Mark 15:1-15
Most of us have asked the obvious question: “why do they call it Good Friday when it’s so horrible?” There are many explanations but the most common points us to the doctrine of atonement – that Jesus died on the cross to pay the price for our sins, as a ransom for many, an innocent man satisfying a judging God by paying the penalty for all of us mortals who are guilty because of Adam and Eve’s Original Sin. And, says the doctrine, we can join him in paradise by confessing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Certainly that’s good.
Because that has long been the creed of traditional Christianity, we may feel a little anxious about saying aloud: “wait a minute – what kind of God demands a ransom for our sins? What kind of God sends an innocent victim to pay the price for the guilty? And what am I supposedly guilty of, except for being thoroughly human? And what about all the claims we make that God is love and God is forgiving and God is good?”
The traditional understanding of Jesus’ death as atonement or ransom doesn’t satisfy me… or many of you. It’s based on assumptions and claims that come from St. Anselm a thousand years ago. More and more people can’t accept this idea that God made Jesus die for our sins. Many have left Christianity because of it, and many more of us are still within the church but can’t assent to that view. And many of us have found a home here.
So first, we need to acknowledge that scripture speaks with many voices, not one. From scripture spring many doctrines, not just one. And in churches like ours we don’t have to see things just the same way. Thank God that’s so. We are, after all, Congregationalists who’ve learned that scripture, tradition, intellect, personal conscience, and community values all work together. And when we seek the will of God both in our individual lives and in the world, we know that everything depends on what we emphasize.
Every person of faith favors certain claims over others; every one of us interprets and applies scripture and tradition to the world we live in. So, for example, when we as a church emphasize hands-on mission and service in the name of Jesus we aren’t dismissive of those who feel a call to prayer and contemplation and even the solitary life. But we emphasize instead the places where scripture and tradition call us to active, engaged expressions of the faith in our daily lives because that’s what Jesus did.
And when we became an Open and Affirming congregation of the United Church of Christ in 2000, we didn’t ignore the scripture that harshly judges and condemns homosexuality. We know it’s there. We emphasize other scripture instead, those rich and wonderful places expressing God’s wide embrace and grace-filled love for all human kind.
You likely heard just this week that Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman announced he no longer opposes marriage equality after wrestling with his son’s coming out as a gay man two years ago. Portman said in an interview:
I wrestled with how to reconcile my Christian faith with my desire for Will to have the same opportunities to pursue happiness and fulfillment as his brother and sister. Ultimately, it came down to the Bible’s overarching themes of love and compassion and my belief that we are all children of God.[1]
And when we think of Jesus, among his many attributes we remember that he was the Master Teacher, whose very life was an example and lesson for us saying “here’s how a life filled-to-overflowing-with-God actually looks. Learn from it and live it in your world.”
Now as we come to the accounts of Good Friday in scripture and faith we know that one particular doctrine has been handed down for centuries first from the Vatican and later from Evangelical Protestant pulpits, with the threat that if you didn’t conform you’d burn in hell, because that’s how this God-who-is-love works.
Let’s be bold enough to say there’s another way to understand what was happening there and then during the Last Week in Jerusalem as Jesus confronted the brutal tyranny of the Roman Empire.
To summarize so far:
- You can be Christian and not accept the doctrine of the Vatican or high-profile Evangelical personalities.
- You can be Christian and not agree with me.
- You can be Christian and not believe Jesus’ death on the cross was God’s will, God’s ransom, God’s sacrifice to pay the debt that you and I owed because Adam and Eve’s sin has stained our souls.
And we can be Christian even when we can’t think of a single reason why Good Friday was “good,” except that we know this truth: before there can be new life the old life has to die.
- Before there can be spring, there will be a winter that tests and tries our every fiber.
- Before there can be the joy of reconciliation there has to be truth-telling and forgiveness.
- Before there can be resurrection there has to be death.
That’s the way God has fashioned all of creation. And as we continue our walk with Jesus through Holy week as Mark tells it, and come now to Friday, the day of the Cross, we know that Jesus’ death was the gateway to something profoundly different.
This was the historic act of violence by the Roman Empire in its attempt to maintain the status quo. And from all appearances it worked: Caesar trumped God. The Chief priest Caiaphas collaborated because Jesus had trashed the temple on Monday and because the temple authorities had to stay on Caesar’s good side or face the same retribution.
Mark, as the earliest and leanest Gospel, was written about 70 AD just as the Romans were trashing all of Jerusalem and destroying the temple on Mount Zion. This was certainly 35 years after Jesus’ death. The Christian community, though small and fragile, could now more boldly live the resurrection faith proclaiming that:
- Rather than fleeing from the powers, Jesus rode up to their thrones and altars.
- While Rome could brutalize, they could not enslave the soul of the believer.
- Jesus had secured the promise of everlasting life for them and for every generation to come.
But why did Jesus die? As Borg and Crossan put it:
Jesus’ passion got him killed. To put this meaning of passion… into a single sentence: Jesus’ passion for the kingdom of God led to what is often called his passion, namely, his suffering and death. But to restrict Jesus’ passion to his suffering and death is to ignore the passion that brought him to Jerusalem. To think of Jesus’ passion as simply what happened on Good Friday is to separate his death from the passion that animated his life.
[and they continue] According to Mark Jesus did not die for the sins of the world… but in an important sense he was killed because of the sin of the world. (pg. 162)
And today? Where do you see and hear the claim that Caesar trumps God? You’ll have your own but I can name a few:
- Gridlock in Washington – and on a smaller scale in Augusta – as the power brokers and money-managers duke it out, claiming we have to choose between caring for the most vulnerable on the one hand and saddling future generations with looming debt, on the other.
- Both hope and despair in the hierarchical Roman Catholic Church as traditionalists resist the calls for forthrightness in dealing with patriarchy and corruption and abuse; with the marginalizing of women, gays and lesbians, and opening the blinds and shutters and letting the spirit of new life break in.
- Indications of long-term climate change continuing to pile up and point us to the urgency of addressing it, while so many cry for more oil, more fossil fuel, more drilling, more pipelines, even knowing there will be more pollution.
- Wall Street rallying and rewarding those who can afford to invest, while employers turn more and more to minimum wage, part-time jobs.
- North Korea, Iran, and other nations flaunting the international community by building nuclear weapons, Israel continuing to build settlements in Palestinian territory, and Afghanistan looking at the devastation that is left behind as US troops are drawn down.
- The Pentagon grappling with somehow containing its budget of 1.3 trillion dollars[2], nearly 30% of our total national expenditures and equal to all the defense budgets of the next twenty largest nations combined.[3]
- Uninsured Americans facing the unconscionable choice of whether to endure illness without treatment, or seek treatment only by leaving a legacy of debt.
If you watch the headlines it seems every way we turn, Caesar trumps God.
Truth be told, many of us live Good Friday lives. We feel stuck, lost, forsaken, cast aside. Powers and principalities that we can’t even identify are calling the shots. That’s what Good Friday says.
And we need to dwell with that impression and let its cold, icy grip seize us. This is what Caesar intends to teach us.
Good Friday takes our breath away, shining a light on the powers – some are corrupt; some corrupt us, and all are hard to resist.
But remember it’s just an appearance. There’s more to the story, isn’t there?