The Central Murder

If it is our death that Jesus died on the cross, there is in the cross the constraint of an infinite love. --James Denney

From the teaching of Jesus and from his crucifixion we can know that murder is the central negative motif in human history. There is murder at the beginning, at the middle, at the close: The righteous son is killed; God's righteous Son is executed; followers of the Son are slain. Jesus, crying out to the doctors of the Law and the Pharisees (Matthew 23), could summarize the history of Israel, negatively seen, as the ever-repeated rejection and killing of the men of god, from Abel in the first book of the Hebrew scripture to Zechariah in the last book (2 Chronicles). Jesus saw that the sequence was about to reach its culmination in what would be done to him. This summary was given still more vivid expression in the parable of the wicked husbandmen who mistreat or kill one representative after another sent by the owner of the vineyard and finally kill the owner's son. (Mark 12:1-9 and parallels).

Jesus stressed that his followers could expect treatment comparable to that given him. Stephen confronted his antagonists with a similar survey of Israel's history, now including its culmination; and with his death by stoning, the murder sequence continued. In the gospel apocalypses and in Revelation, the close of history is depicted as a time filled with catastrophe and mass slaying, especially of the people of God.

In the two great commandments, Jesus called his followers to love God and their fellow human beings. John later emphasized the inseparable unity of the two commandments, from the negative side: "Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen" (1 John 4:20). The dual drives to be rid of God and the countering brother--the opposite of the dual loves to which we are called--coincided completely in the drama of the murder of Jesus: malice toward the visible brother formed a continuum with rejection of the unseen God; the judicial murder of the brother amounted to the attempt to do away with God. "As it is, you want to kill me when I tell you the truth as I have learned it from God" (John 8:40). All their sin entered into the murder, which came as supreme expression of the totality of their sinning.

Even as Christians we can at times discern in ourselves the dual drives to be rid of God and the antagonist. The drive to be rid of God is the chief convergent implication of my sinning; the bent toward doing away with the antagonist is its identifiable inner extreme. But this means too that, whenever and however the drive to be rid of a fellow human being--the hostility-hatred-murder continuum--emerges in me, it carries with it inseparably the drive to be rid of God and veers back across the centuries into that crucifixion of the Christ.

Paul wrote: "We are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died" (2 Corinthians 5:14). James Denney, pointing to the second half of the statement, explains: "This clause puts as plainly as it can be put the idea that His death was equivalent to the death of all. In other words, it was the death of all men which was died by Him" (The Death of Christ).

Taken into his dying was the death of Abel and Stephen and Martin Luther King Jr. Taken in also was the death of Cain and Caiaphas and Adolf Hitler. Comprehended in the death of that Victim was the death of every victim of the hostility-hatred-murder continuum. When one person kills another, they inflict a death which entered into Jesus' dying. When anyone, in hatred or not caring, hands over another into dying, the result was there already in the result of that long-ago betrayal. Massacre of multitudes in war was a component in the one death. The words of the Son of Man on the judgment throne apply also to evil inflicted: "...as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40).

Pragmatic readiness to sacrifice other human beings pervades history. The quintessentially cogent expression of this came in the words of Caiaphas to his fellow oligarchs: "It is better for one man to die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed" (John 11:50). The dire alternative was pictured: "If we let him go on in this way everybody will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy the Holy Place and our nation" (John 11:48). The necessity so obvious to common sense, that in certain situations some (and from an adversary group unlimited numbers) may have to be given over to death for the survival and well-being of the many, would seem here to be supremely persuasive: The death of only one is required to save the whole nation from being destroyed. The danger pointed to was an actual possibility, not something imaginary or fabricated. The oligarchs were chiefly concerned not about the many but about their own position and power with its base in the many. But still, whether for the many or for the privileged few, what could be a more reasonable and natural recourse than the sacrifice of just one person?

Most of the subtleties and persuasiveness of all arguments throughout history (the theological ones also) for the sacrifice of some on behalf of the collectivity are compacted in that formulation by Caiaphas. Such arguments reckon that the numbers of victims (from within the collectivity) will be acceptably limited when viewed in comparison with the supremely important good at stake. Nuclear gamesmen too proceed in a most outrageous stretching of Caiaphas' point.

The pragmatic readiness to sacrifice human life, which found superlative expression through Caiaphas, took as focal victim Jesus of Nazareth. But there was something that outweighed that readiness, even its totality within all of history: The willingness of Jesus to become victim of that pragmatism and thus "identify Himself with the countless victims of wars, with all those who have been deliberately sacrificed to the Political Necessities and Social Duty, [with] the millions of human beings who have been slaughtered and constrained to slaughter each other by being more or less persuaded that their deaths would be serving Justice and Law. By His readiness to become the victim of such a belief, Jesus unmasked its monstrous falsity, and showed His disciples in advance that they could never adopt it themselves" (Jean Lasserre, War and the Gospel).

On a ruined wall in Hiroshima is dimly etched the figure of a human being who was standing next to it when the flash came. The body, though instantaneously vaporized, stopped enough of the awful light to leave that abiding epitaph. When German theologian Heinrich Vogel gazed at the dim silhouette, the thought gripped him: Jesus Christ was there in the inferno with that person; what was done to him was done to Christ; the horror he may have had no instant to feel, Jesus felt. The Light of the world stood uncomprehended, comprehending, and undone by the hideous splendor of humankind's stolen fire. God's son yielded to humanity's Little Boy (code name of that bomb). Jesus' presence in the midst of atomic holocaust was intimated also in the fact that the bomb on Nagasaki exploded very close to the largest Christian cathedral in all Asia, annihilating 1,100 worshippers.

We can envision the risen Jesus there at the foot of the cross of cloud, the victor as victim. But the death of the person next to the wall, the death of those Japanese multitudes, already impinged on Jesus at Skull Hill. What the crucified one took to himself at the midpoint of history, the risen one, drawing near, takes to himself hour after hour, disease by disease, enmity by enmity, war by war in the sequence of history.

We can recite numbers or call up mental images of Auschwitz or Dresden, the Black Death or the slave trade, Julius Caesar's massacres or Tamerlane's, Stalin's or the Pentagon's in Indochina. But the awesome magnitude of such horrors remains a mystery impenetrable except through approach to the man of Gethsemane and Golgotha. I can meditate on the vaporization of a few in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but my mind cannot visualize the snuffing out of 250,000 human beings. There is, though, the slain One, whose mind, heart, body in A.D. 30 and A.D. 1945 took that in. Because the fullness of God dwelt in him, he could take to himself and register to the full the monstrous magnitudes of human hate, killing, and death. When we discern the slaughter or hate and guilt of multitudes as convergent on Jesus Christ, we have an intimation of his agony. By contemplating his agony we have some index to those magnitudes, which encompass each of us and the unsurveyable human masses present and past.

What is currently being prepared for and what would be fought would come as war against all human beings, not just against those in "enemy" countries. All would be to some extent casualties of the war; quite possibly all would die, over a period of time, as its victims. In Hebrew thought a single murder cast its imperiling shadow over the entire faith community; the gravity of the disorder it constituted impinged on all who were within that corporateness. In that perspective, what an ominous hovering immensity hangs over the U.S. because of private murders, the savor and stimulus of media violence, and military slaughters past, present, future. But that immensity in its greater breadth looms over all humanity in its corporateness--looms as non-material magnitude, which, for its full globe-encircling scope, has taken concretization in the nuclear arsenals. It is as central person of all humanity that Jesus Christ is presently threatened by this guilt and doom (which he earlier bore).

God, in order that we might meet, narrowed God's self down into Jesus. But Jesus was also the narrowing down of the totality of humankind. He was formed that our vision might rest not only on this focal expression of the invisible God but also on this singular image of the neighbors we have been too nearsighted to see and of the myriads of human beings we have no sight to see. This latter dimension is indicated by Jesus' words in the judgment scene pictured in Matthew 25:31-46. Though we cannot envision all who should be within our view, we are to see him who is focus and head of that vast throng.

That 300 million persons or a billion or four billion might be killed in a nuclear world war is beyond the imagination of any mortal. My nearest approach to the magnitude of that horror comes when I realize that Jesus would be the central victim in the midst of the annihilation. Each victim he would know; each passion, each death he would feel. He in whom God has drawn near would be there with the least of all who are his in a thousand infernos. The slain Brother would be there with every brother and sister, with every terrified child, as the slower ghastliness of radiation sickness spread across the continents. A darkness more enduring than that on a long-ago Passover would come across the world, after a more ominous quaking of earth and disintegration of rocks. From innumerable parched lips would come some echo of the cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"; for that elimination of intolerable neighbors would bring with it an apparent doing away with God. But the One who gave supreme utterance to that cry, the Neighbor-Brother-God, who was done away with, would be there in the midst.

This means that all the nuclear weapons delivery systems of this world are zeroed in on a target that comprehends all human targets: Jesus. The warriors of West and East, with no eyes to get even a glimpse of the "enemy" multitudes, see the One least of all. But Christians must understand that there is no aiming of nuclear weapons and no assent to them which does not zero in on him: "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me."

It is not given us to know whether nuclear world war, if this comes, will constitute the engulfing terminal murder of all human beings. We can know that it would come as a more immense crucifixion of humankind and re-crucifying of that Man than anything else till now in history. Therefore the awesome magnitude of the guilt in nuclear terrorism (even apart from holocaust) is second only to that guilt in the crucifixion of Jesus.

If as disciples we are drawn close to this Lord, we will be drawn into his anguished compassion for those moving into catastrophe. God was able to involve lone prophets in his agonized cry of warning. The Son draws those who are his. Full knowledge of the doom so near ahead shapes the impinging of his love. Our Lord does not ask that we stare heroically into the nuclear abyss; he asks that we look toward him and let our sight become aligned with his.

If we are to love as he has loved us, our perception of how he has loved focuses toward his earthly life and death, and yet takes in how he loves us all now. An overarching part of that now of his loving has to do with his standing with all nuclear victims. Will we love near and far neighbors as he now loves us? Will we see any who come within our vision as partly overshadowed by the pathos and peril of nuclear guilt and nuclear war? Will we put our lives on the line, his line, against the onrush of chaos?

Dale Aukerman was a Sojourners correspondent when this article appeared.