The Pagan Confessor

One may never have heard the sacred word ‘Christ,’ but be closer to God than a priest or nun.’ – Thomas Aquinas

The first person to recognize Jesus as the Son of God was the pagan who crucified him. This is especially significant in the gospel of Mark where everyone keeps saying of Jesus, “Who is this guy?” Even the disciples, who camped out with him three years straight, are still scratching their heads. No one can figure out who Jesus is!

When Jesus is manhandled then nailed to the wood, they conclude, “He wasn’t the one” They are all too familiar with this plot. The messiah-claimant proved a fraud and his disciples hunted down. The cross was the final “nail in the coffin” for their dreams to be the oligarchs of the new Jewish Kingdom. “If Jesus is no messiah, then he sure ain’t some son of God as he was wont to speak at times.”

It should have been the same for the Roman Centurion, utter contempt of Jesus. The Romans took the crucifixion from the Persians and perfected it into the ugliest physical and psychological torture. It was the grossest public shaming and dehumanization of a person. Romans, understandably, were not crucified. Cicero warned his citizens, “do not let the word ‘cross’ be on your lips.” Even speaking of it brought shame. And this Centurion was familiar with its machination. After all, he carried it out hundreds of times, every execution only confirming his contempt for the one crucified and unquestionably deserving of it. How else could he have continued on his job? We can’t kill a person with a human face. So he despised everyone he nailed. The more he hammered the pikes into wrists, the more he despised them. But that particular day, when the dark pounced at midday, something broke in his heart and a light came in. His confession was spontaneous. He did not know the full meaning of his words, which made it more sincere: “Surely he is the Son of God.”

It was not the confession of a monotheist. It was spoken out of the pagan world where there are many gods. In that sense, it wasn’t orthodox. Like all understandings, he spoke out of the categories he was fed from birth. There are many gods in his world. Gods sometimes couple with human beings and birth demi-gods. There are sons of gods who won great victories, like Hercules. Sometimes humans can become demi-gods through great military conquests like his own emperor Augustus who was crowned with the title Filia Dei (Son of God). Yet, even as the confession birthed out of those pagan categories, it also breaks them. To see a man dying on the cross as victorious, to see a criminal once seen as not even human, as the Son of God is to enter into a whole new worldview.

Perhaps my own orthodoxy can get in the way of seeing who Jesus really is? Maybe I can learn from those who speak of Christ without the sophistication of a theologian or even the piety of the Christian? Maybe I should not judge the way pagans speak of Jesus because they might be on to something.

The Cross, The Subversion Made A Souvenir?

“Religion is the opium of the people,” thus Karl Marx belittled Christianity. His target was all religions, but Christianity was square in his sight. Funny though, why did Nero chop off Paul’s head if Paul’s was only inadvertently serving the Empire by spreading religion that would numb the people to the Empire’s raping of nations? There were plenty of mystery cults those days, promising salvation through a secret knowledge or ritual. They had their eccentric preachers that could match Paul’s strangeness. Many were harrased by young boys restless after their tutoring, but most  were not prosecuted by proconsuls, let alone the Caesar. Paul, on the other hand, is getting either arrested or kicked out, all with the police’s consent. He is even accused of treason in Thessalonica. Even more strange, he gets a hearing with Caesar. Why would Caesar bother with a street preacher? Unless he has become a serious threat.
We forget how threatening the gospel is to the powerful. It started even at the birth of Jesus with paranoid Herod killing toddlers recently weaned, to Pilate who crucified Jesus and sarcastically giving him the title “King of the Jews” and, ironically, the man who questioned truth said something true. Pilate dismissed Jesus from his memory. But in less than 40 years, Caesar tries and executes a person speaking about that crucified Jew who, it turns out, is not just the King of the Jews but the King of everything, Rome included. The message of Jesus was threatening because it put everyone in power on a watch for the true King is going to demand account on whether they are ruling justly. All human rulers were demoted to stewards in the story of Jesus. Rulers don’t want to be demoted or judged for their actions, so they rebelled, as it was foretold in one of Jesus’ parable.
How did we forget this part of the gospel? That justice is an essence of the gospel because it is about Jesus who will bring justice and demands justice from all given authority.
Don’t we forget it because such proclamation is risky? After all, where did Paul end up with such message,  on the chopping block. But Jesus did say take up your cross. And we turned it into a metaphor: the cross as a burden. I have heard some say “my spouse is my cross” which is demeaning of the spouse and the cross. The cross is the risk we take to publicly proclaim the lordship of Jesus. We are risk-averse, especially when it comes to our own life. So we privatized the gospel and shaved the cross into a souvenir. It is quite safe to be a Christian today.
Ironic, and the laugh is on us now, that what Rome failed to do with their lions and swords, to privatize the gospel, we have done it voluntarily.