A Gruesome Necessity

I spent the past week counseling for a Christian camp put on by a high school in South Korea. The camp was specifically geared towards the spiritual growth of the campers which was evidenced by the three chapel services, 45 minutes of "God and I" time, hour of cabin discussion, and 15 minutes of cabin devotions a day.

One of the sermons the visiting pastor preached centered on the gruesome death of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. In fact, the descriptions of His suffering in this particular sermon left even the most obstinate of listeners squirming from sheer discomfort. To hear how skin, bone, and muscle were violently ripped apart; to listen to details of internal organ failure and the order in which they failed; to picture the complete and total agony of crucifixion from mental, spiritual, and physical perspectives seemed to push the entire congregation to near exhaustion.

Two things came to mind.

First of all, I thought about the non-Christian reaction to the movie The Passion of the Christ. The media was absolutely horrified at it. I remembered the interviews of Christians who had seen it. These Christians looked so ridiculously happy about something the rest of the world saw as gratuitous and extreme.

The second thing I thought of was a conversation that I'd had with a long-time teacher regarding methods of teaching. Something he told me stood out as I listened to the camp sermon, "If you want to keep high schoolers interested, focus on gore and grossness. For instance, " he had explained, "don't just tell the kids that Sir Walter Raleigh was a 'gentleman.' Instead, explain exactly what that meant--that gentlemen walked along the street on the outside of a lady because people, not having indoor plumbing at this time, threw out the day's excrement into the street. A gentleman's walking on the outside of a lady assured the lady's protection from filth should a carriage come rambling by." Okay. It's gross. But he was right, as I soon found out from incorporating this method into my teaching the next year.

What I find interesting about these two thoughts in relation to the Crucifixion is this: Christ's bloodshed was extremely gorey--even fringing on the point of the unbelievable. . .but only fringing. Never completely crossing the line. That's the thing. As incredible as it was, it is also quite credible at the same time. All the elements: nails, blood, thorns, thunderclouds, earthquakes, sins, Perfection, etc. All these elements are believable elements. God did not hurtle thunderbolts from a cloud in the sky. God didn't drive the Sun across the sky as a chariot. God didn't change into animal form and stalk His enemies. Rather, God paid for the sins of the world through very understandable and scientifically fathomable means, while at the same time dumbfounding the most brilliant of minds.

However, the credibility of His death, does not outweigh its gruesomeness. Naturally, questions arise. Is God a God who delights in tearing Himself apart so that He can somehow hold His suffering over us like a disgusting obligation? Does He somehow get off on churning our stomachs? Is Christianity just the invention of a completely sick mad-man with a fetish for the morbid?

Or is this story is so vastly sickening because our need for a Savior is so equally sickening? Is the void we made for ourselves between us and God in the Garden of Eden equal to the void Christ bridged with the cross? If Christ's death had been less violent than it was, would we feel so compelled by it? Are we nothing better than completely depraved high schoolers with attention spans so short that nothing less than a blood-battered Savior turns our heads? Are the two pains, our distance from God and Christ's blood on the cross, mathematically equal and opposite?

If you think back to all the literature you've ever read, you will probably only recall a small handful of stories that you remember in great detail. This is because those stories made an impact, an impression. God desires a relationship with us, yet He knows we forget insignificant details. God is not an insignificant detail, so He chooses to reveal Himself through a story that is not soon forgotten. You can forget Aesop's fables. You can forget the Noble Eightfold Path. You can even forget the Ten Commandments. The only way to forget the Crucifixion story is to ignore it. The true awfulness of this story does not lie in the agony that Christ endured. Rather it lies in a depravity so great of people so far gone that we can't get this story out of our heads without making a choice to ignore it. That is merely part of the gruesome and beautiful necessity of its design.