Identifying as human has deadly implications

The incarnation and an execution impacts humanity.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

Head and shoulders image of a man with closed eyes, on his forehead is an ashen cross.

Josh Applegate on Unsplash.

Christmas makes no sense without Easter.

In Jesus of Nazareth, the Creator himself entered his creation to live among us. This is what Christians call the Incarnation. But why? What was the point of this identification with humanity? You might have expected these sorts of answers: he came to found the Christian religion, to teach us how to live and to gather a community of followers. These are true enough but look inside any church building or read any part of the New Testament, and you’ll find that another thing is the focus, something that makes Jesus different to any other founder of a religion. He came to die.

Jesus’ death is the climax of all four gospel stories. It is evident that the point of the narrative is there. The rest of the Bible’s New Testament spends more time describing the machinations that led to Jesus’ death than outlining what he taught. Does that mean it doesn’t matter what Jesus taught? Of course not: Jesus’ teachings matter tremendously to Christians. But his death matters still more.

No doubt you knew that. The first thing anyone learns about Christianity is its symbol, the cross on which Jesus was executed. One of the cruellest forms of capital punishment that has ever been legal, those executed on the cross were called ‘crucified’ – a word which still has its shuddering power even today. Crucifixion was a death reserved for the lowest of the low: common thieves, runaway slaves, rebels, and lawbreakers. Yet this particular death was the ultimate goal of Jesus’ life.

Why? What’s it all about? For Christians, Jesus’ crucifixion strikes at the very root of all that is wrong with the world. To understand it, first we have to understand what Christians believe about that.

If you fall into a pit you can’t climb out of, then lack of information is not your problem. Nor does it matter how many other people are in the pit with you: nobody down there can pull you or themselves out.

Everyone agrees the world in its current state is, to put it mildly, less than ideal. Most put it down to a lack of education, or to the stubborn foolishness of a few isolated individuals.

If you believe that people behave badly because they are ill-informed, then you might think the solution is to teach people what is right. You will put great faith in education: give people the information they need and they will change their ways.

Alternatively, if you believe ‘other’ people are the problem, you can focus your attention on opposing them, imprisoning them, or stripping them of power somehow. But Christians believe that the root of the problem is far deeper, such that these efforts only scratch the surface and will never be effective in the long run.

Christians believe that the whole of humanity has been damaged, cut off from its relationship to what matters by a primordial catastrophe that we call ‘the Fall’. Human beings are not simply ignorant, and the problem does not lie in lack of information, or education. The problem lies in our will, the part of us that chooses what is wrong even when we know full-well that it is wrong. And the problem is not just some people ‘over there’, conveniently set apart from me. Every single human being has been impacted. Including you. And me. Every one of us is part of the problem, which is why no one of us, however smart or well-informed we are, can be the solution. If you fall into a pit you can’t climb out of, then lack of information is not your problem. Nor does it matter how many other people are in the pit with you: nobody down there can pull you or themselves out. You need someone outside the pit who can reach down and grab hold of you.

That is why Christianity is more than a moral programme for self-improvement, or a set of spiritual practices comparable to those of other religions. According to Christians, the human race does not need another set of rules about how to live, or a formula to cultivate mindfulness and inner peace. We need a saviour: someone who does not share our fallen condition, but who can reach down and lift us to safety.

How far down did Jesus have to go? All the way to the bottom, which means death. Even the worst kind of death.

How did Jesus’ death save us? Christians have various theories about that. You may have heard the most common which uses law court imagery: we were guilty and sentenced capital punishment, but Jesus was punished instead so we don’t have to. Some people love this theory and live by it; others find it morally problematic and offensive. But the point is not the theory: the point is the reality to which it points. One way or another, by dying Jesus reconnected us to God and restored the broken relationship.

But it’s stranger still than that, because Jesus’ death is not the end. It was only the preliminary to something far more wonderful and transformative, a sign of a promise beyond our wildest hopes. By dying, Jesus defeated death itself and came back to life. If Christmas makes no sense without the cross, then the cross makes no sense without the resurrection. But more on that in my next article.

The Wild God we can't coerce

Weird and increasingly encountered beyond the wilderness.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A pianist raises his arms while sitting at a grand piano amid recording equipment.

Nick Cave recording Wild God.

nickcave.com

Christianity is a wild thing.

I say this, even while only half-understanding what I’m saying. It’s something that I’m learning. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that it’s something that I’m unlearning. Because, admittedly, I’m far more familiar with a somewhat domesticated view of my own faith tradition. The kind that allows me to fashion fences out of my expectations; to put parameters around God’s presence and boundaries upon his behaviour. Both of which are a farce, of course - but a comforting farce, none the less.

You see, there is nothing ‘comfortable’ about a God who cannot be wholly predicted or comprehended, let alone controlled or contained. A wild God is always going to be a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked and too unused to the sensation of being cosmically baffled.

But, affronting as it may be, I am trying my best to sit in the knowledge that the God I believe in is a wild God. And I’m finding this wildness increasingly hard to ignore. Perhaps it’s all the Rowan Williams I’ve been reading, or my newfound interest in the Romantics (as in, the eighteenth and nineteenth century poets, not the 1970’s American rock band). Or maybe it has more to do with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album, which I have been listening to relentlessly over the last week.

In this musical offering, Nick Cave introduces us to his ‘Wild God’, who I think is my God too. It’s just that ‘wild’ has never been the first adjective I reach for when describing him.

Until now, I suppose.

Let me clarify what I mean by wild, because what I’m not saying is that God is inherently chaotic, unruly, reckless or irrational. Wild Gods, as we know them from the myths and legends, act on tempestuous whims, and are more than a little havoc prone. They are perilous, largely because one can never truly know where they stand with them. That couldn’t be further from what I mean. The entire Old Testament - as complex, nuanced and masterful as it is - can be understood as a collection of ways in which the God at its centre is saying – this is who I am, this is what I desire, this is what I’m going to do, this is where you stand with me. If you were to read the Bible, it would become pretty clear pretty quickly: God is insistent that those who seek to know him will never have to second guess him. God’s wildness does not mean that we cannot know the essence of who he is or how he feels towards us. I like to think that we can endeavour to know him accurately, but never exhaustively.

Rather, what I’m trying to get my head and heart around is the knowledge that God, and therefore Christianity, cannot be wholly domesticated. Despite my best efforts, it cannot be made into an entirely comfortable and cozy thing. To make it so, one would have to dilute it, shrink it, bleed any truth out of it. In his poem - Sometimes a Wild God -Tom Hirons writes,

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all’.

There’s an innate weirdness to the Christian worldview, a pure wildness at the heart of it. It’s brimming with mystery and mysticism. As Hirons hints, it’s bigger and more consequential than our comfort-zones would like it to be. And, what’s more, much of it is communicated through the natural world. Biblical narratives and poetry are endlessly pointing us toward the places and spaces that are outside human cultivation – the stars, the mountains, the oceans – the things that pre-date and will outlive us.

Christianity is wild in that there’s an alluring organic-ness about it. Its truth sits beyond human manipulation and coercion.

For millennia, whole lives have been given over to this truly wild and, I believe, wildly true story. Can I give you just two recent examples? Two people who have (utterly unexpectedly) adventured their way into this wild and wonderful way of seeing the world? Two people I’ve had the joy of learning from over the past year?

First up is Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul is an award-winning poet and a best-selling author of both fiction (including the Buckmaster Trilogy: Wake, Beast and Alexandria) and non-fiction (including Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and his ongoing Sub-Stack series: Abbey of Misrule). He is, and always has been, an advocate for treating the natural world as if it were far more than a machine to be used or a resource to be obtained. Such behaviour is, according to Paul, nothing short of sacrilegious. As well as an enchantment with what he can see and sense in the natural world, he also has a long-standing fascination with all things mystical.

Buddhism, Witchcraft – you name it, he’s tried it.

He told Justin Brierley and I the story of how he his adventures have led him to arrive at the wildest possible destination: Christianity.  

And then there’s the renowned mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw, who decided to do a 101-day wild vigil in Dartmoor. Despite not being a Christian, on the very last night, he prayed. While praying, he looked up and saw something utterly unexplainable, something ‘properly Old Testament’. And that was it – after a night of dancing, several other ‘odd’ experiences, and eighteen months of deep pondering – he was able to say, ‘I went into the forest expected to be wedded to the wild and I came out wedded to Christ’.

Thinking about it, it’s probably no accident that ‘Christianity’ began on the margins, and from there, worked its way into the cities. There was a time where the prediction of Jesus’ arrival was being yelled out into the countryside, so loudly that people were emptying the surrounding towns to come and hear more. A time when rumours of redemption were being whispered in the rural hills. A time when its chief messenger was an inexplicably weird man named John the Baptist; who shunned his prestigious priestly heritage to live in the wilds, to dress in camel skins, to eat honey and insects and insist upon the imminent coming of the long-awaited Messiah. This Messiah, by the way, who would be born where animals are kept, sleep on mountains, retreat into deserts, walk on water, speak to storms, and break people (including himself) out of stone graves.

You see what I mean, Christianity is a wild story to believe and live in accordance with.

It’s the story that drove the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ of the Third Century AD to reject civilisation and all its comforts, in order to seek God in the silence and solitude of the desert. It’s the story that is still inspiring people to live in caves on Mount Athos, secluded islands just off the coast of Wales and forests in the heart of Ireland. An uncontainable message has, since its inception, been lived out in uncontainable places.

Honestly, you want weird? Christianity can darn-well give you weird.

Don’t be fooled by over-familiarity or be swayed by that pesky left-side of your brain, the part that wants to convince you that you know all that there is to know. Christianity is a story that I, myself, had forgotten was quite this wild.