A scandal and a stumbling block is the crucifixion, a “strange way” of getting things done. As we enter Holy Week, Christians need to recover a sense of the utter strangeness of what God has achieved in Christ. A Welsh poet and a French troublemaker can help us with that.

 
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A scandal and a stumbling block, Paul calls it: a scandal for those who think it abhorrent, a stumbling block for those who think it vulgar. It is, of course, the crucifixion. At its core, Christianity (“we preach Christ crucified”) proclaims something that is, at best incomprehensible, and at worst, positively repulsive.

For those of us within the church, preparing to commemorate the events of Holy Week once more, it is sometimes hard to hear the scandalized stumbling that accompanies the message of Christ crucified. For us, the poetic language of two thousand years— prayers, hymns, readings, music, art— is understandable, if not on an intellectual level, then at least on a emotional level. Even the opacity of Newman’s “O generous love! that he who smote / In Man for man the foe, / The double agony in Man / For man should undergo” can make some kind of sense when the verse is sung as part of a service and a tradition which is centred on making sense of the double agony of Christ, in Gethsemane and on Golgotha. In other words, the best way to understand the rules of the game is to play the game.

But this isn’t and can’t be the case for those who stand outside the tradition, whether by choice or by circumstance. You don’t have to be an (un)cultured despiser like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, to find the stories and images of Holy Week strange. And it’s good for those within the church occasionally to recover something of the scandal and the stumbling of the Passion.

One of the best recent examples of this recovery of scandal is the work of the Welsh songwriter Martyn Joseph. In the song “Strange Way” from his 1998 album “Tangled Souls”, Joseph looks at the crucifixion from the puzzled point of view of modern man:

Strange way to start a revolution
Strange way to get a better tan
Strange way to hold a power breakfast
Strange way show your business plan
Strange way to see if wood would splinter
Strange way to do performance art
Strange way to say “I’ll see you later”
Strange way to leave behind your heart

Strange dissident of meekness
And nurse of tangled souls
And so unlike the holy
To end up full of holes
Strange way

Simone Weil would probably have understood Joseph’s shocking tactics: her relationship with the Church and Christian theology was truly to think the unthinkable and write the unwriteable. Not for any puerile desire to shock, but from the sincere and committed wrestling with the truth, the reality, and the implications of Jesus’s actions:

Everytime I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.1

Christ was afflicted. He did not die like a martyr. He died like a common criminal, confused with thieves, only a little more ridiculous. For affliction is ridiculous.2

God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightening flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has become entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.”3

Strange ways indeed.

A version of Strange Way, sung by Joseph on the 2001 Faith, Folk and Anarchy album is available from here as a free download. Listen to it, and then go and buy more of Joseph’s unsettling work

  1. “… toutes les fois que je pense à la crucifixion du Christ, je commets le péché d’envie.” Attente de Dieu, (Paris: Fayard, 1966), p. 62. [↩]
  2. Waiting for God, p. 125. [↩]
  3. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trs. Arthur Wills (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp.140-141 [↩]