Jesus the Crucified and Resurrected Lord Part 2
In the last entry, I discussed the “theology of glory” and the “theology of the cross” and my difficulty with both. I also mentioned how I feel that the problem is essentially Christological. How do we relate the cross and the resurrection in the person of Jesus himself?
In verse thirty of Luke 24, the resurrected Jesus sits down with two disciples who as of yet had not recognized that it was Him, who had not received the hope of resurrection that prevails over their present despondency. Luke is well aware here of the continued significance of the breaking of bread in Christian liturgy. It is at this point more than any other that every believer finds entrance into this story. Even if in our own disillusionment we grow accustomed and anesthetized to our own pain, disappointment and despair, we know that when Jesus breaks the bread, that we are the ones on the receiving end.
At the table, the resurrected Jesus enacts the same symbolic actions of the Last Supper and therein reveals himself as the crucified one. The resurrected one shows reveals himself as the crucified one. The crucifixion is not something Jesus has left behind forever in the triumph of life. The Christianity of the resurrected Lord is ever and always faith and trust in the crucified resurrected Lord. Resurrection in and of itself implies death, and for Jesus every-time his resurrection is mentioned, his crucifixion is implied. It is the symbolic reenactment of the crucifixion, which continues on in the liturgical life of the people of God, that the resurrected Lord is recognized and never apart from such is he known. Later on the resurrected Jesus would only be recognized by his disciples as he shows them his hands and feet (cf. Thomas in the Gospel of John). The contradiction of death remains present in every revelation of the resurrected Lord. He opens the eyes of others to himself in his own contradiction of death and life and herein frees us to live in the contradiction of death and life, promised hope and existing reality, that perpetually surrounds us. We do not live in the power of the resurrection by a denial of the deadliness of death, by the suppression of pain, by the avoidance of suffering or by the reframing of disastrous tragedies as an unmixed blessing.
“Through the knowledge of the resurrection of the crucified the contradiction that is always and everywhere perceptible in an unredeemed world, and the sorrow and suffering caused by that world, are taken up into the confidence of hope, while on the other hand hope’s confidence becomes earthly and universal. Any kind of docetic hope which leaves earthly conditions or corporeal existence to the mercy of their own contradictoriness and restricts itself to the Church, to the cultus or to believing inwardness, is therefore a denial of the cross. The hope that is born of the cross and the resurrection transforms the negative, contradictory and torturing aspects of the world into terms of ‘not yet’, and does not suffer them to end in ‘nothing’.” Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope
Thus, the “theology of the cross” and the “theology of glory” become an eschatological dialectic of “already but not yet.” In the present we recognize the presence of suffering, sin and death, as that for which Christ died and rose to defeat and destroy. We do not glorify them as redemptive. The redemption of God is against and away from the realities that mark the present age of sin and death. We suffer under these woeful elements, groaning for the liberation of the earth and partnering with God to bring forth and implement, in the power of the Spirit, that suffusing dawn of the new age that Christ has accomplished and sent bursting forth in his resurrection. The “theology of the cross” and the “theology of glory” cannot look at each other in bewilderment from across a sharp divide. One side cannot berate the other for being overly optimistic and enthusiastic, from which they cannot in turn rise insensitively “from glory to glory” wondering why the rest don’t “get it together.” The cross and the resurrection, though inherently contradictory, with one annihilating the other, must be held together in the life of faith. We must honestly reckon with the painful absence of God in the earth as humanity pines in suffering, while also holding to the hope of new creation declared in the resurrection. From that place we can then move forward with both sensitivity and courage, with tender and valiant hearts proclaiming, embodying and expanding God’s kingdom of freedom, righteousness, justice and life on the earth.
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