Know Me By My Cross

"When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom.  For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.  And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.  My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power,  so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God."

1 Corinthians 2: 1-5 (NRSV)

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Dear Kate,

Words with power, speak death to our despairs and life to a hope that breaks the totalizing spell cast over us.

This past week I read a very simple sentence that shook me to the core, so simple that I should have known how to---and indeed should have had put the words together this way much earlier on in my faith journey.

It goes something like this: To be a disciple of Jesus means allowing one's own identity to be determined by the identity of the one who died forsaken on the cross.

No exaggeration: the moment I read it, a most "generous orthodoxy," I was a changed man, again.  I pledged my life anew to follow Jesus and shall do that again every new morning in ever more creative ways.  I am a freed man.

Isn't it strange, that Paul "decided to know nothing among (the Corinthians) except Jesus Christ, and him crucified."  Why not him resurrected?  Fleming Rutledge went on to say: "The Crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the Resurrection, is given its proper significance."

There is a well-known saying, by Richard Niebuhr: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross."  Santa brings candy cane to a sugar-poisoned town.

How do I know I am an authentic Christian, a true disciple of Jesus?  It is by whether I allow my own identity to be determined by the identity of the one who died forsaken on the cross.  How does this self-identification change everything that is me?

I am in no place to judge others (and why anyway?), but knowing that my faith story is played out in a "communion of saints," I do question others' self-identity.  Not that any Christian community will ever be perfect (far from it!), but I must pay attention and never turn a blind eye on a culture that despises the Cross.  I don't expect "the world out there" to know the Way of the Cross, but I do not presume they don't either.  (In fact I suspect not infrequently they know better.  God has His ways.)  Yet it is unfaithful of me to sit down and shut up if the church despises the Cross.

Do we know ourselves?  What do people know us for?

Yours, Alex