I recently read a quote from a respected biblical scholar reflecting on why it’s a uniquely difficult time to be a human. We carry burdens of awareness our ancestors simply never possessed. We have discovered the perspectival nature of reality—everyone sees from where they stand; there is no ‘neutral’ viewpoint. It’s become almost impossible to pretend that anything is self-evident. We drift, anchorless, in a sea of uncertainties. It is hard, very hard, to build a life on such an unstable surface.
Christians are far from immune to this condition. Every conversation these days seems to conspire to remind us how vastly different are our pictures of God and God’s desires, our ways of interpreting our holy book. I have become a passionate advocate of a core principle: “God looks like Jesus. All the ideas we have about God and God’s desires for life are meant to be tested by him.”
But every time I articulate this principle, there is at least one wise person in the room who raises their hand and points out: “That doesn’t solve anything! Because we all understand Jesus differently too! All we are doing is changing the ground that we fight over.”
There is a sense in which this very true. Jesus is not some kind of magic tonic that instantly solves the modern uncertainty problem. There are a variety of reasons for this.
More often than we’d care to admit, our different pictures of Jesus result from blatant decisions to read him selectively, to take seriously some things he says while totally dismissing others. Liberal Christians often bypass Jesus’ teachings on judgment because they sound too intolerant and on divorce because they sound too tough. Conservative Christians often bypass Jesus’ teachings on loving enemies because they sound too costly and on turning the other check because it sounds too weak. Absolutely nobody wants to talk about the time that Jesus said, “None of you who are unwilling to give up all of your possessions can be my disciple” (Lk 14:33). In these cases, we may be dealing less with perspectival uncertainty than outright denial.
However, in other cases the stories themselves carry real ambiguity. For example, take the story of Jesus’ ‘cleansing’ of the temple, complete with whip and table flipping. Some of my friends interpret the story as a call to political activism, confronting all the powers that be. Some see the story as offering license for violence as a tool, when necessary. I understand this act as directed toward non-violent reform specifically within the community of faith. All these interpretations may result from serious grappling with the text and sincere attempts to bridge the application gap across 2000 years and quite different political systems.
Other times we come to Jesus bringing modern questions—about subjects like race, sex and gender, accountability in context of abuse, or our relationship to new technology. On these questions, which Jesus himself did not directly address, we must make genuinely difficult decisions about which texts apply and how.
And of course, for many modern people, conversations about Jesus must eventually turn to considerations of the book which preserves witness to his teachings. Questions about the authors’ agendas, intentions, and perspectival limitations, doubts about the ecclesial process by which the canon took shape, inevitably accrue to Jesus himself. Is this even a reliable account of what Jesus said and did? What assumptions, accidentally or on purpose, might have been layered onto him?
Sometimes these uncertainties trouble me more than others. This past week was one of those times. Probably because I was contemplating steps of greater faith and obedience. I felt passion for matters that seemed to me to be of critical importance, yet I also mistrusted that feeling. How do you stand for anything, pray for anything, work for anything, believe in anything, risk anything, when so much seems open to question?
As I was contemplating these questions, words from the early Christian leader Paul of Tarsus suddenly swept over me: “When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I didn’t come preaching God’s secrets to you like when I was an expert in speech or wisdom. I had made up my mind not to think about anything while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and to preach him as crucified” (1 Corin. 2:1-2).
There is an anchor to Christian faith that comes beyond our theological disputes or interpretative uncertainties. It is a person. But even more than that, it is an event that even secular historians rarely dispute happened. Jesus Christ. And him crucified. From the very first days of Christianity, the center of the faith has not been just Jesus in general but Jesus on the cross.
Understanding the cross as the center of Christian faith doesn’t answer all questions or solve all the problems of ambiguity. It doesn’t mean we will all understand the meaning of the event in exactly the same way. It doesn’t mean we will use the same language to talk about it. But I am personally convinced that the gravity of this image, this event, this choice, this moment is more than strong enough to hold us all in orbit around the deepest truth about reality. Even if all we possessed was this mystery, this moment, it would be a firm enough foundation to build a life upon.
John writes, “This is how we know love: Jesus laid down his life for us, and we ought to law down our lives for our brothers and sisters” (1 John 3:16). The cross doesn’t answer all our questions. But it does serve as a window into the deep truth of reality. It is the moment, one might say, of awakening from the matrix. On the cross we learn what God is like. We learn how power operates. We learn the shape of the deep wisdom at the heart of the world. We learn how love is meant to be practiced. It’s all here. The cross is before us like the cosmos is above us, infinite and ever-expanding, bright and dark, beyond imagination, endlessly drawing us ever-forward into exploration and transformation.
The antidote to uncertainty, to the unstable sea of modernity, is not to manufacture false certainty. It is to spend your life in contemplation of the cross. It’s to be anchored by its mystery, its brightness and its darkness, the life that flows from its self-emptying. It’s to be drawn ever-farther into its revelation of the deep structure of reality, the power that fuels life itself, the force of world-creating love.
Paul can resolve to know nothing but Jesus and him crucified because to know this, even in its mystery, in its foolishness and weakness, is to know everything that a person really needs to know.
