Story

The Bible presents itself as a story of everything: Genesis begins with the words, 'In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth', and John's Gospel echoes that cosmic scope by starting with, 'In the beginning was the Word'. But with the failures of Adam, Cain and Noah, the Bible becomes a story of how God chose one people, Abraham and his descendants, the twelve tribes of Jacob. What began as a wide-canvas epic becomes a lyric tale of God's love for Israel, whose destiny continually hangs by a thread. Israel is starved in Canaan, enslaved in Egypt, lost in the wilderness, outnumbered in the Promised Land, leaderless in the time of the Judges, overrun by the Assyrians and the Chaldeans, exiled in Babylon, and almost obliterated by the scheming Haman in Susa. At every stage everybody wonders, and usually somebody says, 'God has abandoned us' – and who can blame them for imagining so?

At the centre of the Old Testament is the covenant that God makes with Moses on Mt Sinai. The story of the Old Testament is of how that covenant came to be made and of whether that covenant will survive the tragedies and tribulations of Israel's faithfulness and folly. Perhaps the crucial moment in that unfolding drama comes in Babylon, when Israel reflects back on the thousand or so years since the covenant, and realizes it's as close to God in exile as it ever was in the Promised Land. The prophet Hosea tells this story in all its simplicity and poignancy. 'When Israel was a child,' God says in Hosea 11, 'I loved him ... I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks ... The more I called them, the more they went from me ... How can I hand you over, O Israel? I will not execute my fierce anger ... I will not come in wrath ... I will return them to their homes.' Here we see God's side of the story.

All of this shapes how we understand the cross. The Gospels present Jesus as the embodiment of the covenant, utterly Israel and utterly God. Jesus re-enacts the great events of Israel's history; being baptized at the Jordan to reflect Joshua entering the Promised Land across the Jordan, spending 40 days in the wilderness to mirror Israel's 40 years, calling twelve disciples to echo Israel's twelve tribes, delivering a sermon on the mount to imitate Moses' time with God on Mt Sinai, right up until his body is destroyed on the cross like Israel's temple was destroyed by the Chaldeans. At the same time the rejection of Jesus by the scribes and Pharisees and Sanhedrin is presented as the final among Israel's long list of failures to honour the covenant. And yet, just as Israel was closer to God in exile than ever elsewhere, so we are closer to God at the moment of Jesus' crucifixion, his ultimate exile from God and from us, than at any other moment.

Jesus assumes the mantle of Israel, suffering for all Israel's sins, and finally achieving what the temple was there to do – make good God's relationship with Israel through repentance embodied in sacrifice. But Jesus also thereby makes a new covenant, not just with Israel, but with all humankind. This is the great gift of St Paul, who in his life and his letters demonstrates how forgiveness and eternal life are extended to all who believe.

And this is where the problem arises. We could call it one problem with three manifestations. The problem we can call history – or to put it more aptly, what happens when story meets history. The first manifestation of the problem is a moral one. In order to explain why God opened the covenant up to Gentiles, the Church started to tell a terrible story of what was wrong with the Jews. And that led to centuries of persecution and culminated in the Holocaust. That legacy of persecution is so damaging that it threatens to leave the moral credibility of Christianity hanging by a thread. But it has more subtle aspects. It's fashionable in some congregations to express misgivings about conventional doctrines of the atonement that suggest Jesus died as a sacrificial victim in our place, or took the world's sins on his back, or that portray Jesus as a conquering hero destroying death and parading down the heavenly way. But notice that all of these atonement theories have one thing in common: they attempt to tell the story of God in a manner that airbrushes out the Jews altogether. The scar of the Church's conscience about the Jews isn't limited to historical oppression: it's riven through conventional doctrine too.

The second manifestation of what happens when story meets history is a factual one. What do we do when textual scholars and archaeologists cast serious doubts on whether some crucial parts of the story measure up to historical scrutiny? If there wasn't, say, an Abraham, or if there's no evidence of an exodus – if Haman's threat in the book of Esther to exterminate the Jews is a made-up fable? What do we make of the Bible, if important elements may never really have happened? When story becomes 'just a story'? Is our heritage hanging by a thread?

And the third dimension of history is a philosophical one. Even if one grants that the most significant parts of the story do indeed match with the historical record, how can one event, that happened once in one place, have significance for the meaning of everything, everywhere? As one eighteenth-century philosopher put it, how can accidental truths of history become the proof of necessary truths of reason? Isn't there a yawning chasm between faith, that holds great store by particular events and people, and history, that derives conclusions from universal phenomena? Doesn't this leave faith hanging by a thread?

Much thought has been put into rescuing Christianity from the dangling thread of history that these three dimensions bring about. When we look at the cross, we see the agony and the isolation of Christ, but to believe it's all in vain, that it's pointless to imagine one moment of sacrifice can represent everything or change anything – that makes the agony all the more excruciating. How can we keep hold of the tiny thread of faith in the face of the dismantling tendency of history?

Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities tells of two men who look extraordinarily alike. One is Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat whose relatives have caused untold suffering to the common people in the decades prior to the French Revolution. He marries the winsome Lucie, even though both realize that his family have caused her terrible grief, including her father's long imprisonment. The other man is Sydney Carton, an alcoholic and depressive English barrister, who also loves Lucie, but fails to win her hand. At the climax of the novel, Charles, who returns to Paris, is arrested and faces the guillotine. But Sydney, playing on the resemblance between the two, in love of Lucie and desire for once to make something worthy of his life, drugs Charles and goes to the guillotine in his place, saying, 'It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.'

What Sydney's gesture shows us is that Jesus' cross may be inseparable from his place in Israel's story; but that all of us can take up our...