#10 “Behold, a God
who bleeds!”
“For the
message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who
are being saved it is the power of God. … For the foolishness of God is wiser
than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”[1]
During an
episode of the original Star Trek series, Captain Kirk beams down to a planet
with primitive people, into their temple, knocking him unconscious and
suffering from temporary amnesia. When he comes out of the temple the natives
proclaim him a god from the heavens, and the chief gives him his priestess
daughter to marry. But the boyfriend is fiercely jealous, and confronts Kirk
alone in the forest to fight him, even if he is a god. In the struggle, the
boyfriend cuts Kirk’s hand, and in a mocking tone, proclaims: “Behold, a god
who bleeds!”, meaning he is no god at all – not powerful or
worthy of worship.[2]
This phrase
just jumped out at me when I saw the episode in reruns, having not watched the
original show. This same mocking disdain for God has been seen for 2000 years, causing
one critic to call Jesus “the mangled Messiah” and Nietzsche to
refer to Jesus as “God on a Cross”[3]
and Christianity as “a religion of pity.” The apostle Paul was quite
familiar with these taunts against Christ and Christianity, when he wrote to the
Corinthians in the scripture verse at the top.
The Jews were
looking for a Messiah who would be a father like Abraham, a deliverer as mighty
as Moses, and a warrior king like David, but not a bleeding god. Even when
Jesus was dying on the cross, the crowd urged Him to come down off the cross
and show His power.[4] That this Messiah would also be a lowly servant,
even unto death, was a stumbling block for some of them, and a disappointment for
others.
In Athens, the
apostle Paul preached to the Gentile intellectuals about their “unknown god.”[5]
They knew that even if their gods would stoop to become human for a while, they
wouldn’t stay that way. Plato summed up their beliefs saying “The body
is the prison house of the soul” and once you die, the soul is
left free to fly up to heaven and not be weighed down by the illusion of this
earthly existence. But when Paul preached to the intellectual Athenians about
the resurrection of the glorified body, most scoffed at his foolishness and
left and only a few became believers. Jesus was fully God and fully human,
showing that our bodies are an important part of expressing who we are, now and
forever in the resurrection.
The crowds
loved Jesus’ healings and feeding thousands with free bread, but when it came
to His suffering and dying on the cross for our sins or being resurrected in a
body, that is where followers either turned away or became believers.
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