April Fools and the Cross

I have enjoyed April Fools that last few years on this blog. Last year I posted a parody of what would happen if the Concerned Nazarenes got their way and all those they had called heretics were kicked out of our denomination. Long lists of many Nazarene Pastors and leaders, many of them friends, were posted along with my own name as those who “had been excommunicated from Nazarene fellowship”. While it was of course pure fiction in the spirit of April first that we were kicked out, what wasn’t fiction was that the list of names came from Concerned Nazarene websites.

Needless to say, though we tried to laugh and not take ourselves too seriously in all this, there has been some real pain involved in places where real division has been caused by all of this. I am thankful however that there is hope, even if just a fools hope, that we can move past all things divisive in the body of Christ; especially within our particular tradition.

In recent posts, I have made an effort to change the tone of any possible disagreement we might have with those who consider themselves speaking for the “concerned”. I am thankful that the founding voice of “Concerned Nazarenes” has acknowledged that I just might be a real Christian after all. Though a small step, it is a step; and one I hope we can build on. I have made an appeal to him asking if we can work together to build on what we have in common based on our Christian beliefs we share as Nazarenes. I asked him for this on the blog and by personal email, but so far any further inquiry into this possibility has gone unanswered. Even still, I will hang on to a fools hope for reconciliation.

The Apostle Paul was no stranger to trying to discourage division in the body of Christ as he understood that through Christ’s broken body on the cross God found solidarity with humanity and reconciled what otherwise seemed utterly irreconcilable. Sin and injustice that we human beings commit against each other, and commit against the God whose image we were made in, just doesn’t seem compatible with God’s holy dreams and intentions for his creation and for us as humanity within it. Yet, God meets us in the middle of all this ugliness in order to win us back to his dream for humanity made in his image. Our own sin and injustice breaks us, and so God allowed it to break him. Our sin could not keep God away from us, as he was literally dying to be with us again. No wonder with all that God went through to reconcile us and unify us in his body, that Paul in his letter recorded in First Corinthians would be so alarmed that Christians could so easily divide over anything when there should be unity in the foundation of the cross.

Divisions over following different teachers such as the Apostle Paul or Apollos, Calvin or Wesley, MacArthur or McLaren are all pointless because at best they are “only servants, through whom we came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task”. Regardless of what any of them may have to say, “no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.” And how did Paul describe and proclaim such a foundation to the Corinthians? Paul said, “we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”

Saying “Jews and Gentiles” is like saying Jews and everyone else; so in other words everyone who encounters the cross will in one way or the other stumble and trip on its foolishness. We can therefore either dismiss it as foolishness which represents one kind of stumbling or in faith wrestle with its foolishness like Jacob wrestled with God; seizing the victory but not without forever being changed by having a hip dislocated so that a once seemingly steady walk is forever reduced to stumbling along. This may sound like a foolish victory, but the gospel of the cross shows us that “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are.”

So for centuries followers of Jesus have wrestled in faith with, and were transformed by, the foolishness of the cross. Along the way men have tried to describe it, but even the Apostle Paul, (whose writing in the Bible is as authoritative and inspired by God as any of Scripture), admitted to the Corinthians that his vision and understanding of all this was like trying to see through a dim mirror. He knew that at best he only “knew in part”; but that one day he would “know fully, even as he is fully known”. In the meantime Paul knew that wrestling with the cross meant embodying love; as Christ himself embodied his love for us on the cross. Failure to do this means that no matter how eloquent our descriptions of theology may be we are but noisy gongs without love. This is why Paul said, “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified….my message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power.”

You see the cross is not just some abstract theological idea, but rather it speaks to the very way of the Kingdom. And this way should be most evident in the body of Christ, as Jesus gave us “a new command” saying, “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." The Apostle Paul embraces this idea as he calls us to be unified in the cross. It isn’t that he doesn’t encourage us also to hold each other accountable, but he instructs us to restore a brother caught in a sin “gently” and to “carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ”. The community of Christ is about sharing in the way of the cross together. We might disagree about the best theological way to describe the foolishness of the cross that we stumble all over and wrestle with together, but more importantly through in this stumbling and wrestling we are to embody the way of the cross together as we follow Jesus in faith.

As this April Fools Day comes to a close let us be reminded of the foolishness of the cross that trumps conventional wisdom. Let us embrace this crazy foolish love that chose solidarity with us in our human condition despite our sin and injustice even when directed at God himself. The foolishness of the cross is winning by losing. Paul tells us that we were enemies of God. How did God respond? God met us on our turf and then let us win in the way that mankind most typically tries to “win” against our enemies; by trying to discredit, dominate, dehumanize, and kill. In the confrontation between man and God, man won and God lost; and he "lost" so we could be won to him; and to one another through him. In this also, the resurrection isn’t just the come from behind victory for God; it is the victory for us.

As we solemnly approach Good Friday with the hope that follows with Easter I want to bless those “Concerned Nazarenes” and seek solidarity with them even though they reject us. I want to embrace what should be solidarity in our understanding of biblical Christian orthodoxy that we share in the Nazarene Articles of Faith. I want to embrace the cross with them as God first embraced us all on the cross. I want embrace our solidarity with them in embracing that one and only foundation we have in Jesus Christ himself who said, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” I want to honor the cross by seeking solidarity with all those Christ died for, especially those fellow believers who have embraced the cross in return by faith and through him we can bear the fruit of God’s reconciliation together.