Yes, the cross is an exceedingly strange religious symbol.

Embarrassing, even. An instrument of humiliation and torture, after all. We celebrate a guy getting tortured two thousand years ago. Yay for us.

Seriously, have you ever stopped to consider how truly bizarre that must be for someone who hasn’t grown up with it?

We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks.

Think about that. For Jews in the first century and for many other nations conquered by the Romans, a cross was a symbol of cruelty and subjugation. It must have been exceedingly offensive to have Christians celebrating it. For others, it must have been just plain dumb, like this woman who commented on this article. People are in the same place now, of considering Christian symbols offensive or of simply not having any basis of understanding about them.

I taught Christology and Soteriology, the study of Christ and the study of salvation, last semester at Continental Theological Seminary and in my preparation and teaching came to appreciate even more than ever before the bizarre and terrible and wonderful fact of the brutal murder of the Person we worship.

I was reading the Pentateuch at the time, those delightful and jolly books of Leviticus and Numbers, and I was also studying Hebrews, and in the combination of those two parts of the Bible, the concept of sacrifice and atonement in Leviticus suddenly came alive.

Leviticus is all about sin, human brokenness, human impurity, and how we who once walked freely with God in the world He created for us now have to perform all kinds of rituals of purity and atonement for sin in order even to approach the outskirts of His presence.

There is so much blood in Leviticus. Do we ever stop to think about how important blood is? The life of a living thing is in its blood. Blood carries oxygen, it carries DNA, it fights infection, it brings nutrients to a growing embryo; when it is shed, a person dies; when a donor gives her blood away, another person is given life. Shed blood is the price for sin, and it is the great and undeserved gift of God to cover sin.

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes the atonement.”
Leviticus 17:11

Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
Hebrews 9:22

Instead of sacrificing their own blood for their sins, God provided for people to sacrifice the blood of a pure animal. That in itself was undeserved grace. But those animal sacrifices and all the purification rituals of Leviticus only worked for the moment in which they took place. A person could go away from the sacrifice of an expensive animal and promptly encounter something or do something that would make him impure and unworthy again, and he’d have to do it all over again. He was never permanently cleansed, and even when he was cleansed, he still was not pure enough to approach the very presence of God. There was no single sacrifice that would be enough, no blood pure enough and powerful enough.

Humans caused the problem, the sin that separated them from God, and so needed to atone for it, but no sacrifice performed by a human could ever be good enough.

Until a Person came who was both human and God. Human to fulfill humanity’s need to atone and Deity to be the one good enough to do it.

But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.
Hebrews 9:11-12

For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.
Hebrews 9:24-26

We don’t celebrate the murder of some random guy who preached good things two thousand years ago. We celebrate the willing self-sacrifice of a hero, the life-giving donation of pure blood, the sacrifice that covers all sin once for all and brings us not only to the outskirts of God’s throne room but into the very presence of God Himself, no longer separated and soiled by sin but cleaned by the purity of that blood.

So,

We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
1 Corinthians 1:23-24

Not all the blood of beasts
On Jewish altars slain
Could give the guilty conscience peace
Or wash away the stain.

But Christ, the heavenly Lamb,
Takes all our sins away;
A sacrifice of nobler name
And richer blood than they.

My faith would lay her hand
On that dear head, of Thine
While like a penitent I stand
And there confess my sin.

My soul looks back to see
The burden Thou didst bear
When hanging on the cursed tree
And knows her guilt was there.

Believing, we rejoice
To see the curse remove;
We bless the Lamb with cheerful voice
And sing His bleeding love.

By Isaac Watts, 1674-1748

One of my excursions, to see the Flower Carpet Brussels creates for three days once every two years. Click on the photo to see more pictures.

One thing I never thought about before was how much lecture preparation is necessary. Since this is my first time teaching these classes (Introduction to Theology and Christology/Soteriology), I have to start from the beginning and write lectures for 12 weeks of 3-hour classes. After reading textbooks for most of June and July and writing lectures for most of August and September, I have about 8 weeks of each class prepared—and I’m already done teaching the second week! And as soon as I’m done writing those, I have to start on next semester’s lectures. As I knew it would, my being a tourist has reduced quite a bit in favor of my being a teacher.

I have to say, it’s a rather magnificent job to have, getting to read and analyze theology books and write a couple hundred pages on theological subjects, with the goal of teaching them to people who may be complete neophytes to theology. But sometimes I have to force myself to do it and to focus on doing it. I could use your prayers for focus specifically.

My desk, where I do most of my studying and lecture-writing

The best part, after my two whole weeks of experience, is definitely the teaching. I rather adore it. When I was itinerating, I loved the part where I got to get up and tell people all about what God was doing in my life and calling and European missions. That love has transferred to the process of teaching, which is really quite similar. I stand in front of people and tell them wonderful things about God.

After my second day, as I was biking home from school, I realized to myself that the act of teaching doesn’t feel like a job, even a job that I enjoy (I loved library cataloging, but it was still a job). It feels like doing something I love. It causes the same emotional sensations in me that doing things I do just because I love them does, such as reading or bicycling or taking interesting photographs. It might perhaps be almost like the feeling I get when I write fiction (though nothing is quite like that in the world). And to think that once upon a time I declared to myself my intention of never becoming a teacher (that was a very long time ago).

My 7:30am bike commute to CTS.

I have two classes of a dozen students each (large class sizes, for CTS), and each one has a couple of Americans, a couple of Nigerians, a couple of Belgians, a couple of Dutch, and one English student (each), with the odd Italian and Pakistani and Ghanian thrown in for good measure. Most are college age, but a couple are a little older and have already been in full-time ministry. Some of them have amazingly good brains. Some of them know absolutely nothing and ask the most interesting (and difficult) questions (“Is God still faithful to Israel?” “If God is King of Kings, how is Jesus King of Kings?” “If there is natural revelation, what about people who see the existence of God through nature but never hear the gospel?”).

One of the classes told me they would never have imagined I hadn’t already been teaching for ages. I think this is because, for one, I’ve spent my whole life contemplating the topics I am teaching on (when I was about 9 years old, for instance, I would probably have told you that Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection for our benefit were only logical, given the nature of God—though not necessarily in those words); and for another, I’ve just spent two years doing public speaking almost every single week, which has helped me feel comfortable and natural being in front of people and speaking to them. Thank you, two years of itineration!

And, yes, I have cried in three out of four class periods. Once was when I was talking about the importance of John the Baptist to the life of Christ and read Isaiah 40, where Matthew and Mark get their prophecies which John fulfilled. (Go read it. Go, right now. And think about John the Baptist declaring this about Jesus before His baptism.) The second time was when I was talking about Jesus’ servanthood as revealed in the Last Supper and read Isaiah 53. (Go….you get the point.) The third time was today, in my Intro to Theology class, where I’ve been talking about the attributes of God (holiness, love, justice, and so forth), and in my section about faithfulness I told them about my own experience of God’s faithfulness. I don’t think I could not cry while discussing such wonderful subjects. But I warned them all ahead of time that it was entirely likely I would. And who knows, maybe now whenever they read the beginning of Mark and read about John the Baptist, they will remember about Isaiah 40 and remember that it is so lovely that their theology teacher cried about it in class. (I don’t think I’ve ever had a theology teacher cry in class, which makes me wonder what’s wrong with them.)

Most of my students have been mostly paying attention, which is perhaps as much as a teacher can ask for. (And of course those who don’t seem like they’re paying attention very well might be.) There’s often discussion and questions asked, and a couple of times students have kept talking about things we talked about in class as they put their things together and leave, which means they’re interested. Quite delicious, I must say.

I can’t wait to teach again on Monday.

Footnotes:
*I also got to watch the building next to my new apartment get completely torn down, observe a crane pull the demolition backhoe out of a hole it fell into (almost falling into my kitchen as it did so), and usher men through my apartment to look at the hole they accidentally drilled into my guest bedroom. That’s enough for a whole blog post itself.

My new friend Sigmund, chomping away at the building next door. This picture is taken from my bathroom window.