As the lead pastor of a contemporary worship service, I have had a lot of time to meditate upon the lyrics of Jeremy Riddle's song "Sweetly Broken," which we sing perhaps every other weekend. The verses are a catechism of penal substitution theology: "For on [the cross] my Savior both bruised and crushed / Showed that God is love / And God is just" and "I was under Your wrath / Now through the cross I'm reconciled."

I often cringe at the way that an overzealous worship of substitutionary atonement creates an account of divine justice in which God is way more invested in making humanity pay infinitely for every small infraction against Him than He cares about standing up for the widows, orphans, and aliens. I've also spent many hours of my life wrestling with the Greek word <em>orge </em>which gets translated as "wrath" in English, but is also etymologically related to our word "orgy." It seems like there is more going on with God's <em>orge</em> than just intense anger. I tend to think of God's <em>orge</em> as expressing the cataclysmic dissonance that occurs when God's all-consuming, infinite love confronts our stand-offish self-reliance and self-justification.

But what really makes me uneasy about this song is the chorus:
<blockquote><em>At the cross You beckon me</em>
<em> You draw me gently to my knees, and I am</em>
<em> Lost for words, so lost in love,</em>
<em> I'm sweetly broken, wholly surrendered</em></blockquote>
Am I the only one who sees this as an uncomfortably erotic image? Madonna's song "Like a Prayer" uses similar imagery: "When you call my name, it's like a little prayer; I'm <em>down on my knees</em>, I can take you there." Throughout Christian history, erotic language has been used to describe the mystical reality of our relationship with Christ. He is called the bridegroom of the church, and the steamy Biblical book <em>Song of Songs</em> has been interpreted as a description of what that bridal chamber looks like. Jesus certainly used language about his own body that was very uncomfortable for His original listeners to hear: "Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." (John 6:53). Early Christians were accused by the Romans of cannibalism because of language like this.

Here's my concern though. When the cross is eroticized in a song like this, do we forget that real blood was shed? As Mark Baker writes in his <em>Recovering the Scandal of the Cross</em>, the brutality of what was done to Jesus has been lost in an age when we're "lost in love" with the piety of our atonement theories. Certainly Paul used the cross metaphorically in his writings; it's an eternal mystery that transcends the temporal physical event itself, but has the cross lost its power when we are able to use words like "gentle" and "sweet" to talk about what happened to Jesus? Perhaps the problem is not so much the eroticism, but the fact that Jeremy Riddle isn't really "lost for words" before a cross that gets domesticated when it becomes the centerpiece of a love song.

I will never completely understand the cross, though I will probably preach about it several hundred more times before I die. I understand that Riddle is grappling for a way to describe the mystery of atonement and that he's talking about his personal experience of redemption rather than what physically happened to Jesus. But it's also important to name the truly horrifying eroticism of the cross, since Jesus was <em>penetrated</em> by the world's nails. So I'm not sure that "gentle" and "sweet" are the right adjectives to use when talking about the rape of the creator of the universe. I must confess I'm "lost for words" myself, because I'm not sure how I would write the song differently or whether we should be making pop love songs about the cross.