The Death of Jesus for Postmodern People

Sword of Gryffindor is updated with Harry Potter, Perelandra, and Alchemy. 

I’m probably going to start moving a bit quicker with this "Moving Forward, Looking Backward" series, because I’m really itching to get to a series on adiophora. 

Onward we proceed with the doctrine of Christ, focusing on Christ’s suffering as the key to Christianity, postmodernism, and modern metanarratives.

“Suffered under
Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried”

The
inspired Christ-hymn presses the matter of Jesus’ condescension to earth by
declaring, “He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even
death on a cross.”[1] It is here, more than anywhere else, that the
Christian story gives unprecedented challenge to all modern forms of the
metanarrative.

It is the Christian claim that Jesus
paradigmatically embodied the central biblical trajectory of embracing
marginality and pain – ultimately death – on behalf of both the
margins and the center, thus bearing the sins of the world. This radical
embrace was vivid testimony to his trust in the Creator of both center and
margins, a Creator who is able to bring life even out of death. The person of
Jesus, and especially his death on a cross, thus becomes in the New Testament a
symbol of the counterideological intent of the biblical metanarrative and the
paradigm or model of ethical human action, even in the face of massive
injustice.[2]

Contra
those who wanted to overthrow Rome by military might, Jesus challenged the very notion and then submitted to
crucifixion. The words of the Creed,
“crucified under Pontius Pilate,” remind us of Jesus’ exchange with the man
under which he was crucified. “If my
kingdom were of this world,” Jesus tells Pilate, “my servants would have been
fighting.”[3] When Pilate explains to Christ his authority
to hand him over to death, Jesus places all authority in the hands of God.[4]

In this the
character of God is most powerfully revealed to anyone skeptical of the power
plays of modernist metanarratives. God,
who has all authority, demonstrated it in the great weakness of death on a
cross, “for us and for our salvation.” The Christian faith, firmly founded on the death of Jesus Christ for the
sins of the world, rests not on a promise of military victory or political
triumph, but upon the submission of the Son of God incarnate. A threatening
metanarrative Christianity is not.

Sadly,
Reformed and other believers in the past, as well as some today, have
envisioned Christianity as the triumph of Christian moral values, or even the
imposing of Old Testament civil law, onto the governments of the world. It is far past time to embrace once again the
humble character of the Christian faith. All our desperation, including the postmodern confusion of human identity,
is fixed in our rebellion against God the Creator. All our hope is found in the death of Jesus,
the Son of God, “who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and
was buried.”