The Bad Publicity of the Cross

This idea is only half baked, so I'm fine if someone wants to tell me to put it back into the oven for a while. It's just this: the other day I was subbing for a grade 12 class and in the five minute scrum before the bell they got talking at random about the end of the world. Apparently someone had done some research into the ancient Mayan calendar that predicts the world will end in 2012. They chewed this back and forth for a while, till someone asked me, "Don't Christians say the world's going to end, too?"

I did my best to explain: some Christians talk about the end of the world, but more accurately Christians believe in the end of the age and the resurrection of the dead, when Christ will return to establish his kingdom of peace.

One of the students sort of scoffed: "Yeah, and I believe in a plague of zombies that are going to take over the planet..."

Laughter.

I told them that they were free to laugh if they wanted to, but they also needed to know that I myself was a Christian and I shared this belief in the return of Christ.

He said: "Well, it's just that it's easier to believe in a plague of zombies than to believe in that."

From this point they started asking me what I knew about zombisim, and the conversation shifted.

But here's the half-baked thought that's been rising in my mind since this exchange. I have a feeling that if I'd shared about some esoteric belief from the Vedas, or about some mystical Nirvana experience, it would have got a better hearing than the credal belief in the Second Coming (even the Mayan calendar and Haitian Voodoo got more respect than the resurrection of the dead). And as I wondered about this, it struck me that the Vedas, the Mayan calendar, Nirvana, voodoo-- these things are all mysterious, mystical kinds of knowledge that are the special domain of the spiritual elite, kept hidden from public scrutiny. Unlike the public proclamation of the Gospel, they're spiritual secrets whispered in select ears.

And if someone's out to ridicule the faith convictions of others, these convictions are hard to ridicule because they aren't public. They're shrouded in an ambiguity that silences derision. But in the Gospel, God went public with his hidden wisdom. In the open scandal of the cross, he told the secret of his love for the creation to anyone who'd listen. He exposed it to public scrutiny.

And public ridicule.

Now this is not a typical, evangelical, "why's everybody always pickin' on me" pity-party. And I'm fully aware that there are non-Christian religious groups that our culture ridicules, some precisely because they are highly secretive; and I'm aware, too, that there was a lot of secrecy around communion and baptism in the early church, and the surrounding culture ridiculed them mercilessly for it. So my theory can't be pushed too far.

But still. I wonder if being open to scrutiny to the point of ridicule isn't fundamental to Christian faith. Because there has always been something scandalously public about following Jesus. The spiritual secrets he whispered in our ears he asks us to shout from the roof tops, in a way that makes us almost spiritually immodest next to the secrecy of many other systems of belief. Perhaps when we can humbly open ourselves this kind of scrutiny (and its attendant ridicule) without defensiveness or sanctimony, we will have really learned what it means to be followers of a crucified Lord.