Love it or hate it, you must confront the Cross
In which I make an attempt to proselytize Muslims
A dear friend of mine from college suggested that I open up a dialogue with those in the Islamic world, where “history isn’t at its end” and “religion is still alive.” He offered to translate the following essay into Arabic. If anyone responds, he’ll translate that into English, and we’ll have a dialogue on our hands. If you like this, please let me know in the comments, and I’ll find a way keep this style of writing coming. —DAK
At present, the West’s singular, distinctive feature 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 is not that Westerners hate God; rather, they simply live as though He is not real, or that, if He is, 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 who saws off the branch on which he is sitting, the West has been cutting itself off from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God not of the dead, but of the living. So dramatic is this rejection that Millennials are choosing to sterilize themselves rather than being fruitful and multiplying, as God in Genesis commands. (See Gen. 1:28.)
Is it any wonder the West is dying before our eyes?
Not so in the Islamic world, even though, to be clear, my view is 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 Catholic, and it pains me deeply to see this disparity.
But do not hear what I am not saying. I am a staunch Catholic, though I certainly 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 take their faith seriously in the face of the corrosive acid of modernity. I write in a shared spirit. I take God seriously, and so do millions of Muslims. We are devoted to God, and we do not 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. 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 also better to believe things fervently than to be lukewarm. Nobody likes fence sitters—Christ least of all. He says that He will spit the lukewarm out of His mouth at the end of time! (See Rev. 3:16.) Perpetually sitting on the fence 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 get off the fence, or you rot there.
Someone who sincerely and strongly believes some 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, at least, believes the questions themselves matter—which means he cares about the answers and is open to new information. But the one for whom existential issues are of equal or even lesser import to 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.
I write in the Roman Catholic Church’s Easter season. On Easter Sunday, and throughout the 50-day Easter season, which ends on Pentecost—the birthday of the Church, when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles in the form of tongues of fire (see Acts 2:1-11)—Catholics commemorate Jesus Christ’s Resurrection from the dead following His brutal Crucifixion on Good Friday. Muslims, on the other hand, believe that God created a Jesus “look alike” to die in His place.
The effect of such a view is an avoidance of the Cross by insisting that Jesus Himself avoided it. And if Jesus did that, then, logically, so can we. This is wrong, but it makes sense, if find yourself attracted to Islam. As St. Paul explains, the Cross is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (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 that the prophet Muhammad is the greater of the two, then of course Jesus did not endure the Cross—for, if He did, He would be greater than Muhammad.
Yes, I am saying that to die on the Cross is greater—infinitely greater, in truth—than to have escaped it. Jesus humbly and obediently abandons Himself to His Father’s gracious will as He suffers the anticipation of His impending death in the Garden of Gethsemane: “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” (Mt. 26:39.) He does this because “though He was in the form of God, [He] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited” (Phil. 2:6). The greatest of all must be the servant of all. (See Mt. 23:11-12.) Jesus lives out this command perfectly (see Heb. 4:15), and He calls us to do the same (see Mt. 5:48).
I am aware that this is bizarre. Even I, a faithful, orthodox Catholic, sometimes find myself recoiling from these teachings. They are quite strange; they defy human logic, which prizes strength, beauty, power, intellect, and competence. Nonetheless, the Lord says, “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.” (See Is. 55:8-9.)
Mary sings about the loveliness of “divine inversion” when she visits her cousin Elizabeth, who was then far along in her pregnancy with John the Baptist: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” (See Lk. 1:52-53.) All this to say, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor. 1:25.)
God, because he is so radically Other, is infinitely surprising. But that does not mean that we cannot 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. And it is fitting that the Son of God should endure His Passion to save mankind from sin and death.
God’s fundamental essence, if we can be so bold as to identify such a thing, is love. Scripture says that God is love: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” (1 Jn. 4:16.) Jesus is “both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation” (See Dei Verbum § 2)—the definitive self-revelation of God to Man. Critically, love requires community. One cannot love alone. Aristotle’s Prime Mover is solitary and self-sufficient, appearing to lack nothing. But it does: friendship and love.
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. Without getting too deep in the weeds, and to avoid confusion, it is enough to say, “The divine Unity is Triune.” (See Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 254.)
God’s love is so immense and intense that it overflowed into Creation, reaching its pinnacle in Man, who was created in God’s own image and likeness (see Gen. 1:26), through the Son, the Word of God, through Whom all things were made, and without Whom nothing was made. (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 describes. All of it points to Jesus, Who is the culmination of that plan.
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 lays it on his shoulders and rejoices.” (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. (See Lk. 10:25-37.) Jesus is akin to the Prodigal Son’s father, who, “while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him” (Lk. 15:20), giving him a robe, a ring, sandals, and throwing a banquet feast in celebration of his return (Lk. 15:22-23)—even after that same son “devoured [his] property with prostitutes”! (Lk. 15:30.)
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 rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God 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, “out of the whirlwind: ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to 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 42:1-16.) “And Job died, old and full of days.” (Job 42:17.)
There is something deeply true about this story. And yet, it is striking in how unsatisfying it ultimately 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 He transforms it utterly. 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 use it 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; 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 it by rising from the dead on the third day, totally destroying the power of sin in the process.
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 doing so. God is constantly laboring in our lives, to bring everyone into knowledge of the truth and, thus, salvation. (See 1 Tim. 2:4.) 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. (See 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!”
Update (May 1, 2022, 5:39 p.m.): Minor grammatical changes.
I salute you in your effort, Deion--I think at times like this, when the scourge of secularism is so biting, it is important for those who believe to discuss openly with one another those things in which they believe. Aside from that, while this piece is obviously not aimed at me, I appreciate it nonetheless. It is a lovely meditation on the cross, and its centrality not just to our salvation story, but to everything that we believe as Catholics. Well done.
Deion, I didn't realize that Muslims believed that Christ was not the one who was crucified. Interesting. I rather hope a Muslim posts a rebuttal here, because I would be intrigued to see how they frame it... I honestly know virtually nothing about Islam. As you say, though, you have to respect the fact that Muslims love (and fear) God with a passion most Westerners long forgot.