It is only February, but I am already thinking about Lent, which often begins in February, but this year does not begin until March 2. I guess it is just a habit after being fulltime pastor for forty years. I think of the year in terms of the church seasons. Lent is a Christian spiritual practice of meditating on the death and resurrection of Jesus. These are the central events of the Christian story. Today I am going to interpret the Cross and the crucifixion of Jesus as an expression of nonduality, and next time I will deal with the empty tomb and resurrection appearances as expressions of nondual reality.
A lot of people who have left Christianity – especially evangelical or fundamentalist forms of Christianity – also leave behind the Cross. It has too many negative connotations involving sin, guilt, shame, judgment, and fear of punishment. They want to focus on Jesus’ teachings.
Jesus’ teachings are important, but Jesus taught with more than words. Jesus taught with symbolic actions. He saw himself in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, who often used symbolic actions as a way to communicate their message. You might call it religious theatre. The Cross is a symbolic act.
The Gospel of Mark, which is the earliest of the four gospels, is mostly about Jesus’ actions and not his words. The Gospel of John makes the connection between symbolic actions and teachings very clear. It is constructed around the framework of seven signs and seven sermons. Jesus does seven symbolic actions – called signs - and to make sure the reader understands their meaning, he then gives a teaching about them.
In the synoptic gospels Jesus was performing a symbolic action when he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and when he cleansed the temple. He was teaching through action, not words. The two greatest symbolic actions that Jesus did were his death and resurrection. What he was communicating through these powerful symbols is not what later Christianity says about them. Jesus was communicating nondual reality.
Christianity, beginning with the apostle Paul and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, interpreted the Cross in terms of the Old Testament sacrificial system. They saw it as a transaction that satisfied a legal requirement; they saw it as the ultimate sacrifice for sin. But Jesus never said that. His approach to the temple sacrificial system was much more like the prophets Jeremiah Isaiah, and Amos.
God says in Jeremiah:
“What use to me is frankincense that comes from Sheba,
or sweet cane from a distant land? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable,
nor your sacrifices pleasing to me.
Isaiah said:
“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the LORD;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of well-fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats.
“When you come to appear before me,
who has required of you
this trampling of my courts?
Bring no more vain offerings;
incense is an abomination to me.”
God says in Amos: “I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
I see Jesus’ act of cleansing the temple as more than just a protest against greedy moneychangers who were taking advantage of worshippers. He was pronouncing judgment on the whole sacrificial system. Jesus followed up this symbolic action by saying that the temple was going to be flattened, and he would start all over again with a new type of temple. At his trial witnesses testified that he said he was going to destroy the temple. In fact Jesus predicted accurately the destruction of the temple and the end of the sacrificial system.
It is clear from the gospels that Jesus was opposed to the sacrificial system, and the guardians of the sacrificial system – the priests – where opposed to him. It is ironic that Christianity so quickly turned his death on the Cross into an endorsement of the sacrificial system. Christianity made Jesus into a champion of exactly what he opposed! Jesus’ death was interpreted as a sacrifice for sin, a payment for a sin debt, a turning away of the wrath of an angry God, who would send humans into an eternal hell of endless torture unless his wrath and justice were satisfied by a blood sacrifice.
That was not the message of Jesus. He spoke against the sacrificial system, just like his heroes the prophets. The only place in the gospels where Jesus seems to say anything that supports the traditional interpretation of his death is where he says, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” That ransom was later interpreted as his death on the Cross. But if you read that verse in its context he was not talking about his death but his life of serving others. “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served.” He was giving his life in service.
Yet the Church made his words into an elaborate theory of Jesus paying off the devil by dying on the Cross. They said the devil somehow held humankind hostage, and Jesus offered his life as a ransom in exchange for the lives of his followers. Other variations of the ransom theory is that the ransom is paid to death or to God. That in turn gave birth to penal substitutionary atonement in which God as Christ offers to God as Father a sacrifice in order to satisfy God’s justice and allow himself to forgive humans. As is often summarized: God offering himself to himself to save us from himself.
But Jesus never engaged in such convoluted thinking! That is just the type of sophistry and legalism that Jesus railed against when arguing with the scribes and priests and Pharisees. Legalistic theories of the atonement have made Christianity into exactly the opposite of what Christ was proclaiming.
So if the Cross is not a sacrifice for sin, what is it? What does the cross really symbolize? The Cross is a symbol of nondual reality. Furthermore it demonstrates how this unitive reality is realized in our lives. It comes about through the death of the self. By his death on the cross Jesus was leading the way symbolically, and we are to follow.
That is what Jesus taught. He said, “If anyone would come after me he must deny himself – his self – take up his cross and follow me.” Jesus orchestrated his crucifixion to be his greatest teaching. It taught what he had been saying all along, that true life, eternal life, comes about through the death of the self which reveals what we really are.
We are not the body. Death reveals that. We are not the physical suffering that comes with the body. Death puts an end to that physical suffering. Also we are not the self – the individual personal psyche that we tend to identify with. We are not the emotional suffering that is connected with that psychological self. That self died on the cross. Jesus on the cross is the picture of a body and a self that is dying. It is a picture of dying to self. And the resurrection – which we will deal with next time – is the revelation of our true nature – the no-self.
We can still use the term atonement, but not interpreted as a sacrificial death appeasing an angry deity. It is interpreted as at-one-ment, being one with the Divine. That is the root meaning of the English word atonement. Atone is from a Middle English word, meaning literally "at one.” The word atone literally means nondual. Yet the word has been coopted to mean a dualistic theory that turns God into a monster demanding the torture and death of his beloved Son by crucifixion in order to satisfy his thirst for retribution against sin and sinners.
Traditional theories of the atonement teach that the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross is what makes reconciliation between God and humans possible. But Jesus never taught any such thing. Jesus said that we are one with God. Before his death he prayed that we may know that oneness with God just as he did. That was Jesus’ message. And that is the nondual meaning of the Cross. That is why I call myself a Christian. And that is it for today!
