Love it or Hate it, You Must Confront the Cross
For decades, the West has been steadily cutting itself off from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God not of the dead but of the living. Is it any wonder the West is dying before our eyes?
What follows is a reflection on the duty to pursue and believe in the Truth, borne of a desire to enter into dialogue with those similarly in thrall to that duty—in this case, Muslims. A dear friend of mine from my undergraduate days has offered to translate the essay into Arabic so that anyone who wishes to read it and reflect upon it may do so. Anyone is welcome to respond to it. I believe that this essay will be of particular interest to those who are curious to read an American Christian perspective from someone who cares about religion.
In the Gorgias, Socrates argued with Callicles, the sophist who rejected beauty, truth, and goodness, and tried to show that, in the final analysis, Callicles was in disagreement with himself. Similarly, the ultimate aim of this essay is to suggest that the things that all persons most care about, regardless of their religious faith (or lack thereof), find their perfect fulfillment in Christ and His Bride, the Church.
I hope anyone reading this opening salvo, and any exchanges that follow, will benefit in some way from the clash of the written word.
-Deion
As I see it, the West’s signal feature at present is its lack of reverence for God. Its people have forgotten Him. Their churches are empty. Consequently, they worship cruel, demanding idols: diversity, equity, inclusion, tolerance, comfort, status, sex, and self-expression. The list goes on.
It’s not that Westerners hate God; rather, they live as though He is not real, or if He is, that His existence is of no practical relevance. Nothing about their everyday lives suggests an awareness, let alone a respect, for God and His will. For decades and decades, like a fool sawing the branch on which he sits, the West has been steadily cutting itself off from “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”—“not the God of the dead, but of the living.” Mt. 22:32 (NASB). So dramatic is this rejection that Millennials are choosing to sterilize themselves rather than obey God’s very first command to Man in the Garden: to be fruitful and multiply. Gen. 1:28.
Is it any wonder that the West is dying before our eyes?
Not so in the Islamic world—despite the fact that Islam embodies dangerous perversions of the truth about God, Jesus Christ, and salvation. There, belief in God is alive and well. I am a staunch, devout Catholic, and it pains me deeply to see this disparity.
That said, I respect the fervor with which Muslims practice their religion. In light of the West’s existential ennui, its decadence, it is refreshing to realize that tens of millions hold fast to their faith despite being immersed in the corrosive acid that is modernity. I write in a shared spirit. I take God seriously, as do millions of Muslims. We are devoted to God and love Him more than we fear the world’s punishments because God is sovereign over all things and has conquered the world. We know the God of history—and, critically, that God is not History.
From this common ground, we can reason together. Is. 1:18. We can wrestle with what religion—the virtue of giving God his due—requires of us.
All things being equal, it is better to believe in something rather than nothing, and it is better to believe things fervently than to be lukewarm. Nobody likes fence sitters—Christ least of all. In the Apocalypse, He will spit the lukewarm out of His mouth. Rev. 3:16. An open mind is like an open mouth: the point is to close it on something solid. Perpetual fence sitting is not a mark of a sophisticated “neutrality” that lingers until sufficient “evidence” presents itself. In reality, it is a choice for spiritual decay and, eventually, death.
You either get off the fence or you rot there.
Someone who sincerely and strongly believes a given proposition, even if he is in error, is superior to someone who is apathetic when confronted by fundamental questions of reality, or who is hostile to the prospect that he must take such questions seriously. The former person, at least, believes that the questions themselves matter—which means that he cares about the answers and is open to new information. But the latter one, for whom existential issues are of equal or lesser import than what’s for dinner—he is a lost cause. Such a one’s soul is deaf to the call of religion, which represents a “divine map,” if you will, for understanding reality: whence Man has come and whither he is going, how he ought to act during his brief but weighty sojourn on Earth, and what his relationship to God fundamentally consists in.
On these things, Islam gets key things wrong. But, again, it is better to be wrong and care deeply about such issues than to be apathetic or hostile to the possibility of there being any truth to be found regarding them, let alone a truth that binds. (St. Augustine of Hippo endorsed the etymology of religion as “to bind.”)
As I write this, we are in the heart of Lent, the Church’s annual commemoration of the mystery of Jesus’ 40-day struggle in the desert with the world, the flesh, and Satan. The culmination of Lent is Easter Sunday, the day of the Lord’s glorious Resurrection from the dead, followed 50 days later by Pentecost—the birthday of the Church, when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles in the form of tongues of fire. Acts 2:1–11. Muslims, on the other hand, believe that God created a Jesus “look alike” to die in His place at Golgotha.
Muslims flee from the Cross by insisting that Jesus Himself escaped its logic. And if Jesus did, then so can we, for no servant is greater than his master. Jn. 13:16. This is wrong, but it’s attractive and even sensible if you happen to find yourself gravitating toward Islam. As St. Paul proclaims, the Cross is “to Jews a stumbling block, and to Gentiles foolishness.” 1 Cor. 1:23. Naturally, then, people will struggle with the Cross’s meaning. Nonetheless, something must be done about the Cross.
One can either accept it or reject it, but ignoring it is definitely not an option.
To reject the Cross is to reject Jesus as the Son of God, and to embrace the Cross is to embrace Jesus as the Son of God. Thus, to hold, as Muslims do, that Muhammad is the greater of the two is to hold that Jesus did not endure the Cross. For, if He did, then He would be greater than Muhammad.
Yes, I am saying that to have died on the Cross is a greater feat—infinitely greater, in truth—than to have escaped it. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus humbly and obediently abandons Himself to His Father’s gracious will as He anticipatorily suffers His impending death at Golgotha: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.” Mt. 26:39. He does this because although “He already existed in the form of God,” He “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself by taking the form of a [slave] and being born in the likeness of men.” Phil. 2:6–7. Power is meant to serve the weak; therefore, the greatest of all must be the servant of all. Mt. 23:11–12. Jesus lives out this command perfectly, and He calls each one of us to do the same. Heb. 4:15; Mt. 5:48.
I’m aware that this sounds bizarre. Even I, a faithful, orthodox Catholic, sometimes find myself recoiling from these teachings. They are utterly strange, and they defy human logic, which prizes strength, beauty, power, intellect, and competence over weakness, ugliness, impotence, simplicity, and incompetence. Nonetheless, the Lord says, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, / Nor are your ways My ways . . . For as the heavens are higher than the earth, / So are My ways higher than your ways / And My thoughts than your thoughts.” Is. 55:8–9. Indeed, God deliberately chooses “the foolish things of the world to shame the wise” and the “weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong.” 1 Cor. 1:27.
Mary sings of the loveliness of “Divine inversion” when she visits her cousin Elizabeth, who was then most of the way through her pregnancy with John the Baptist: “He has brought down rulers from their thrones, / And has exalted those who were humble. / He has filled the hungry with good things, / And sent the rich away empty-handed.” Lk. 1:52–53. All this to say, “the foolishness of God is wiser than mankind, and the weakness of God is stronger than mankind.” 1 Cor. 1:25.
God, because he is so radically Other, is infinitely surprising. But that does not mean that we can’t follow His plan, albeit at a distance and with quite a bit of spiritual effort. He leaves us a trail, and He walks beside us as we journey, like pilgrims, to our eternal home with Him. He encourages and strengthens us on the way.
In point of fact, the Cross is an essential feature of the economy of salvation. As St. Athanasius of Alexandria explained 17 centuries ago, it’s deeply fitting that the Son of God took on human flesh and endured His most sorrowful Passion to save mankind from sin and death. Christ “took pity on our race, and had mercy on our infirmity, and condescended to our corruption, and, unable to bear that death should have the mastery—lest the creature should perish, and His Father's handiwork in men be spent for nought—He takes unto Himself a body, and that of no different sort from ours.”
God’s fundamental essence, if we can be so bold as to identify such a thing, is love. Scripture says that God is love. 1 Jn. 4:16. Jesus is “both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation”—the definitive self-revelation of God to Man. Dei Verbum § 2. Critically, to love requires community: One cannot love alone, in solitude. Aristotle’s Prime Mover is solitary, self-sufficient, and appears to lack nothing. But it does: friendship and love. As Pope St. John Paul II taught, “God in his deepest mystery is not a solitude.”
God is three distinct Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each shares the same substance, and all are, together, in a relationship of self-giving love from all eternity: a dance. (The Church Fathers used the Greek term perichoresis—something like the admittedly clunky phrase “interpenetrative indwelling.”) Without getting too deep in the weeds, and to avoid introducing confusion about the deepest mystery, it is enough to say, “The divine Unity is Triune.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 254.
God’s love is so immense and intense, so superabundant, that it overflowed into Creation, reaching its pinnacle in Man, who was created in God’s own image and likeness, through the Son, the Word of God, through Whom all things were made, and without Whom nothing was made. Gen. 1:26; Jn. 1:3. When Man fell, God set in motion a plan to save him, to bring him into eternity with Himself. That is what the Old Testament catalogs. All of it points to Jesus, Who is the culmination of that plan. Lk. 24:27.
In brief, God became a Man, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, so that Man might become like God, to be taken up into the inner life of the Most Holy Trinity to behold the Beatific Vision for ever and ever.
Jesus is the Good Shepherd. He is extreme in his desire to find the one lost sheep, even leaving behind the 99 others in His flock to do so, and “[w]hen he has found it, he puts it on his shoulders, rejoicing.” Lk. 15:5. Jesus is the Good Samaritan. He recklessly and profligately risks His own life to save the life of a complete stranger on a dangerous road. Lk. 10:25–37. Jesus is like the Prodigal Son’s father, who, when the son “was still a long way off, [the father] saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him,” giving him a robe, a ring, sandals, and throwing a banquet feast in celebration of his return—even after that same son “devoured” the father’s “wealth with prostitutes”! Lk. 15:20, 22–23, 30.
Simply put, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God. As St. Paul writes, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Rm. 8:38–39.
Beyond all that, however, the Cross is deeply consonant both with reality and God’s character. Let us ponder why. The story of the holy Job helps.
In brief, after much suffering, reproach, dialogue, sorrow, affirmations of innocence, and prayers for relief, Job hears God speak, “from the whirlwind”: “‘Who is this who darkens the divine plan / By words without knowledge? / Now tighten the belt on your waist like a man, / And I shall ask you, and you inform Me! / Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? / Tell Me, if you have understanding.’” Job 38:1–4. After Job proclaims his ignorance of God’s wisdom, God instructs him to pray for his friends, and, when he has done so, he restores Job’s fortunes tenfold. Job 38:5–42:16. “And Job died, an old man and full of days.” Job 42:17.
There is something deeply true about this story. And yet, what strikes me is how ultimately unsatisfying it is. Yes, God’s majesty, wisdom, power, and designs are infinitely greater than our comprehension. Certainly Muslims hold to that. In Islam, God is pure will, so alien and transcendent that we cannot fathom anything of His “logic,” so to speak. If God commands that white is black, and vice versa, then so it is.
But this is not the Catholic way. We believe God is intelligible to us, even if only by what He is not—i.e., by negative implication we can know something of and about God. He has a “reason” proper to Him, even if it is not easy to grasp in our limited and fallible human perspective. And this is why the Cross happened: Because God is not content to thunder at us from within a whirlwind, cloaked in over-aweing power, might, and strength. He does not “pull rank” with shock-and-awe tactics, though He has every right to do so.
Instead, He does the most sublime thing possible. He enters into the mess—the pain and brokenness—of human existence, becoming a real human being, and by doing so utterly transforms human being. He confronts human depravity, sin, and death, and He completely destroys their power. He does not leave us alone to wail about our suffering, much of which is caused by human freedom, a necessary precondition for knowing, loving, and serving God. Instead, He so thoroughly respects our freedom that He allows us to misuse it in the most dreadful manner: to commit deicide against His only Son. He communicates with and lives among us in a manner befitting our rational natures, even though it requires Him to stoop down to our level. He takes us seriously by standing in radical solidarity with the human race; rather than merely explain why suffering, sin, and death do not have the last word—like some aloof, cosmic professor would—He shows us, viscerally, by partaking in that most terrifying and mysterious part of being human: dying (often painfully).
But, because He is God, He conquers death by rising from the dead on the third day, totally destroying in the process the power of sin, which was buried with Him but stayed in the tomb where it belongs.
All this to say, the Cross is simply the logical result of God’s nature, His very being and essence. God, a divine community of Persons Who love each other infinitely, desires to share that love with human beings, whom He created in His infinite freedom and goodness in order to know, love, and serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
God wills our ultimate good, all of the time. He never stops. God is constantly laboring in our lives, to bring everyone into knowledge of the truth and, thus, salvation. So much so that He would lower Himself to be born of a woman, the blessed Virgin Mary, and live as a Man, to show us how to live as God would have us live. In, on, and through the Cross, Jesus reconciled all things to Himself. 1 Tim. 2:4; Col. 1:20.
This is why the Cross had to happen. It does not matter how far we have sunk into the muck of sin. Even unto death, God would not—indeed, He cannot—stop pursuing us. Which is why we cry out, in joy, thanksgiving, and awe, each year on Easter, “O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!”