The revolutionaries gather at the national capital. Their leader is quickly arrested and executed. The group retire to the countryside. What a failure! What sane person would have anything to do with such an organization?
Yet this failure is at the heart of the Christian message. "We preach Christ crucified," wrote Paul to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 1:23). Nobody expected such a feeble Messiah, no philosopher could want to worship a convicted criminal. This wasn't what the prophets foretold - or was it?
The earliest sermons recorded in the Acts of the Apostles were concerned with explaining that this "failure" was not a mistake on God's part. It was there in the scriptures, if people only knew how to read them and where to look. Matthew's Gospel is forever reminding its readers that the stages of Jesus' life fitted closely the prophecies of the Old Testament. And, as our Creed reminds us, the experience of the resurrection was also "according to the scriptures."
Paul preaches Christ crucified. "Not with eloquent words," he adds. The people in Corinth are not to pay attention to him, or to his style of preaching. It is what happened that matters, and not the messenger, or the words of the message.
Paul's view presents us with a difficulty. In his time, the events of Jesus' life were still fresh in people's minds. There were still people alive who had heard him, who had spoken to him - admittedly not so many in Corinth, but people had come from Jerusalem carrying the news (and emphasizing that it was not dismal news, but good news, the sort of good news foretold by Isaiah 61:1!). We no longer have this direct contact - though this is not to deny that God can speak to our hearts directly, nor is it to deny that the news has been passed down to us by generations of believers.
Our contact cannot be so direct as Paul's, or the people who lived in the first century. We rely on what we can learn from the Gospels, from the letters of Paul and others, from reading, from studying, from listening, from trying to get as close to the events as we can.
The New Testament has a different purpose from the Old. When we say that the Holy Spirit "spoke through the prophets", we mean that the prophets gave an insight into God's purposes and plans, God's hunger for righteousness and God's sorrow towards evil. But the Gospels were written for instruction. As John's Gospel says: "Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name." (20:30-31), and Luke's Gospel intends its reader to "know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed" (1:4). And many of the Pauline letters were written to congregations facing particular situations, to advise, to instruct and to help.
A deeper understanding of the New Testament can give us a deeper understanding of "Christ crucified" (and of Christ exalted on high!). Modern scholarship has helped us in this, by looking more closely at the text, and by seeking to get closer to the truths it contains. One view of "Biblical inerrancy" is that every word in the Bible is a record of events of the kind one gets from a closed-circuit television camera. But this neglects the real purpose behind the New (and Old) Testament writings. A documentary would be a better parallel - the writers have selected events, giving some of them more importance, some less, in order to convey a message. The truth of the Bible lies in the message it conveys, not in the trivial details of the description itself. To argue (to take just one example) over whether the Cleansing of the Temple came at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, or at the end (or happened twice) is to fail to see the wood for the trees.
For the question is not what day of the month, or exactly where, or exactly how, Jesus died. The fact, and the fact the New Testament writings proclaim, is that he did die, and he died for us. "We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."
HD