The dinner party has settled at the table, the hostess is inspecting the silverware, passing around the new wine. A young man at the end of the table is eager to talk politics, religion, wants to talk all the things your not supposed to say in polite company, in the company of politeness. The theopoet is smelling his dinner, he is high off of the intoxication of dinner, friends and conversation.
He is passionate.
This is dangerous for a theopoet. Theopoets get rilled up so easily, they fall in love with the God and the world over and over again, only to have their hearts break. The hostess is on edge, this is one of her husbands friends, she thinks, and not suitable dinner company.
Before us now is the task of the theopoetic and the cross. This cross is the so-called scandal of the church but functions more often than not as an instrument of torture, abuse and conquest.[1] We have ceased to be scandalized by the cross but have taken on the task of scandalizing with the cross. Those of us who have faith must live with this scorn, that the holiness of our religious imagery is the image of abuse, as Brock says, of divine child abuse.[2] But the cross as scandal exists as such by the merit of its being a place of reversal, of danger. It is an unholy event, it is a profane event and it is as such that it becomes for the Christian a place of revelation and of hiding of God.[3] We hold the cross as revelation next to the idea that Jesus was killed by political authorities and for political ideals.[4] The cross is a scandal in that we turn to a politically dangerous and revolutionary leader for our inspiration, it is dangerous because by wearing the cross around our neck we reveal that we will not be had by their torture, by the way states and corporations cut down criticism, shut off protest, even death can’t silence this cross, this revelation, this hiding and revealing and hiding again of a God who prefers to make godself known in death, in margin, in prison, in execution and in political scandal and in resurrection, that’s right, even in the unknown, the unpredicted, the surprise of God and life.
The cross announces embarrassment to the church and to the world, that the unholy is the holy, that it is revelation that faith is not wrapped up in our neat moralities, our safe pleasantries. It is a degrading punishment, a punishment done in public, hung up for your mother to see, for your friends to balk at.[5] The Israeli people knew this, that to be hung on a cross was to be rejected by your people, to be cursed among Gods people, to be excluded from the covenant life.[6] To worship a God revealed in crucifixion is to be inappropriate, it is to enter the task of Holy and Wholly Inappropriateness as spiritual calling.[7] It is to take up the holy task of profanity.
Our Moral Majorities are interested in a clean country, a strict sense of what is moral and what is not. Our Moral Majorities announce who is rejected by God, who is outside the blessing. This, of course, is not the cross. The cross wants the reverse, wants to drag our eyes to dangerous places. The cross wants us to be shocked that whenever we announce something as unholy God pops up there, spirituality pops up there, faith and life flourish. To be moral in this sense is to not be inappropriate; it is not to be a scandal and a shock. How can we announce the ‘enterprise of God’ come if we are busy maintaining the moral order? How can we announce the enterprise of God if we are too busy turning away from the scandal and revelation of bodies that break?
Alberto L. Garcia places Luther and the theology of the cross squarely in the liberation theology tradition; he says that the key to the theology of the cross is to see it as living, as active, as a form of discipleship in the world.[8] This cross of discipleship is not a cheerful object, is no rose color cross, it is no multi colored cross[9]. Those cross’s can come out of the theology of the cross, can be a way of speaking revelation in a particular context, a way of voicing discipleship in a particular community. But to get there is to go through a repugnant object, an ugly thing, a scandal.
This scandal of the cross is a cross against the church, against society. It is a cross that reveals the broken bodies, the holiness of being profane and inappropriate. As Luther would have told us in this theology we bring Christ to others and also carry others in their burden as Christ would have carried and embraced them.[10] But it assumes that they must be saved out of their revelation, must be saved into our condition, our place in society. To do this requires them to be saved away from the cross, away from the experience and revelation of God. Instead we must come to a new place, a place where we not save the neighbor but are instead saved to them[11].
CRASH
The hostess has dropped her fork, one hand to her chest, her breathing a little rough, a little tight in her chest. She is unsure of what to say, her eyes search faces and one hand plays at the edge of the table pulling at the table cloth.
“Excuse me?”
“We are saved out of holiness and into the profane; we are called into profanity, into immorality, into the filthy.”
A young man at the end of the table is fidgeting; he is excited and scared by the idea all at the same time. Words want to bubble out of him in a mess of language and emotion. He is not sure how to proceed, not sure what to say or do. He pushes the chicken around his plate.
“But” he is stammering, his words are yawning out of him. “What about…poor people, and the children on TV, the starving ones in
“Jesus Christ!”
“Don’t swear.” Your hostess is pouring another wine, a deep red in crystal. She doesn’t get it, your so-called swearing, that you are declaring revelation, you are declaring virgin birth, a God who gets godself born into impossible situations, into dangerous messes and among animals and shit and filth and political danger.
Bibliography
Altmann, Walter. Luther and Liberation : A Latin American Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.
Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation : History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988.
[1] Cite
[2] Brock,?
[3] Walter Altmann, Luther and Liberation : A Latin American Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992).?
[4] Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation : History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988).81
[5] Moltmann, 33
[6] Moltmann,33
[7] Ibid, 34
[8] Garcia, 92
[9] Moltman, 34
[10] Garcia, 24
[11] Gutiérrez., ?
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