Johnny, Take a Walk With the Crucified God

In December 1991 the rock band U2 released the song “Mysterious Ways,” the second single from their album Achtung Baby. With its funky guitar riff, catchy chorus, and appropriately confusing music video, the track quickly became a hit. In Bono’s famously opaque lyrical style, the song celebrates the creative movement of God’s spirit. “It’s alright,” the U2 frontman sings, “she moves in mysterious ways.” In his 2022 memoir Surrender, Bono wrote, “The lyrical genesis of this song had been a conversation with Jack Heaslip where he mused on the idea that the gender of God is not clear in the original biblical Hebrew.” Bono then places side-by-side quotations from the Bible’s creation story and David Byrne: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” and “The world moves on a woman’s hips.” Juxtaposing these two ideas, the song likens the creative power of God with that of the muses in his life, a power that cannot be understood, let alone controlled.

“Mysterious Ways” certainly has some emotional resonance for many today. The song’s confidence in divine action may provide some relief: “She’s slippy, you’re sliding down / She’ll be there, when you hit the ground.” God is there, working, even if we can’t see God: “One day you’ll look back, and you’ll see / Where you were held now by this love.” But as the guitar plays its last funky chord and conga drums fade, the assurance of the song gives way to questions. Who is this “slippy” God? How can such a power be trusted? Is there a person lurking behind the mystery? These questions are precisely the ones Bono’s careful ambiguity is meant to evoke. We are to be moved by this love in such a way that we can’t help but look to the lover herself.^[1]

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But given the state of our increasingly post-Christian world, it seems our methods for discerning God are lacking. We are told by everyone (both inside and outside the church) to write the plot to our story — to find God strictly within the horizon of our own experience. This inward turn represents a kind of spiritual version of what philosopher Charles Taylor has called the “ethics of authenticity,” where “each one of us has an original way of being human… each of us has to discover what it is to be ourselves. But the discovery can’t be made by consulting pre-existing models.” External authorities are either untrustworthy or inauthentic — we must judge for ourselves the truth about our lives, and about God. But is the story of one’s life really all that clear? Amidst the ebbs and flows of daily existence, the best one can say about God is that he is mysteriously aloof. To narrow your view of God to your experience actually compounds the mystery, unbearably so. Grasping for signs of the transcendent within the immanent, you will inspect and reexamine every data point of your life until you’re likely to collapse under the strain of this endless exertion and give up on God altogether.

When the earliest Christians spoke of God, the story they told was not of their day-to-day experience. To them, the intersection between divine transcendence and imminence was, first and foremost, the person of Jesus — whose death and resurrection did not simply represent the moment of their personal salvation, but the decisive revelation of God. The narrative they couldn’t stop repeating was of God’s gracious intervention in the world, specifically through the sending of his Son — an event that radiates outward to illuminate all of life and history itself.

They told of Jesus’ ministry, the way he was followed by large crowds wherever he went, performing miracles and teaching with unheard-of authority. The people begged him for miracles and he duly obliged. They hung on his every word and he gave them more to ponder. But what did it all mean? Jesus turned to his disciples and took a straw poll: “Who do the people say that I am?” The report they gave was disappointing. The crowds believed Jesus to be John the Baptist, Elijah, or another one of the prophets. Jesus turned the same question to the disciples, and Peter, the aspiring star student, offered a better hypothesis. Jesus was the Messiah (Mk 8:29).

Jesus didn’t praise Peter, but neither did he admonish him when it quickly became apparent that what Peter understood the Messiah to be was even further from the truth than the guesses of crowds. To Peter, the Messiah would triumphantly vanquish all of Israel’s enemies. To Jesus, the Messiah was one who would suffer and die. Like the half-healed blind man in the prior scene, Peter sees Jesus, but does not truly perceive him; he hears, but does not understand (Mk 4:12). To Jesus, the kind of Messiah Peter envisions is demonic, and he abruptly replies to Peter with the command, “Get behind me, Satan!” (8:33).

Between Jesus and Peter, between Jesus and the crowds, lay the unbridgeable gulf of Messianic suffering and death. On the one side is who people might deduce Jesus to be; the other side who Jesus actually is. However wrong they may be, the guesses of Peter and the crowds are nevertheless well informed. They follow the logic of scripture and Jesus’ own public actions, feebly searching their available language and postulate who Jesus is. They only know what they can see, having set their minds “on human things” (Mk 8:33) and compared Jesus to people who are similar to him. But in doing so they are unable to grasp his true significance, which ultimately lies beyond human wisdom. The death of Jesus at Golgotha introduces an unnatural contradiction: that the Messiah who will forever reign on David’s throne will do so by dying at the hands of Israel’s enemies, that the path to victory runs through defeat.

The shock of Jesus’ death and resurrection generated an epistemological revolution for his earliest followers. The truth of God and the universe was not what they otherwise would have thought it to be. Because however much Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection on the third day occurred “according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3-4), the Christian conviction arose retrospectively — both historically and hermeneutically. Aside from Jesus himself, the idea of a crucified Messiah was unthinkable to both the disciples, their Jewish contemporaries, and the Gentiles. Something new occurred at Calvary, an event whose very strangeness revealed what was hidden from before the foundation of the world.

Richard Tinkler, Book 7 Volume 1 Page 21.1, 2022. Ink on paper, 14 × 11 in. Courtesy of the artist and 56 Henry, New York. Photo by: Thomas Müller.

What if the contradiction of the cross was more apparent than real? What if the very thing that first appears strange and counterintuitive was, in fact, the way things always have been? Were it so, then presumptions about what is normal, natural, or rational, would themselves become their opposite — abnormal, unnatural, and irrational. One would be forced to confront the terrifying, but inevitable, conclusion that everything one had previously thought to be true was false. This is precisely the argument pursued by the apostle Paul.

Paul began his life, like Peter and many of the other disciples, believing in the coming of a Messiah who would restore the former glory of Israel. Paul was educated, a rising star within Judaism who knew his scriptures backwards and forwards, and to him the idea of a crucified Messiah was blasphemous, a capital offense. But encountering the risen Jesus on the Damascus Road, everything this learned scholar thought was turned upside down: his scriptures, his life, even his God. When Paul narrates his life story, Damascus is its disruptive turning point. Before Damascus, everything Paul had done amounted to nothing. After Damascus, Paul remained a Jew, but a highly peculiar one. He continued to believe in the same God, but understood him anew. He likewise continued to cite his scriptures, but their significance now pointed to Jesus.^[2] Paul the Jew became Paul the theologian of the cross.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul begins to outline his theology of the cross by noting its contradictory character. The word of the cross appears foolish compared to human wisdom. Likely reflecting his own missionary experience, Paul acknowledges that the scribe, philosopher, or rhetorician who might have heard him preach would have walked away with utter confusion and perhaps mockery. To these dissenters, the idea that the crucifixion of a convicted criminal brings life to all people is not just incorrect, but insanity. Just as it had once been for Paul himself, the cross of Jesus was “a scandal to the Jews and lunacy to the Gentiles” (1 Cor 1:23). Paul then takes their accusation and turns it on its head. From where Paul now sits, the life this message promises reveals all other forms of wisdom to be foolishness. Or better, God has turned other wisdom into lunacy. This upside-down logic extends even to the Christians of Corinth: just as a crucified Messiah was the means of redemption, so too were uneducated peasants chosen by God to dishonor the elites of his day.

The cross, in other words, was to Paul the sole basis for discerning the difference between truth and falsehood, and there was no other foundation upon which to build that would authenticate Paul’s message. As the philosopher Michel Henry observes, “The Truth of Christianity differs in essence from the truth of the world.” Jesus’ life-giving death brought all other ways of knowing God under judgement:

For Christianity, the truth no longer consists of showing itself in the world’s life, but on the contrary, one might say, by avoiding this … This radical overturning of the criterion of any truth is a paradox because it completely upsets ways of thinking about humanity, whether of today or of ancient times. Beyond these ways of thinking, ways of doing and the practical conduct of societies, as well as individuals, are also overturned.

God, for Paul, is to be found in the horror of the cross. Indeed, God refuses to be seen in any other way except through the cross.^[4] What looked like wisdom was really folly. What looked like life was really death. The truth only looks like a lie to those perishing, but “among the mature we do speak wisdom … we speak of God’s mysterious, hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages for our glory” (1 Cor 2:6–7). What was unknown became known, what was hidden became revealed. Before Paul, the Corinthians, Israel, and even creation itself, there was the wisdom of the cross.^[5] Like a prism refracting white light into a glorious rainbow, at Golgotha the mystery of everything was revealed, illuminating all the past, the future, and God himself.

Our lives may often appear mysterious; God is not. We struggle to discern the causal connection between one day’s events to another, one year to the next — let alone approximate their ultimate, divine meaning. If our lives have a story, its plot is largely unknown to us. But the radical conversions of Paul and the earliest Christians suggest a different way of approaching our own incomprehension. If everything is lunacy and the cross is wisdom, then perhaps we don’t need a coherent life story. Perhaps life doesn’t need to make any sense, because in the bewildering and unexpected, God has revealed himself. As foolish as it might sound, that’s the one true thing that makes everything alright.