8

Paul’s Cross-Centered Life

I KNOW THIS guy who, as a teenager, read an article in Popular Science—one of those articles that says we use only 15 percent of our brains and speculates about what the human race might be capable of if we figured out how to use more of it. As proof of this claim, the article suggested this: try reading a novel upside down and from back to front. Your brain, the article claimed, is amazing and will be able to decode the novel. You will understand the book by the time you finish it.

Being a nerdy fourteen-year-old living in the moonscape of West Texas, my friend decided to give it a try. And lo and behold, it worked. He understood the book, even though he’d read it upside down and backward. Now, as a result of training his brain, this guy can read four hundred pages per hour. You might call my friend “scary smart.” The more I read the letters of the Apostle Paul, I suspect that his contemporaries would use the same words to describe him.

And, as it turns out, Paul came to understand Jesus’ life the same way—in reverse.

Getting the Story Backward

Mostly, we hear stories from beginning to end. That’s how we make sense of a plot. The three-act play, on which almost every movie is based, follows the beginning-to-end format: 1) cat gets stuck in tree; 2) several unsuccessful attempts are made to get cat out of tree; 3) cat gets rescued from tree. But occasionally a story comes along that’s told in reverse—like the film Memento or the Seinfeld episode in which the cast attends a wedding in India—and we realize that we can, in fact, make sense of stories that are told in reverse or in other discombobulated ways. We mentally rearrange the parts, and the story goes from nonsensical to comprehensible.

Peter, John, Mary, Martha, and the other disciples had seen Jesus’ life unfold in a conventional manner. They’d joined him on his journeys, heard him teach and seen him perform miracles, watched his popularity grow among the crowds and the opposition harden among the leaders of the Temple. They’d witnessed his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion. He’d appeared to them—bodily—after his death, and he was ultimately swept into the clouds before their eyes.

The Gospels and Acts are rife with examples of the disciples slowly getting it, understanding who Jesus was and what his mission was. It dawned on them over time that Jesus was the Messiah, albeit an unexpected Messiah. In the Gospel of Mark, this transition from nonunderstanding to understanding is explained with a story. A blind man is brought to Jesus when he’s in Bethsaida. Jesus puts saliva on his hands and places his hands on the man’s eyes.¹

“Can you see anything?” Jesus asks.

“I can see people, but they look like trees, walking,” the man responds.

Jesus touches the man’s eyes again, and the blind man’s sight is completely restored. Mark reports, “And he saw everything clearly.”

This story stands right at the center of Mark’s Gospel, and the author is sending his readers a message. The disciples, portrayed as bumbling fools in the first half of the Gospel, don’t see who Jesus really is. But in the second half, the scales begin to fall from their eyes, and over time they see clearly that Jesus is the Messiah. The Gospels, written in the sixties (Mark), seventies (Matthew and Luke), and nineties (John), tell the story of Jesus much the way that the disciples experienced it, from beginning to end. And most of us learn the story in just that way, starting with Jesus’ birth in a stable and ending with his death on a cross.

Paul had no such luxury. He didn’t meet Jesus during Jesus’ life. He never saw a miracle, heard a sermon, or witnessed a debate with the Pharisees (his own political party). Instead, he met the Risen Christ on the road as he was making his way to Damascus, intent on persecuting Christians. In an instant, sometime in the midthirties, Paul went from a persecutor of Christians to a Christian himself. He immediately began preaching Jesus as the Messiah but was quickly set upon by his former compatriots.

Even Christians doubted him; in Acts, Luke reports that shortly after the Damascus Road conversion, Paul went to Jerusalem to meet the disciples—in Galatians, Paul writes that this is three years after his conversion—but “they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple.”² At that point, Paul exits the scene, and he’s not heard from again for several years.

We know nothing of the “lost years” of Paul. But in the decade between his dramatic conversion and his first missionary journey, Paul clearly did a lot of thinking about the meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Based on the dozen or so letters of his that we have, he concluded that the death and resurrection of Jesus were of supreme importance. Jesus’ life? Not so much. In all of Paul’s letters, there’s not one mention of Jesus teaching a parable, nothing about the miracles, no allusion to his birth in a manger. Maybe Paul didn’t know about these aspects of Jesus’ life—the Gospels likely weren’t written until after Paul’s letters were completed—or maybe he heard the stories of Jesus’ life and considered them unimportant. In either case, Paul pays the life of Jesus no heed. The death and resurrection of Jesus, on the other hand, are Paul’s foremost concern. When he looked back on Jesus, that’s all that mattered to him.

Paul’s epiphany was that the long-awaited Jewish Messiah had come as expected, but he’d come in a way that was totally unexpected. Paul could have turned his back on Judaism altogether. That’s what most people do when they convert: they go from one religion to another, taking nothing with them. When I visited Sri Lanka, I asked a couple of Christians who had converted from Hinduism what they maintained from the religion of their youth. “Nothing!” they assured me, going on to tell me that the gods of the Hindu religion are demonic. I get much the same response from several of my friends who grew up Christian but are now atheists. There is nothing about Christianity that they embrace.

Paul could have done this same thing. He could have rejected Judaism in toto. He could have embraced Jesus as the savior of the world without also considering Jesus the Jewish Messiah—many converts since Paul have made this very choice.

But that’s not what Paul did. Instead, he racked his brain and his spirit to figure out a way that Jesus’ death and resurrection fit into Israel’s longstanding story about themselves and God. What he came up with shaped Christianity indelibly and irreversibly.

N. T. Wright, the preeminent Bible scholar working today, says that one verse in all of Paul’s letters says more about the meaning of Jesus’ death than any other—Romans 8:3: “For God has done what the law (being weak because of human flesh) was incapable of doing. God sent his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as a sin-offering; and, right there in the flesh, he condemned sin.” ³

To Paul’s way of thinking, after the torturous prehistory of Eve and Adam, Abel and Cain, the Tower of Babel, and the ark and the rainbow, God made an everlasting covenant with Abraham and his descendants. They, the Israelites, were uniquely bound to God, in particular through the rite of circumcision and later through the law of Moses.

But after his conversion, Paul saw the law differently. As he spells out most explicitly in his letter to the Galatian church, Paul came to believe that the purpose of the law was not to bring Israel closer to God, but to show Israel how impossible it is to do what God wants.⁴ The law, it turns out, is not the savior; the law shows us our need for a savior.

The law does this by 1) defining sin, and 2) establishing the means of mitigating the consequences of sin through food laws and the sacrificial system. “Through the law comes the knowledge of sin,” Paul writes to the Romans.⁵ The Israelites had a unique understanding of God’s Law because it had been delivered only to them, but consequently they were uniquely accountable for upholding it. Even Moses, to whom the law was delivered, warned the Israelites that their knowledge of the law meant that the curse of the law would fall uniquely on them.⁶ Indeed, Paul writes, even Christ himself was cursed by the law—more accurately, he became the curse of the law.⁷ In other words, even Jesus was not exempt from the consequences of the law.

According to Paul, the law killed Jesus.

Paul on the Crucifixion

The cross is everything to Paul.

For Paul, the “cross of Christ” is a metonym, a word or phrase that acts as a substitute for another, like when journalists use “Washington” as shorthand for the U.S. federal government.⁸ According to Paul, the cross is the gospel, and he uses the “cross of Christ” as a stand-in for the gospel throughout his letters, just as he uses “Christ crucified” as a primary identifier of Jesus. For example: “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”⁹

The cross is also the primary interpretive lens through which Paul understands most everything: his former life, his new life, the law, the Hebrew scripture, and the life of Jesus. It is Jesus’ death on the cross that reveals the righteousness of God, and Jesus’ death on the cross that results in our justification. The cross both fulfills and shows the limits of the law. The cross culminates the various covenants that God has made with Israel through Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. The cross fulfills Old Testament prophecies. The cross discloses the self-sacrificial nature of God. The cross exhibits the love-bond between the Father and the Son. And the cross shows followers of Jesus and lovers of God how they are to live.

The cross is like a giant reset button that God pushed in his relationship with humans and with all of creation. As a result, new things were revealed about God and humanity. Some elements of that relationship, like blood sacrifices and circumcision, were made unnecessary; other elements, like hospitality to the stranger and love of neighbor, were amplified. The whole cosmic state of affairs was rejiggered by Jesus’ death.

Paul’s letters make up over half of the New Testament, and out of all that, two passages stand above the rest in explicating Paul’s view of the cross: Romans 3 and Romans 7–8.

Paul’s letter to the Romans is unique in that it’s the only time he wrote to a church that he hadn’t visited—all of his other congregational correspondence is to churches that he launched himself. He writes to the Romans with a much less paternalistic tone than he does to, say, the Corinthians or Thessalonians. His purpose in writing is to introduce himself—he’s planning to visit the church in Rome on his way to Spain, and he wants to collect from them an offering for the church in Jerusalem—and to establish his theological bona fides. As such, the first eight chapters of Romans are the closest thing we have to Paul’s system of theology.

We don’t know how his letter was received by the church in Rome. Paul did wind up in Rome, but not as he’d planned. He was brought there under house arrest and spent two years pleading his case—and probably teaching the Roman Christians—before he was beheaded by imperial soldiers. Over the spot of his burial today stands the magnificent church San Paulo Fuori le Mura (St. Paul Outside the Walls).

Now let’s look a little more closely at those two passages.

Romans 3

The backdrop to Paul’s famous lines in Romans 3 comes a chapter earlier.¹⁰ The promises of God were delivered to the Jews—they are God’s covenant people. But, Paul argues, God’s promises were not exclusively for the Jews; they came through the Jews. “God shows no partiality,” Paul writes, after saying that both good and bad come through the law, to “the Jew first and also to the Greek.”¹¹ Israel was “entrusted with the oracles of God,” Paul goes on to say, but he continues to make clear that that was for the sake of all humanity.¹² Israel is the conduit through which God achieves the redemption of the world.

Many books have been written by commentators on two words in this chapter, each of which, when read correctly, redirects the entire narrative plumb line of Romans. The first dispute is over a mere preposition. The traditional translation of Romans 3:21–22 reads, “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” But the Greek genitive case doesn’t necessarily mean “in.” It can also mean “of.” Thus, with one slight change, this passage and much of Paul’s theology takes a turn: “ . . . the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe.”¹³ Now we see this narrative arc differently: God is faithful. That’s the message. And that’s a big part of Paul’s message in all of Romans. God’s redemptive plans will not be thwarted, even though Israel has consistently stumbled over the law.

Then Paul reaches his crescendo: in Jesus the Messiah, all of God’s promises are funneled and fulfilled. It is God’s faithfulness to his plan, and Jesus’ faithfulness to that same plan, that is the good news for both Jews and Gentiles. N. T. Wright explains it this way:

            (A) The covenantal God promises to rescue and bless the world through Israel.

            (B) Israel as it stands is faithless to this commission.

            (C) The covenantal God, however, is faithful, and will provide a faithful Israelite—the faithful Israelite, the Messiah.¹⁴

The other disputed word comes in the very next sentence. Paul continues his thoughts, “They are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.”¹⁵

The word translated “sacrifice of atonement” doesn’t mean exactly that. Actually, it refers not to a concept or idea, but to a place: the spot in the Temple where sacrifices were made. “Place of atonement” is a better translation, or even “Mercy Seat.” Again, Paul is saying that everything that’s gone before, the entire history of Israel—the Passover, the Exodus, the Temple sacrifices—is concentrated into the person of Jesus. God’s faithfulness comes to its climax in the life of Jesus and, ultimately, in his death and resurrection.

Romans 7–8

Again we have to back up a bit since Paul hits this chapter already running full speed. In his on-ramp in the previous chapter, Paul again makes clear that the problem in the triangular relationship of God, the law, and humans wasn’t God, and it wasn’t the law. It was the humans. Because of our frailty, which we inherited from Adam, human beings are incapable of keeping the law. Paul writes that our flesh has weakened the law, rendering it impotent to save us. All the law is able to do is to remind us that we’re frail, also known as “sinful.” This could be seen as a weakness of the law, but Paul thinks it’s a strength, for the law is doing its job perfectly, namely, showing us our need for a savior.

According to Paul, the law had been misunderstood by his fellow Jews, just as it had by him when he was a Pharisee. The law cannot save; the law can only show us that we need to be saved. Indeed, the law brings human sinfulness and our need of salvation into their most fully concentrated form, to a single focal point, so that it can be dealt with once and for all.¹⁶

In Romans 3, the entire sacrificial history of Israel is concentrated in Jesus the Messiah, so in Romans 7–8 is all of human sin concentrated in him. Then, on the cross and in the person who represented Israel most perfectly, all sin is condemned.

What this doesn’t mean is that Jesus died because you and I sinned. Instead, it means that sin is endemic to the human condition, that it needed to be conquered, and that on the cross it was. What some see here—that God demanded sacrificial recompense because his holy honor had been disparaged—isn’t really there. Yes, Jesus acts as a substitute for us, but it’s not to appease a wrathful God. Instead, it is to vanquish sin.

Like all Jews of his day, Paul both expected and longed for the Messiah. Exactly no one, Paul included, expected the Messiah to be defeated and executed by the Romans. They expected just the opposite. The Messiah was going to free Israel from oppression, expel the foreign colonizers, and finally bring about the national sovereignty that had long been promised. This very expectation is what prompted the leaders of the Temple in Jerusalem to reject the claims of Jesus’ followers that Jesus was the Messiah, so they colluded with the Roman governor to have him killed.

Therefore, when Paul was confronted by the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus, he had to recalibrate himself intellectually, spiritually, and theologically. He went away for a few years to get his head straight, and he did a one-eighty. When he emerged as a Christian preacher and church planter, as described in the second half of Acts, he had made sense of a crucified Messiah. His theological rationale for an executed savior consumes much of his writing, and the outworking of that—the ethics of the Christian life, how a Christian is to live in the shadow of the crucifixion—can rightly be said to comprise his entire corpus.

It can be argued that Paul was the first theologian, that he invented theology. Athens had its philosophers, and Jerusalem had its priests and prophets, but Paul was the first person to really theologize about religious events. And the prime event about which he theologized was the crucifixion and the puzzle of an executed Messiah.

When I teach “Introduction to the New Testament” at the state university, I always give the undergrads the same assignment for the final essay. After a semester of the Gospels and Acts and Paul and the other letters of the New Testament, I ask the students to take a position on this question and explain their answer: “Did Paul continue the religion that was started by Jesus, or did he use an aspect of Jesus’ life to launch a new religion?”

There are two reasons that I can even ask this question: (1) the Gospel writers are almost completely uninterested in the meaning of Jesus’ death, and (2) Paul is almost completely uninterested in the meaning of Jesus’ life.

Some look at Paul’s theologizing about the crucifixion and see an exclusively substitutionary view. But N. T. Wright cautions us not to impute this to Paul. Paul’s view of the efficacy of Jesus’ death, Wright argues, is far more complex than many would like to admit. In fact, Paul is anything but unequivocal, and Wright sees at least six aspects to Paul’s understanding of the atonement: representation, substitution, sacrifice, judicial punishment, Israel’s purpose, and divine victory.¹⁷ Each of these themes can be found in Paul’s letters and sermons. As we’ve already discovered, the death of Jesus contains a surplus of meaning, and surely there is not one single take on his death that answers every question or exhausts all possibilities, at least not for Paul.

However, Paul does introduce an innovation that we didn’t see in the Gospels. For the writers of Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John, the death of Jesus was seen exclusively through the lens of the Passover sacrifice—a Messiah leading the people into liberation. While Paul acknowledges this, he also introduces the idea that Jesus was the Yom Kippur sacrifice, an atonement in blood, meant to cleanse sin. It’s not that Paul disagrees with the Gospels; it’s that he emphasizes a very different part of Jewish sacrificial life. And Paul stresses individual human sin as making Jesus’ atoning blood necessary, an idea that is absent from the Gospels.

Living the Crucifixion

God revealed something essential about himself in the crucifixion. That’s central for Paul. What God revealed is that he is unequivocally on the side of human beings—all human beings, both Jew and Gentile. And if the crucifixion tells us something central about God, it also tells us something about how we’re supposed to live as followers of God. Several of Paul’s more memorable lines continue this theme:

           Romans 6:6—“We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.”

           Galatians 2:20—“It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

           Galatians 5:24—“And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”

I was talking to Rabbi Joseph recently, and he said, “You know, Paul was right—the cross is a stumbling block for the Jews!”¹⁸ What he meant is that for Jews, the Lord is unseeable and ineffable. For God to pour himself into human flesh is unthinkable for Jews. For that human flesh to be nailed to a tree is beyond unthinkable. According to Rabbi Joseph, the crucifixion, and Paul’s take on it, is exactly why nascent Christianity grew so much more quickly among Gentiles than it did among Jews.

For Paul, everything is implicated by the crucifixion. Life itself, life in the flesh, is to be crucified. When Paul wrote letters back to the congregations that he’d founded, they were full of exhortations that the people were to subjugate themselves in every way, just as God had subjugated himself on the cross. A godly life means forsaking pleasures, practicing self-control, even punishing your body until you bring it into submission. Similarly, human relationships—between husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave, business associates—are to be characterized by submission. In the church, members were taught to share their money, food, and possessions. And all of this stems from the crucifixion of Jesus, the impetus for every aspect of life.

For all the words that have been written trying to uncover Paul’s theology of the cross, it was the ethics of the cross that most interested him. What he hoped for the people he’d led to faith and the congregations he’d founded was that they would live out the example that God set on the cross: self-limitation, humility, and submission. That, for Paul, was the lesson in Jesus’ death.

Throughout this journey, we’re looking for love in the event of the crucifixion. We’ve seen humanity’s and Israel’s history with sacrifice, and we’ve looked at how the Gospels portray the life and death of Jesus. Now we have considered Paul’s contribution—the first overtly theological contribution to the understanding of the crucifixion. For Paul, the love of God is shown in the cross because God confronts sin head-on. No more food laws or animal sacrifices—now it’s personal. In a passage we’ve already read and will read again later, Paul virtually sings that in Christ and particularly on the cross, God’s humble love for us is on full display:

           Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

               who, though he was in the form of God,

                   did not regard equality with God

                   as something to be exploited,

               but emptied himself,

                   taking the form of a slave,

                   being born in human likeness.

               And being found in human form,

                   he humbled himself

                   and became obedient to the point of death—

                   even death on a cross.¹⁹