The "Failure" of the Cross

This is a continuation from a previous blog post, “Success and Failure”, which can be found here.

During his 2015 trip to the United States, Pope Francis caused a minor controversy by suggesting that Christ’s life on earth ultimately ended in failure on the cross. Predictably, some accused the Pope of blasphemy, while others denounced him as a false prophet. "How could Christ's death on the cross possibly be a failure when it was the means by which he redeemed the world? Does Francis not understand the basics of Christian theology?".

Yet, like with any controversy involving a quote by a public figure, we need to return to the source of the quote in question and place it in its proper context to avoid any potential misunderstanding. For instance, if you take the famous quote by John F. Kennedy, "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a Berliner"), out of context, you might end up thinking that the former president was claiming to be a native of the German capital when he was actually expressing his and America's solidarity with the people of Berlin after the city had been divided in two by the Wall in 1961.

With the Francis controversy, however, there was something worse than a simple misunderstanding going on: most of his critics failed to cite the quote correctly by including two words that totally affected its meaning, and those were "humanly speaking". The entire quote was as follows:

“The cross shows us a different way of measuring success. Ours is to plant the seeds: God sees to the fruits of our labors. And if at times our efforts and works seem to fail and produce no fruit, we need to remember that we are followers of Jesus… and his life, humanly speaking, ended in failure, in the failure of the cross” (Homily delivered at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, 24 September 2015).

Now, it's not hard to see what Francis meant in this passage from his homily. In fact, he spells it out quite clearly: "humanly speaking"— according to man's measure of success— Jesus was a failure. This was the man who many believed was the promised “Son of David”: the anointed one who would free his people from foreign oppression, recall the twelve tribes of Israel to their homeland, defeat the enemies of the Lord, and unite all the people of the world under his rule. Yet… Christ didn’t do this: instead, he was tried and accused of blasphemy by the Jewish religious authorities, executed in a shameful and excruciating fashion by the soldiers of the occupying forces, and rejected by his own people as an apostate. By all appearances, Jesus failed in his messianic mission; and, not only failed, but failed spectacularly.

Of course, Jesus’s life was not a failure because, “The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25). What many people living in the time of Christ failed to see—and what many in our own age still fail to see—is that it was by this "failure" on the cross that Christ was able to redeem the whole world. He might not have defeated Israel's enemies and freed the Jews from their oppression at the hand of the Romans, but he did free all of mankind from its enemies: sin, death, and the devil. This messiah might not have called the lost tribes of Israel back to their homeland, but he did call all the people of the globe back to their home in God's kingdom.

What does all this mean for us Christians and our lives today? It means that, even if what we are doing appears fruitless and a total waste of our precious time (or a catastrophic failure of monumental proportions), there is a great probability that God will bring about good fruit from this effort of ours if what we do is done out of love for him. If God was able to bring about a greater good from the "failure" of our Lord's crucifixion, he can surely bring about greater good from our failures. Therefore, we shouldn’t despair if things haven't worked the way we would have liked: our life is in God’s hands, and he causes all things to work together for good to those who love him (Romans 8:28).