I’ve spent most of the afternoon preparing a sermon on Acts 9.1-20, Luke’s account of the conversion of Saul. It strikes me that the reaction of Saul to the earliest Christians offers helpful insight just how the message of a crucified Messiah would have been received. As noted in the last post, only those who were cursed by God were nailed to a cross; only the most despised reprobates suffered crucifixion. The words of Deuteronomy 21.23 were burned into the mind of every religious Jew of the first century AD: “Anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse.” And so it was with Saul; the message of the atonement, the crucified Messiah, could not be tolerated. It was anathema. It was unthinkable. It was obscene and profane.
Saul first crops up in Acts 8.1, guarding the outer garments of the witnesses (in conformity with the law set down in Deuteronomy 17.7) as they hurled the first stones at Stephen, who would become the first Christian martyr. Saul is “breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples” (Acts 9.1), intent on rounding up and assasinating those who would contravene sacred Jewish law and preach a crucified Messiah. He secures letters from the High Priest to synagogues in Damascus so that he might round up Christians who were seeking refuge there. It is likely that he determinedly walked the 300 km between Jerusalem and Damascus, utterly fixated on rounding up those "who belonged to the Way” – the Christian converts who were making such a mockery of Jewish ancestral tradition by proclaiming that a crucified Nazarene was the Son of Man.
Saul’s intense hatred of the earliest Christians gives us an insight into just how scandalous the message of the cross was to the ears of a first century Jew. The concept of a crucified Messiah was outrageous blasphemy. The gospel the Christians proclaimed was totally incompatible with the Jewish tradition Saul was a part of. F. F Bruce writes in Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free: “No heed could be paid to them when they [the Christians] supported their affirmation with claims that Jesus had come back from the dead and appeared to them. In making this claim they were either deceivers or self-decieved, for none of the arguments which they used for Jesus’ messiahship could stand against one irrefragable argument on the other side: a crucified man could not conceivably be the elect one of God” (pp. 71).
“Hanging up alive” is the Hebrew phrase for crucifixion in 4QpNah, one of the Qumran scrolls; it well conveys the horror with which crucifixion was viewed by pious first century Jews like Saul. According to Luke (Acts 5.30, 10.39), the phrase “hanging on a gibbet” was used in the earliest apostolic preaching of the atonement, as if to convey how religiously shocking this mode of execution was. The cross was so cruel that the Romans refused to allow their own citizens to be crucified, regardless of what the person had done. Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher (106-43 BC) reputedly wrote that crucifixion was “a most cruel and disgusting punishment. It is a crime to put a Roman citizen in chains, it is an enormity to flog one, sheer murder to slay one; what, then, shall I say of crucifixion? It is impossible to find the word for such an abomination.Let the very mention of the cross be far removed not only from a Roman citizen’s body, but from his mind, his eyes, his ears.”
After Saul’s dramatic encounter with the risen Christ, he began to preach the message he had so passionately sought to stamp out; the gospel of the crucified Messiah. He would later write, as the apostle Paul, in the midst of much hostility from his own countrymen: “we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block (skandalon) to Jews and foolishness to gentiles…” (1 Corinthians 1.23). The message of the atoning death of Christ was a scandal; it was repulsive to Jew and Greek alike.
To a great degree, we have assimilated the cross as the symbol of Christianity; it is a given, something taken for granted and causing very little stir or reproach. Certainly it rarely, if ever, shocks or appals anybody. It does not gall our religious sensibilities as it did the Jews' of the first century. In fact, it has become the world’s most prominent and beloved symbol of Christianity. Nonetheless, as Mark Driscoll points out, this is basically “akin to a junkie’s needle or a perverts used condom becoming the world’s most beloved symbol and adorning homes, churches, and bodies.”
And yet, Calvin could call the cross a glimmering, many-sided jewel. How can the bloody death of a man on a cross be described as a precious jewel, shining with radiant beauty? Some of the following posts will view the crucifixion of Jesus through the only lens that enables us to see the cross for the treasure it is; the words of Scripture.
Mightily,
The Scribbling Apprentice
No comments:
Post a Comment