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Read more of Kim Lawton's March 31, 2004 interview with the Rev. Fleming Rutledge:
Is it difficult year after year for Christian ministers to come up with something to say for Holy Week and Easter?
That's probably a general problem. Let's call it a challenge. I have preached for 25 years and especially during Holy Week am aware that I need to say something new. But one of my deepest convictions is that the Scripture is ever renewing, and that's one of the aspects of Christianity not everybody fully understands. Scripture, the Holy Bible -- one doesn't need to be a fundamentalist in order to understand how there is life that flows from it new every day, in any language, anywhere in the world. So I have never found myself really at a loss, because once I begin working from the biblical text, something new always happens.
Is it a challenge to communicate that to people who have heard this story over and over?
That's the challenge. The challenge is communicating it in a fresh way, so that the old story becomes the new story and people begin to be aware that "this is my story, too." That probably is one of the reasons that there have been such wildly different perceptions of the movie [Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST]. I've been amazed at the discrepancy between people who were completely turned off and people who wept and felt convicted in a very personal way. It's really amazing.
What accounts for that?
I haven't been able to put my finger on it yet. People say it depends on what you bring to it. I've heard a lot of people say that, and of course that's true, but many people that I know quite well I would have expected to hate it; they loved it. And people I expected to love it hated it. I don't really know what's going on. I think it's a strange phenomenon. It's related to psychology. I'm disturbed by the psychology of it all -- the wallowing in this extreme violence. And, of course, the vangelists don't do that. The evangelists have put all that at a great distance, and that's a fascinating aspect of the biblical narratives. We're all going to be in church on Palm Sunday, in the liturgical churches, and we're going to hear the entire Passion narrative read. Many churches will do it in a dramatic form. And the congregation will say, "Let him be crucified." All these Christians will be saying that, and not once in any of that long, long narrative is anything said specifically about these physical details. We just learn that he was scourged, he was mocked, he was crucified. The evangelists want us to think about something else.
Is there a spiritual danger in focusing too much on the suffering part of it?
There may be, but I want to be cautious here. I am a Protestant, really. I come from the Protestant wing of the Episcopal Church, which used to be very substantial and now is dwindling rapidly. But as a Protestant, I tend to focus much more on the ministry of the word and much less on visual images, even though I personally love visual images. Mel Gibson's movie is very Catholic in its sensibility, and specifically Mediterranean and Latin American Catholic, with all that emphasis on blood. That's very characteristic and typical. In Northern Europe, the churches of the Reformation, this would be decisively deemphasized, and so in that regard the movie has been surprising because it has appealed to so many Protestants and Evangelicals in particular, which doesn't entirely suit the sensibility of the churches that arose from the Reformation. Certainly blood is involved. The Epistle to the Hebrews famously says that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins, and that's a key text. But I don't think that the Scripture means us to take it so literally. I see this to some extent as a cultural debate between people who interpret the Bible very literally and those who are comfortable with metaphor and symbol. ... I remember one man who didn't like the imagery that Jesus used about being fishers of men because he was worried about how the hook would hurt. He took it so literally; he didn't understand that it was a metaphor. But then, on the [other] hand, it does hurt to become a Christian. It's the best news in the world but at the same time is very dangerous news. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die." There is pain involved in being a Christian, and maybe some of what we call the "happy-clappy" denominations have not understood that well enough. It isn't about prosperity; it isn't about having all your prayers answered; it isn't about finding everything that you want. It may be about learning that the things that you thought you wanted are not the things that God wants you to have. It may be not keeping a job; it may be about being fired from a job in order that your true calling might be called out by God. There is, I think, a lot of pulling and hauling going on between groups of Christians who have a rather straightforward, I would even say wooden, way of interpreting Scripture, where "this" means "that" and "this" always means "that," and a much more fluid, loose, imaginative, poetic way of interpreting the narratives. But that's not to say that the narratives at their essential points are not true, and that's where I would want to draw a line. The crucifixion really happened. I was amazed to learn that there are people who believe that it never even happened -- that there was no Jesus, that there was no crucifixion of Jesus. That amazed me. I think that can be demonstrated to be true. No one would dream up the idea of a crucified Messiah. It must have happened. And given the fact that it did happen, we have to ask ourselves, what about the resurrection? Did that happen? Many, many mainline Christians today back off from the idea that it really did happen. How did it happen? We don't know. No one was there; no one saw the resurrection. What they saw was the empty tomb and the appearances of the Lord. And his appearances were strange because he was the same and yet he was not the same. He ate and yet he said, "Don't touch me." He showed them the wounds but he came through the door, and so a lot of us say that the resurrection was a metahistorical event that actually happened in history. That's a way of saying two things at once. It happened, but it wasn't a historical happening; it happened in history, but it cannot be captured in history.
Do some streams of Christianity place more emphasis on the crucifixion than the resurrection?
Oh, absolutely. I'm not an expert on this, but I know many devout Christians who are not in liturgical churches who know nothing of Good Friday. They don't go to church on Good Friday. They go to Palm Sunday, and then they go to Easter Day, and that does it for them. ... A professor wrote me by e-mail yesterday and said that he had heard that a lot of evangelicals were going to the movie [THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST] because they really hadn't known anything about the cross. That was an astonishing thought. Maybe that means that all the emphasis is on spiritual blessing, spiritual phenomena, spiritual manifestations instead of the actual story of what Jesus did and what happened to him. Now as soon as I say "what happened to him" I want to correct myself, because it didn't happen to him as though he was simply a passive recipient. The word "Passion" is a tricky one; it's based on the same word that we get our word "passive" from. Jesus, in accepting his destiny, was passive in the sense that he did not resist, but the important thing is that it was the will of God the Father and God the Son working together -- the will of them both. In that sense, it didn't just happen to Jesus; it was something that God was doing in Jesus. It was active, the most active thing that's ever been done. God was acting in the world through his son to redeem the world. It was both passive and active. ... I think most people understand that Jesus died for sin, but what exactly that means and exactly how that happened and exactly how that worked is a very complex and multifaceted matter in the Scripture. There are many, many images to explain why and how the death of Christ took place on this metahistorical level, on the transcendent level. The meaning of the cross can't be found in looking at the beating and the flaying and the nailing. The meaning can only be grasped through very deep engagement with the various portions of Scripture where this is proclaimed. It was a ransom, it was a sacrifice, it was a victory. It was many things. He was a scapegoat, he was a sacrificial lamb. It was a new Exodus, it was the Passover completed, it was deliverance from death, it was the harrowing of hell. [There are] wonderful paintings in the Eastern Orthodox tradition of Jesus bringing up Adam and Eve and the patriarchs and matriarchs from hell, or from limbo, from oblivion, from the realm of death into the realm of the resurrection.
Can the crucifixion be understood apart from the resurrection?
I think clearly not. ... The material in the Gospels was certainly known to Paul, but he focused on the crucifixion and the resurrection as a single event. I have consistently tried to help people understand that we can't know what we really need to know about the crucifixion and the resurrection without immersion in the apostolic preaching, which means the Bible. The New Testament is the apostolic preaching, the preaching of the apostles to the first Christians. That's how we know what it all meant. And although I do love images and have images in my house and love painting and sculpture, it is the word, the words, the message, that brings life. There are numerous passages about that in both the Old and the New Testaments, how the word of God -- the actual message itself, what is heard -- brings life. It is in the preaching of the cross and resurrection that we gain this life -- in hearing it, receiving it in faith. The crucifixion and the resurrection were a single event. That's very important. You wouldn't know that certainly from the movie. ... It's so important to consciously spend time with that event and with that narrative, the narrative of Jesus' Passion, suffering, death in order to understand how that is what makes Easter Day what it is. Easter Day was not just a bursting forth of a dead person from the tomb. Easter Day was the overcoming of absolute nihilism, absolute total dehumanization, degradation. Jesus did not just rise pleasantly from the tomb with the sun coming up. This is a victory of unimaginable and really inexplicable (speaking humanly) proportions -- a victory over death itself, a victory over the powers of evil themselves, a victory over the power of sin, however we want to consider that. ... There is evil loose in this world. It doesn't belong to any one group or any one person. It can emerge anywhere and in anyone's heart. Jesus died at the hands of that evil power and then overcame it.
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Without the crucifixion, the resurrection quickly becomes just a sort of sentimentalized romantic idea of immortality. Across the world in all these religions there are these ideas about immortality and living in another life and regaining one's self, and various ways of putting that. All religions have some sort of idea of an existence that transcends this earthly mortal existence, whether it is nirvana or the Islamic paradise. They vary tremendously, but all of them have something transcendent. Without the crucifixion, the resurrection could very easily have been interpreted as another religious, transcendent event -- an idea, a hope for immortality. In fact, that's the way I think most people do think of it. The resurrection offers us hope of immortality. But that's not what the resurrection is about at all. The resurrection is about deliverance from the grave, and it is about reversing the bondage of death, and it is about bodily existence, and that's something that's very hard to grasp. It means that a body that was literally buried or entombed and was literally, in this case, dead -- not comatose, but dead -- was restored to the life of the Eternal Age. Not just brought back into mortal life, but the life of God. The incredible discrepancy between the horrible obscenity of the crucifixion and the glory of the resurrection is very important. It's that contrast that gives the story such power. Otherwise, it is just another story about a dying and rising god. There are zillions of those, but this is a story about a historical event that was then reversed by transcendent intervention. Unless they're put together, the story falls apart. There is also something else. The crucifixion is necessary for understanding the lengths to which God went for us. Just to imagine that you are watching a person rising gloriously at sunrise from the grave does not tell us anything about how much God loved us and the lengths to which he was willing to go, the degree of human wickedness that he was willing to absorb. That's so important. What we see on the cross is Jesus taking into himself the very worst that the human being, the human race, could do -- the very worst; absorbing it into himself and then triumphing over it on our behalf and in our place.
Are you concerned that all the focus on the crucifixion has given short shrift to the end of the story?
Not really, because I think that Easter is such a powerful day and such a powerful message and such an extraordinary, unique event with content that is unequaled. I don't think that it can ever really be eclipsed by focusing on excruciating suffering. I think it's the other way around. Paul the apostle was concerned about the church in Corinth because they were so crazy about Easter they overlooked Good Friday altogether. That's not the way he put it. He said that the cross was the center of the message and that it was foolishness to those who do not understand it. But to those who understood it and believed it and who received it in faith, the message of the cross is the power of God for salvation. He didn't talk about the resurrection right that minute; he worked up to it 13 or 14 chapters later. Then he burst out into this extended, chapter-long rhapsody about the meaning of the resurrection. I think the point there is that you can only grasp the full significance of the resurrection if you have immersed yourself in the meaning of the crucifixion. And that's why the two must go together. I don't worry much about people being overly focused on the crucifixion at the expense of the resurrection, because I think the resurrection itself vindicates the crucifixion. No one would be interested in the crucifixion if it weren't for the resurrection. We wouldn't even know that there had ever been such a person as Jesus of Nazareth if he had not been raised from the dead. That is my view. We don't know the names of any other crucified victims in history. I think he would have been a forgotten person like all the other nameless thousands who were crucified and disposed of. That's one of the reasons I think we can argue that the resurrection really did happen. Something happened. Exactly what it was is a matter of dispute, but something tremendous and unpredictable and unforeseen and unprecedented happened. And it was a victory over sin and death. ...
What is it about this story that still intrigues people 2,000 years later -- that still prompts artists and people in every generation to try to grasp it in some way?
Well, it depends on whether you are a believer or not. If you're not a believer, it's a cultural phenomenon of some sort. It's related to the history of art and the history of warfare and the history of cultural transformations. Christianity played a huge part in the history and the art of the western world, so one has to be interested in it from that point of view. But if one is a believer, then this is the story that never dies, because this is the story of God's decisive, once-for-all intervention on behalf of his creation to save it. And even if people are not entirely convinced by that, there's something uniquely compelling about it. There's no other story that brings us this message of God entering history himself, and not only entering history but taking upon himself personally the burden of history -- all the suffering, all the anonymous deaths and tortures and people who died in prison whose names we don't even know, people who were humiliated, degraded, despised, rejected. "He was despised and rejected of men," as the Scripture says. There is infinite power in that for everyone. ... Looking away from the crucifixion means looking away from the sufferings of the world for which Christ died. It is the suffering of the world that he takes upon himself, so to look away from that and want only Easter is to turn away from the victims of the world. And that, above all, a Christian may not do.
What is the meaning of the cross for today?
I'm glad you asked that, because one of the theological points that mean the most to me is that the death of Christ is not just a personal matter, a personal transaction between Jesus and individual believers. That's the usual way of interpreting it: the individual believer receives Jesus as his personal Savior, is forgiven of sin, receives the Holy Spirit presumably in baptism, and then becomes adopted of God by grace and is then able to lead a new life according to the power of God granted through the Holy Spirit. But that completely overlooks the preaching of the apostles and specifically St. Paul, who did not preach Christ simply as a personal Savior but at the geopolitical, cosmic Savior. Paul speaks about the entire creation being in bondage, groaning in bondage, waiting for deliverance -- the entire creation, which means nature and the cosmos. Everything has been derailed. Christianity doesn't have this view of unspoiled nature that many people do have. In Christian faith, the entrance of God on the scene in the person of Jesus is the entrance of a new purpose and power for deliverance of the entire universe. And this means nations, people, groups -- the "principalities and powers," as the New Testament repeatedly calls them. All these things which have been drastically and catastrophically and fatally defective are being made right through Jesus Christ. That's really the overriding message of the New Testament -- not that Jesus has come to this person and that person individually, although he does do that, but that history itself is reversed. There is a cosmic event that has occurred, that has arrested the irresistible forward movement of the principalities and powers -- sin and death [and] Satan, if you will, the symbolic figure that represents all of this. An event which has taken place from outside this sphere has reversed the downward spiral that we see around us -- the decline and fall of empires. This is an empire that cannot decline or fall -- the kingdom of God. Jesus' appearance on Earth means the inauguration of the coming kingdom of God, and that is not just an individual matter. That has to do with the movement of history itself. And the important thing about the crucifixion in that regard is that the movement of history itself will take place through small actions by sometimes unknown, insignificant people. ... These are the people who represent God's future, and because Jesus died the particular kind of death that he died, people who suffer, people who are despised, people who are looked down upon can take great comfort in knowing that God will work through them, through their suffering, through their offerings, through their sacrifices, through their love, through their persistence, their perseverance. God works through all of that. That is the way of the cross. It's important to understand that Christianity is not just about single individuals and their relationship to God. It's about what God has done for the whole world and how God works through individuals and groups to show the rest of the world what his intentions and purposes are for redemption, for forgiveness, for rectification for all that has been wrong, for justice, for peace.
Are these messages and meanings more difficult to grasp the farther away we are from the events of Holy Week and Easter?
No, because it is fundamental to Christian faith that Jesus is alive, and the word of God is alive. The word of God is living and active, as the Epistle of the Hebrews says. And it never fades. It never loses its power; it never loses its re-creative dimension. Jesus is a living Lord. That's the whole point, really. He is not someone whom we seek to emulate or whom we think of as an object of our devotion. Some people do think of him as an object of devotion, but that's a great misunderstanding. Jesus is not the object of our devotion. He is the active subject of all that happens through his Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is out there in places that I've never even heard of, doing things with people that I would never have known. We don't go to bring Christ to the heathen. Christ is bringing us there. Jesus is alive. There's never a possibility of the event fading into the mists of the past, because this is about a living God who acts and speaks in our own time and will continue to do so until he brings all things to their consummation.
What do you say to people who have seen THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST and don't know much about the story apart from that?
I very much hope that they will find a Christian church, a Christian community, to attach themselves to, because that is the way that Christ is made alive -- through the Christian community with all of its faults, all of its sin, all of its hypocrisy. But there is sin and hypocrisy everywhere in the world. You can stay out of church and you're still going to find sin and hypocrisy, but I just hope very much that people who are drawn to the movie will also be drawn into a Christian fellowship where they will struggle with their fellow Christians to let Christ's love take shape, incarnate among them. That is what the church is. The church is the incarnate love of Christ in the world today. And when the church fails to be that, it is, of course, tragic. But that is what the Holy Spirit continues to do among us -- to make the church the incarnate love of Christ today. That's why Christians, when they're acting like Christians, would never say that another person or group was beyond the reach of the love of God; would never separate themselves over against another group of people as though we are in the right and they are in the wrong, we are good and they are evil. That is a deeply mistaken idea of what Christianity is about. In the cross we see Jesus taking all the sin and evil of the world onto himself, and that means each and every one of us.
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