The Semiotics of the Cross pt 2
1. Of course the Cross as a symbol was itself a deliberate repurposing by the Early Church, an ironic giving of a completely opposite meaning to a symbol of ruthless Imperial Roman torture and death.
Or ruthless Imperial Roman lawgiving, sacrificing the well-being of a few rebels for the creation of a safer world.
Do you think Jesus believes that his death was worthwhile because the execution and torture of violent rebels helped create a safer Roman world - a high-technology, slave-owning Pax Romana?
Or was he looking forward to a Pax Judaica, when the Jewish Sanhedrins would take their rightful place as lawgivers, handing down Sharia-type judgements against adulterers and blasphemers?
Or a Pax Christiana, millennia in waiting, when finally he'd be the one to violently execute rebels who refused to take His name?
Or was he thinking of a different kind of Pax entirely?
2. Would you attend religious services in a cult centre that had as its symbol a noose and gallows?
Or an electric chair?
Or a guillotine?
Or a Taser?
Or an image of a dismembered human body, dying in pain, from the Vietnam war, or Iraq today?
Or a boot standing on a human face?
Or the 'Death' card from Tarot?
3. But that is what the Cross is.
Why do you use that symbol?
What do you *think* it means?
Do you think everyone who sees it will react the same way?
What do you think they will think you are saying, when you thrust a symbol of slow, gruesome, death before their faces and say 'believe in this and be saved'?
4. Saved from what?
What could possibly be worse than slow gruesome death?
5. Saved by what?
By slow gruesome death?
Or something else?
But the process as a whole involves slow gruesome death, yes?
6. Saved for what?
For making other people die slowly and gruesomely?
Why not, if it is how they are saved?
7. Do not think that you already know those three answers, for evidently the world is not already saved.
a. If you had really known, you would have conveyed the message clearly to everyone.
b. If you had conveyed the message clearly to everyone, everyone would have heard and understood the message clearly.
c. If everyone had heard and understood clearly a message that is the most wonderfully good news ever since the founding of the Earth, they would have had no choice but to answer 'yes'.
d. If everyone on Earth had answered 'yes' to the most wonderfully good news ever since the founding of the Earth, the Earth would by now be transformed, and there would be no war, crime, sickness, or death.
e. But perhaps all those people, and there are billions of them, who have heard the message of the Christian Gospel and not responded 'yes' are so absolutely evil and depraved that they would answer 'no' to the most wonderfully good news on the planet anyway, just out of spite, on principle, knowing full well that it would damn them to Hell eternally, forever. Because they're just that nasty. Bad, rotten, no-good folks who'd eat kittens for breakfast and spit out the bones.
f. Look me in the eyes and say that you really think your neighbours are that nasty, and that you think Jesus is okay with you thinking that.
Is there something wrong with my logic?
Or is the Earth already saved and transformed and healed?
How would you know?
Would anything be different?
What would be different?
Is it different?
8. Did God the Father create us?
Does he love us absolutely?
Does he love everyone the same?
Does he already love us entirely, more than we can imagine, as much as we can possibly ever be loved in the entire universe?
Does he love us absolutely and entirely and forever, BUT, only so long as we perform a certain ritual in space and time expressing belief in a certain person born some 2,008 years ago (modulo calendar conversions) called Jesus?
Does he love only those who believe in Jesus?
Does he hate the rest?
Does the infinite God get *better* if he decides to love us, after all, rather than hate us and abandon us to hell forever?
Does he love everyone and desire their company intensely and wish absolutely no harm to come to them, yet consign the unbelievers to eternal torment without end, forever - thus causing Himself eternal, unending grief and incompleteness?
What manner of expression must we use to dedicate our lives to Jesus, and what power must it have such that it changes the very eternal nature of the Father God Himself - He who cannot be changed and from whom we receive our being?
If this ritual of salvation is so very, very powerful that it changes the nature of God Himself, must we also be very, very careful about how we perform it, lest it go horribly wrong - and the Father God (who knows the track of every atom and the whisper of our every thought) misunderstand us entirely?
9. Does God perhaps love *everybody*, even those who have not performed whichever mysterious and awesome ritual it is that expresses saving faith in Jesus and puts sinners on the path to salvation?
Did perhaps God love everybody equally and infinitely *before* Jesus was born?
Does the notion of 'before' and 'after' have any meaning to a God Who lives outside time and creates it?
Did sinners pray 'the prayer of salvation' before Jesus was born?
What words or symbols did they use to do this?
Did they use words or symbols at all?
Do sinners pray 'the prayer of salvation' in words and symbols that do not directly reference Jesus - or something entirely other than words or symbols - after Jesus was born?
10. If God the Father already loves everybody more than they can possibly be loved, and His love cannot be diverted away from its course by anything we could ever say, think or do, and His love creates and populates the infinite heavens and the most intimate secrets of our as yet unspoken hearts:
Why did Jesus die?