Good Friday April
18, 2014
Isaiah 52:13-53:12 Ps 22
Heb.10:1-25
John 18:1-19:37
The Cross of Jesus has developed many meanings since it first occurred. We can only start with a very secular history
of the Roman method of capital punishment, the method of crucifixion. It was a horrendous event that could be
coupled with floggings, humiliations and other techniques of torture. One could imagine it a part of interrogation
as a way for the Roman authorities to find out co-conspirators in anything that
could have the appearance of an insurrection.
The Cross of Jesus lost its brutal secular historical interpretation
when the followers of Jesus could not believe that the death of such an
amazingly perfect person could be but the seed planted for a more perfect and
complete outcome.
The greatest outcome of the Cross of Jesus was the birth of a large
number of people who saw the Cross of Jesus as an event of Glory. St. Paul said that he would know nothing
among his people, except Christ and Him Crucified. St. Paul said that he would glory in the
Cross of Christ, through whom he was crucified to the world and the world to
him.
The earliest New Testament writings are the writing of St. Paul and the
cross had become for him a profound metaphor of personal transformation. It had become the profound metaphor for the
Eucharist which Paul presided at. Paul
wrote, “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep
the feast.” With St. Paul we have a Lamb
of God theology which in turn becomes a part of how Christ is presented in the
Gospel of John.
The Passion Gospel of John, which is read on Good Friday, is the most
developed presentation of the Passion Narrative. In this Passion we can see evidence that
“Glorying in the Cross” of Jesus has now become the way in which the very
Passion Narrative is presented.
In the Gospel of John, Pilate as the executioner is treated as though he
is a minor pawn in God’s purposes for the world. “Pilate, you could not do anything unless it
was allowed and ordained by God.”
Some people might think that an event can only have one meaning or
several official meanings. Some people
would be ready to excommunicate you if you believed or thought lots of
different things about the cross.
I think that the Cross of Jesus, like any event, does not ever finish
having meanings, even new meanings because in our isolation from the events of
2000 years, new meanings, other meaning can occur to us. One meaning can even contradict another meaning
and yet still not be censored by doctrinal police who presume to know the “real
meaning.”
For many years, the prophets and
sages to criticized the business of priestly religion. The economy of priestly religion was for
people to provide animal offerings for the priests of the temple. The
priests of the Jewish Temples wanted sacrifices of lambs, heifers, sheep, goats
and birds. Such offerings were good for
the Temple economy; the animal offerings were “stand in” victims to pay with
life for the sins of the people who gave the animal offering. People could get “indulgences” for their
otherwise bad behavior by offering sacrifices.
The ancient sages had enough of the “bloody mess” when they cried, “God
does not desire bloody sacrifice. God
does not desire the blood of animals.”
What God desires is the living sacrifice of loving mercy and justice and
walking humbly before God.
If this living sacrifice theology really caught on, then religious institutions
would surely not be needed.
The holy Man, Jesus was a living sacrifice with his life; he loved
mercy, he did justice, he advocated radical love and he walk humbly as Son of
God before God.
The justice, love and mercy of Jesus caused a stir. He gained a following and some of his own
felt threatened. Jesus was in the
tradition of the prophets who wanted religion not to be a diversionary game
from how one lived one’s life. His
radical love, justice and mercy were also a threat to the Romans. The Roman authorities ended up being like unknowing
secular priests who offered the life of Jesus, not on an altar, but upon the
cross.
The Cross to end the life of a political figure got reinterpreted and it
became an altar on which an offering was made to God to consummate or celebrate
the relationship between humanity and God in a new Covenant.
And here’s the meaning now.
Please understand that God does not want death or blood or
sacrifices. In the story of the
sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, we have a paradigm shift for ancient
pre-history. God did not want human
sacrifice so Abraham understood that God would allow animal substitute
sacrifices. But then later we are told
by the prophets that God does not desire the sacrifice of animals.
You and I could imagine a different life for Jesus of Nazareth. How about, Jesus living to a ripe age of 90
and then dying a natural death and coming back to life after 90 years of
life. We could have found equal
inspiration from those events. Did God
really need Jesus to die a violent death on the cross as the only way in which
God could love and forgive people?
Or is this the way in which
humanity gets the real message about freedom.
If even the divine life is and can be offered up to death for a temporary victory for the forces of
evil; is that not the most profound sign of how the very nature of God is
Creative Freedom? Jesus was subject to the conditions of freedom
which allowed forces of tyrants to rid the world of people whom they deemed to
be a threat to their power. But isn’t
the main point of life to resist and overcome the freedom of evil with the
freedom for good? The death of Jesus on
the cross and the frequent defeat of all good things in life is but proof that
freedom is a fact of life, it is a fact of God, because even God honors freedom.
The Cross of Jesus is the story that we’ve been given. His death on the cross is the death from
which we must look for meaning. The
followers of Jesus had the freedom to know and present the cross in a completely
different way than it was intended by the Roman authorities. They had the freedom to reinterpret a very
bad Friday and re-create it to be a very Good Friday. And with this creative interpretive goodness
we have the ultimate irony: In but a century and a half this man who died on
the cross took over the Roman Empire.
The Passion Narrative which we have read today is not so much the truth
of the details of what happened when Jesus died on the cross; it is the truth
of the faith of the people who took the Cross as a rallying symbol of
glory. The people who wrote the passion
narrative had already had the evil freedom which resulted in the cross,
overcome by the freedom of resurrection goodness. By knowing the freedom of resurrection
goodness, they could re-visit the cross and present it not as harsh history but
as the divine providence known from the hindsight of resurrection grace.
Today, Good Friday, invites us again to have faith in this incredible
ironic alchemy of transformation. We see
in our lives and in our world the results of the freedom of evil and badness,
of greed, pride, hatred, bias and bigotry.
We find the attitudes and the results of the freedom of evil in our
world.
And we seek to live with hope for the future and with faith in the
present. We look to our present goodness
to reinterpret our past experience of badness; we hope that any Bad Fridays in
our world now will be overcome and re-interpreted with future and free
resurrection goodness.
Let us be inspired by the faith of the writers of the Passion Gospel,
who knew powerful freedom of such resurrection Goodness that they could write
for us a Good Friday. Amen.
