“Kiss the Son”
“‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky.” (Jimi Hendrix)
The average woman or man on the street – upon questioning – has quite a positive picture of Jesus in his or her mind. Surveys usually reveal people’s admiration for his compassion for the poor and downtrodden and his revolutionary teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (“turn the other cheek and all that”).
But when the cross is brought up, this admiration is swiftly transformed into evasiveness, bewilderment and even ridicule. People simply cannot conceive of why, after all the good he has done in his life, Jesus suddenly gets it into his head that he’d like to be noble and try and ‘save us from our sins’. Such ideas as ‘sin’ and ‘propitiation’ are considered barbaric, unworthy and unsophisticated today and so the (post)modern, secular person – who genuinely appreciates Jesus as a man and a teacher in many ways – is torn between embarrassment and mild offence whenever this subject of the cross is brought up.
Their demeanour says it all:
“C’mon Jesus, I think I get why this follower of yours in front of me is trying awkwardly to persuade me to ‘repent’ of my sins and trust in the ‘blood of Jesus’ which ‘washes all my sins away’… he is ignorant, he has misunderstood the mythology of the Bible, probably through a lack of education, and is taking it all too literally. But you, surely you should know better? This dying on the cross thing is beneath you and surely out of character for a man of your sophistication. Get down from the cross, you’re only embarrassing yourself and those of us who used to respect you. Help people in ways that you can; play to your strengths – teaching, showing compassion for the poor and sick, feeding people, giving them hope and leading the way in moral purity.”
Now perhaps you yourself have never said quite these words to Jesus in your head/heart but you would be the exception. I have seen the look that corresponds to these words countless times, even from people who continue to love and respect me despite my dependence on something so risible as the blood of Jesus.
We are told that postmodernism has created a more reflective modern man who is more humble and less self assertive than previous generations. In many ways I can affirm this, being myself a child of the postmodern academy. Yet for all this the self-assertiveness of men and women has not gone away and it never will, in our own strength, for it is buried deep within our hearts. And it manifests itself supremely in our response to the cross of Jesus.
The people in the gospel narrative – virtually to a man – all had this identical response to Jesus. They found that, in the light of his great moral stature, his presence on the cross offended their sensibilities and they demanded that he get down from the cross.
This is where the irony – both now and then – is absolute. Because were Jesus all of a sudden to jump down from the cross, healed and seeking the people who wrongfully tried to have him killed, we would then finally realise that we did indeed need to be saved — from him! For we were the ones who put him there.
It was Jesus’ attitude to sin and his assertion of his right to forgive sin that led people who had previously respected him to become complicit in his execution. This is describing you and me! The outrage we feel when Christians come to us telling us that we need Jesus to save us from our sins is the only confirmation that we need that, if we had been in the crowd in the first century, we too would have (whether wistfully or passionately) affirmed the call for Jesus to be stopped (ie. called for his blood).
Yet if we ‘could’ have been there and if Jesus ‘had’ in fact answered our request for him to stop embarrassing himself and get down from the cross then we would finally have realised – too late – what he was doing there in the first place. He was being judged in the place of arrogant, self-centred, God-hating people like you and me. Such a Jesus, who would come down from the cross, could only ever engender terror and despair in us as we realised that the wrath of God that was being poured down on Jesus on the cross was now being turned upon at us, it’s original and rightful recipients – and at our own behest no less! What a relief that Jesus did ‘not’, in fact listen to their jeers then, or ours today, which ‘dare’, challenge and beseech him to come down.
The only hope we can turn to in light of this we find described in Psalm 2 with the simple advice:
“Kiss the Son, lest he be angry”…
What you must understand is that there are actually two ways to kiss the son: there is Peter (who represents the authentic Christian believer [nb. who was originally most opposed to the cross cf. Mark 8]) and then there is Judas (anyone who has got to know Jesus but ends up scorning the cross and selling Jesus out).
Judas:
The person who asks Jesus to get down from the cross is being the same kind of friend to him as Judas, who respected him initially yet betrayed him when he realised that his destination was the cross – betrayed him with a kiss.
Peter:
The person who has understood the wrath of God against sin, however, through the wrath that the son ‘took’ on the cross for the sake of their sin, will fall before the son in fear and terror – fear and terror at the scandal of witnessing the God, there on the cross, who would deign to love and save someone as detestable as them. Their kiss would not be the Judas kiss of betrayal – of the one who sees no need for the cross and who thinks it diminishes Jesus’ glory and makes him unworthy of their worship. No, theirs is the kiss of devotion lavished on the one who loved them deeper than anything this world has ever seen, for he gave himself for them, his enemies, to save and redeem them and make them his brothers and sisters to share in his glory.
How will you kiss the Son?
Will you kiss him as Judas, the self-righteous, so-called friend who considered himself above the need for forgiveness from a holy and wrathful God…?
Or will you kiss him as Peter – a flawed, impetuous, hypocritical and weak person (as all Christians are) who was confronted with the scale of his own betrayal of Jesus, yet also with the even more tremendous love and mercy of Jesus which lifted him to his feet in forgiveness, bestowing dignity and honour upon him which he did not deserve, even as he threw himself to the floor in unworthiness…
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