Hilton Head Island, SC – September 27, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
I Corinthians 1:18-25; Hebrews 9:11-22
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred which redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant. – Hebrews 9:15
Is The Cross Necessary For Salvation?
In seminary we were taught that there are two kinds of preaching. They are described by two Greek words, kerygma and didache. Kerygma means “proclamation,” essentially, and didache means “teaching.” To overstate the difference, kerygma is what occurs in a large Gothic church filled with expectant people who are thirsting to hear the word of God powerfully proclaimed by a great preacher, and you can hear a pin drop; didache, on the other hand, is the kind of explanation that goes on in a Bible study with a few people, and there is a back-and-forth discussion of some of the finer points of theology and faith, and people are trying to discern the finer points of what they think they are supposed to believe.
Through the passage of the years in my ministry, and especially in the last 20+ years, I have been struck by how my preaching style has shifted from primarily kerygma to primarily didache. I have been pastorally associated exclusively with Mainline Protestants for over fifty years. Mainline Protestants are not the same as Evangelical Protestants or Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox Christians. During the first half of my ministry, it seems to me, Mainline laity were more aware of the essentials of the Christian faith, because they attended church with more regularity, they went to adult Sunday school classes, and many participated in various classes throughout the week. Thus they were more familiar with what was both taught and proclaimed about Christianity. They were not as busy, and they had more time for church matters.
In latter years, however, I have the feeling that Mainline Protestants are less likely to be involved in learning on a regular basis, and therefore they are less able quickly to grasp the meaning of the proclamation of the Gospel. These are broad generalizations, to be sure, and they may be generally incorrect. Nevertheless, I think that as time has gone on I have concluded it was more of a necessity for me to become a “rabbi” as a preacher, a teacher, which is what the word “rabbi” means, and less of a proclaimer. In order to understand what is proclaimed, it is necessary first to learn the meaning of what is proclaimed. Thus in my old age didache has taken precedence over kerygma. That, in any case, is how it seems to this particular preacher.
With all that as in introduction, what follows is an historical summary of how I believe the crucifixion of Jesus Christ came to have such immense importance in the New Testament Church and in the entire Church of Jesus Christ ever since the first century. Make no mistake about it: Without the cross, Christianity as we know it would be a totally different religion from what it is. If Jesus had died as an old man, we might never have heard of him. His death on a cross became a central element of Christian belief.
To begin, we need to understand that nearly everyone in the New Testament Church was a Jew. “The New Testament Church” consisted of all the people who eventually considered themselves Christians during the first hundred years or so when the Church was in its earliest stages. These people are often called “Jewish Christians.” That is, they had been born Jewish, but they became Jewish followers of Jesus of Nazareth. In time they decided their commitment to Jesus made them Jews of a different sort, and hence they eventually became known as “Christians,” devotees of Jesus Christ. However, the word “Christian” apparently was originally a term of derision, at least according to the Book of the Acts of the Apostles.
Over the first two millennia of the evolution of the Jewish religion, the primary earthly focus of Judaism came to be centered on the temple in Jerusalem. The temple was the holiest location in the world, as far as Jews were concerned. It was there where animals were sacrificed to take away the sins of the people. And it was there, in the small inner room of the temple into which only the high priest could go, and even he only on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, where the high priest sacrificed a bull and a ram. Their lives symbolized the removal of sin of the entire Jewish nation for that year. Because of that single sacrifice, they believed, God would forgive their sins. As with other ancient religions, sacrifice became an essential element in how the people believed they could be put into a proper relationship with God.
You may strongly disagree with that idea. It may seem peculiar to you, odd, even bizarre. But that is what the Jews believed. Without sacrifices, they thought they were doomed.
Now let us turn to the New Testament Jewish Christians, the Jews who established a religion distinct from, and yet rooted in, Judaism. Nearly everything in the New Testament, with the exception of the letters of the Apostle Paul and perhaps the Gospel of Mark, was written after the greatest disaster in the history of the Jewish people up to that time. It was the destruction of the Jewish nation and their temple by the Romans in the Jewish Revolt of 68 to 72 AD, or, as we say now, CE, “the Common Era.” When the Jews tried to drive the Romans out of Judea, the Romans brutally crushed them. There was far more resistance than Rome anticipated, but in the end, Rome prevailed. Jerusalem was burned, and the temple was utterly obliterated.
I said that almost everything in the New Testament was written after the Jewish Revolt was put down. It was Jewish Christians who did the writing. Yet none of them, not one, referred to the failed attempt to drive the Romans out of the Holy Land. It was the most disruptive event in the entire history of Israel, but the New Testament is silent about it, even though most of it was written after the destruction of Israel. Why didn’t they refer to it? Why would they avoid talking about the most important event not only of their lifetimes but of the life of the entire Jewish people for the previous six centuries? Jesus hinted that the destruction was coming, but no Christians wrote about it after it happened. They desperately wanted to distinguish themselves from the Jews, to let the Romans know they were no longer Jews, that now they were Christians.
Christianity germinated exactly during the period of the most indescribable national calamity of the Jewish people. Had the Jewish Revolt not occurred, Christianity might well never have occurred. It is an immense irony of history that the annihilation of the Jewish nation at the hands of the Romans made possible the birth of Christianity. Out of the ashes of the Jewish nation Christianity sprouted. It would be a travesty to believe God engineered such an historical tragedy, but nevertheless, historically, that was the unique chronology in which it happened.
Now let us go back twenty or thirty years prior to the Jewish Revolt, and to man named Saul of Tarsus, who became the Apostle Paul of the Christians. Paul was, by his own admission, an obedient, committed Jew. He was a Pharisee, he tells us, and a persecutor of the earliest Christians, all of whom, remember, were also Jews. Then he had his conversion experience on the road to Damascus, and he became the most influential leader of the New Testament Church.
Strangely, in his letters to the various churches of the Mediterranean region, Paul says almost nothing about the teachings of Jesus, the didache, if you will. Instead, he focused almost exclusively on the death and resurrection of Jesus, but especially on his crucifixion. The cross became the central element in Paul’s writings. We saw an example of that in our reading this morning from the first chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians.
Telling the Corinthians how he perceived himself and his mission, Paul wrote, “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.” By preaching the importance of the crucifixion of Jesus, Paul seemed to imply, he was preaching didache as much as kerygma, teaching as much as proclamation. Then Paul wrote one his most famous statements: “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (I Cor. 1:22-24; my italics).
In Greek the word for “stumbling-block” is skandalon. The cross is a scandal to everybody except Christians. To make the cross the primary symbol of Christianity would be like making the scaffold or the firing squad or the electric chair the central symbol of our faith. It is bizarre! It is intellectually odious! It is theologically atrocious! Yet there it is. The symbol of death and destruction becomes the symbol of life and resurrection.
However, says Paul, the Jewish Christian, and says the anonymous writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, also a Jewish Christian, by Jesus being executed on the cross, in effect he becomes the single sacrifice necessary to save us from our sins. The cross, say these two writers, is the sole necessity for salvation, not the animals sacrificed in the temple, not Yom Kippur, but the cross. Jesus is the person who voluntarily gives up his life for the sins of the world. He is the sacrifice; he is the high priest in the celestial temple. Good Friday becomes the Christian Yom Kippur.
Before I read some quotes from the Letter to the Hebrews, I want to state a strongly-held opinion. It may be wrong, but nonetheless it is strong. I do not believe that sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of Jesus, is necessary for salvation. I do not believe that God foreordained Jesus to die on the cross. I do not believe Jesus wanted to die on the cross. Jesus was crucified first because the Romans thought he represented a potential threat to their empire and secondly because a small segment of the Jewish religious leadership may have encouraged the Romans to act on their suspicions regarding Jesus. Down through history religious reformers like Jesus have been killed to silence them, but surely in every case it was not the will of God, nor was it the will of God for Jesus to be killed.
Put yourself in the shoes of the original followers of Jesus, those who actually knew him and heard him and loved him. When he was crucified, they were devastated. They thought that the “Jesus Movement,” as some now call it, was suddenly and disastrously finished. Easter changed that. But the terrible trauma of the crucifixion lived on in powerful memory long after the New Testament Church concluded that Jesus was raised from the dead. His cruel death still occupied their thinking at its very foundation. What did it mean that Jesus was crucified?
Only over time and the passage of a few decades did the thinking of the New Testament Church with respect to the crucifixion coalesce. Why did Jesus die on the cross? Not because the Romans wanted it, but because God wanted it! It was all part of the plan of God, and not just a factor, but a major factor! Just as the historical Jews believed that animal sacrifice was necessary for the atonement (the expiation) of sins, so now the historical Christians believed that the crucifixion of Jesus atoned for the sins of the whole world. To believe in the saving grace of the cross was to be saved by the cross for eternal life.
So let us take a look now at the Letter to the Hebrews. Whoever wrote this letter was steeped in the sacrificial tradition of Judaism. Maybe he was a priest himself, or a Levite. Certainly he was very familiar with the notion of sacrifice, and how important it was to the Jews. “It was fitting that he (God), for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering” (2:10). In other words, God made Jesus perfect through his suffering on the cross on our behalf. Animals sacrificed in the temple had to be perfect; imperfect animals were rejected. “Since therefore the children” (in other words, us) “share in flesh and blood, “he himself” (i.e., Jesus) “likewise partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (2:14). I don’t believe either of those proclamations, nor do I think you are required to believe them, but without question most of the people in the New Testament Church believed them. God created Jesus to die for our sins on the cross, they insisted, in order to defeat the devil. And that became the orthodox Christian position with respect to the cross ever since.
Here are more quotes from Hebrews. These statements are not easily understood, but they are important ideas in what Christianity became. “But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent” (a reference to the tabernacle in the Wilderness Wandering) “…he (Jesus) entered once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (9:11-12). This suggests that the Christian Yom Kippur occurred when Jesus willingly went to the cross. His once-for-all sacrifice brings atonement for the world. “Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred which redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant” (9:15). The Old Testament was delivered to us initially by the life of Moses, but the New Testament is delivered by the death of Christ. “Hence even the first covenant was not ratified without blood” (9:18). Do you understand what is being proposed here? Sacrifice is necessary for atonement, and atonement (being made right with God) necessitates the shedding of blood. But it is the blood of Jesus which saves those who believe in him. Think of some of the 19th century the hymn titles: “There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins;” “Cross of Jesus, cross of sorrow, where the blood of Christ was shed;” “Throned upon the awful tree, King of grief, I watch with Thee.”
Again, from Hebrews: “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (9:22). If you believe that something or someone needs to be sacrificed in order for sin to be washed away, then you believe the cross is necessary for salvation. But if you don’t believe that, then you may believe the death of Jesus on the cross was an enormous historical injustice, an event that is understandable from an historical standpoint but not necessarily a theological or Christological standpoint.
I want you clearly to comprehend what I am attempting to do in this sermon. If you are happily able to subscribe to the traditional concept of the crucifixion, more power to you. Truly you are blessed. But if you can’t, if it just doesn’t make sense to you, then you have just heard an alternative explanation. I am trying to use both my didache and my kerygma to try to enable you to be a committed Christian, obviously not in a traditional or orthodox way, but in a way which may nevertheless liberate you to call yourself a conscientious Christian of the 21st century. It may be incomprehensible to you, as it is to me, that God ever required sacrifices, let alone the sacrifice of Jesus. Tearing Christianity apart is a travesty. Rationally thinking it through may lead to a triumph for those who are trying to become modern thoughtful Christians.
Belief without intellectual support rests on a shaky foundation. If doctrines don’t make sense, they can’t create commitment. Jesus Christ died on a cross. What does it mean?