Wednesday Wonder

Holy Week 2010

Every Holy Week I wait for each day to tell me something new. Some of those things are universal, general truths, a minimum that might known: Jesus was brave. Life is not fair. Goodness gets squashed. The best endures. Life comes out of death. God always has the last say.

But then there are the new dimensions that get added to that base line. On a deeper level they have to do with the nature of God and the nature of humanity. In this story the humanity part is the dark background for the God part. As regards the God part there is much revealing that is going on. But what kind of revealing?

At this point I need to be very clear. I owe it to myself, to you, to anyone who lives in the contemporary world and struggles to make sense of the Christian story. Clarity is important because so many centuries of Christian thought about the death of Jesus have preceded us. When Jesus died his followers had to make sense of his death. There was no playbook for Messiahs that died a death like that. In fact, some of the early Rabbis were clear that crucifixion was a kind of curse. How could a Messiah be cursed and suffer so?

There were the suffering servant images from Isaiah, and Christians took them up and viewed Jesus through that particular lens. But they also reached for symbolism that was earlier than that, and it was the language and thought of sacrifice, ritual sacrifice, and how the slaughter of an animal, the shedding of blood, somehow appeased the god or gods. On the Day of Atonement the sins were symbolically cast upon an unblemished victim who was driven out, carrying with it the sins of the people. Christians borrowed this imagery in an attempt to explain Jesus’ death.

There are several derivations of this atonement theology. Some use the language of debt – there is a debt to be paid, ostensibly to God, and something has to settle the score. Some use the language of substitution – that because people cannot provide anything that is able to satisfy the wrath of God, God has to do the providing of the victim, too. So Jesus is the provided victim that, once slain, rights the scales and puts everything back into divine balance.

That’s how some writers in the New Testament and a handful of influential early fathers of the church explained the death of Jesus. The problem, it seems to me, is that this primitive belief that the spilling of blood somehow satisfies a wrathful deity is not unique to Jewish or Christian thought. Many ancient religions thought the same. Animals and humans were sacrificed at the altar to make covenant with their gods, keep them happy, and maintain the eternal balance.

This is the origin of our language about Christ “paying my debt” or “dying for my sins.” The difficulty for most modern people is that we no longer have such gods, wrathful deities that have to be appeased with blood-letting. Most find it generally abhorrent that a loving father would only be satisfied by the death of his only begotten son. Many people honestly question how a loving God could ever provide his own son as the victim destined to die, to be tortured, as a part of a plan that could make anything right, that the more blood is spilled the better things could be. Still others reject the idea that violence and destruction are somehow ordained by and for God.

So there is our problem. Christians received this incredible revelation of God in Christ that defied explanation, and then in order to share the power of it all they turned to the only stories, images and symbols that they had in their theological tool kits. That’s what we received. But what if you don’t have a God like this? Then what?

I believe that there is more than enough room for divine power here, but we must interpret it differently. Here are several clues, and I offer them as one pilgrim to another, as one who is also trying to make sense of the death of the Messiah, the one who still lives in strange and unusual power in our midst.

I don’t believe that the death of Jesus somehow satisfied God, that blood made things right in the heart of God. I believe that the goodness of God, in Jesus, plunged into the darkness of humanity and was snuffed out. This happens all the time in the great martyr tradition of the faith. God sends prophets and they go willingly, obediently, to the places where they are killed for being prophets. The first chapter of John’s Gospel helps us here. The darkness wants to overcome the light, but it cannot.

I believe that Jesus was crucified because abusive power doesn’t discriminate; the same oppressive power that crushed every other Roman foe crushed Jesus. He was, after all, the son of man, bearing our humanity, sharing our suffering in every way. Of course he died like the rest of the vulnerable. But Jesus also died because he willingly humbled himself, even to death on the cross. In other words, he willingly gave himself for the sake of God, for the sake of those he loved. Philippians 4 helps us with that one. Because he makes a choice it has moral power and we stand in awe.

There is vast power in the suffering of the innocent. There is also vast power in the contrast between the goodness of God and the evil intentions and actions of humanity. When those times come God’s love stands out in dramatic relief.

There is a theology of the cross that may speak strongly and persuasively to the believing heart today. And that is that everything about Jesus’ faithfulness, everything about his distinct sonship, demonstrated the depths of the divine heart – whose nature is love – and suffers for us in ways we cannot comprehend. Jesus calls to his God from the cross to forgive those who have harmed him because he somehow knows God is already dying a thousand deaths for those who are so entirely estranged. In that cry, in that anguished love, we witness it all. God loves unto death those who have abandoned God. God loves unto death those who are suffering. God loves unto death those who would kill God.

There are the shadows that push this radiance up front, of course. They are the shadows of the human heart. And I have come to believe that this story is revealing as much about our darker nature and capacity for evil as it is our need for utter transformation. This story holds up a mirror in such a way that we cannot avoid seeing the truth. Most of the time we deceive ourselves, but not here, not now: We are capable of the unimaginable. Scratch beneath the thin respectable veneer of our lives and the reptile is not far beneath. People do hideous things. Even those who call themselves Christians do evil, cover it up, and stand by and witness it without doing anything.

All of this is revealed in Holy Week, year after year. Some we know and some we come to know more. And so, here I am, waiting again. I am waiting for it to speak another word. And in the waiting and listening, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there when you saw the powerful love of God at work in the faithfulness, the obedience of Jesus? Were you there to witness inhumanity in the face of holiness? Did you hear God weep? And did you hear yourself?

We all stand on the edge of a mystery. I dare not say more, lest I ruin it.