This week, hundreds of millions of Christians throughout the world will commemorate the suffering and death of Christ. These observances will entail marking and remembering this momentous event through a solemn reading and careful consideration of the accounts of Christ’s death that are found in the Gospels.
The yearly practice of remembrance of the torture and execution of Christ is accepted by most Christians as an occasion of personal transformation and spiritual edification — unexpected meaning is found in calling to mind an event that is for the believer a testimony to the indomitable love of God manifested in His willingness to forgive even that which seems to be unforgivable.
While the internalization of the meaning of Christ’s suffering and death is undeniably personal, it is also cultural and always has been. When Christ’s earliest disciples held up the story of Christ’s cross to the culture in which they lived, a culture that employed the cross as an instrument of terror, they were knowingly engaged in an act of cultural subversion. Christ’s suffering and death had not only changed them, but it was also meant to change the world. How so?
Perhaps one of the most compelling accounts of how the cross of Christ stands athwart culture has been presented by 20th-century historian and literary critic Rene Girard. Girard saw in the Gospel accounts of the suffering and death of Christ something of surprising importance, an unexpected turn against a practice of violence that had been sanctioned for countless
