jesus living on Earth actually told us that unless we start dealing with ourselves, with our own “planks” of our humanity – if we didn’t learn how to embrace ourselves as human beings first…we would be completely missing God.  For being human is the vehicle that God desires to use in order to show Himself to this world.  For where we truly embody who we were created to be – where we love and be loved – we embody the very image of God Himself.

WHERE DO I STAND WITH THE CROSS?
In closing, I have to end with this twist:

Note: I am not sure I will write the #2 in this series…as you would most likely be better off reading Insurrection by Peter Rollins.  In his book, Peter does a much better job at describing the death of oneself that must happen in order to fully lose the “security blanket God”  in order to truly “find” God on the other side of the Cross. 

* Soul (a definition): The intangible component that ties our minds, bodies and wills together.  For more on the soul, you can watch the latest series by John Ortberg here.