The opponents of Jesus had finally gotten their way. Throughout his ministry, they had dogged
Jesus with their constant accusations:
he heals and helps people on the wrong day – the Sabbath – and he hangs
out with the wrong people – tax collectors and sinners. He
lived a life of radical obedience to God, and at the same time radical freedom
from the prevailing human interpretations of God’s will– and the opponents of
Jesus interpreted this radical combination of obedience and freedom as blasphemy
against God and rebellion against authority, so much so that he was accused of
rebellion against mighty Rome and Almighty God. They plotted his arrest, convicted Jesus on
false charges of blasphemy, dragged him through trials before Pilate and Herod,
and shouted Pilate down when Pilate tried to have Jesus released. Finally they had gotten their way – as Jesus
said to his accusers at the time of his arrest, “This is your hour, and the
power of darkness.” And finally they
would soon be rid of this troublemaker.
Or so they thought.
At the same time, at least in Luke’s gospel, Jesus died as
he had lived, reconciling people to God and one another. Even on the cross, Jesus prayed for his
accusers – ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Even on the cross he welcomed one of those
crucified with him into relationship with God:
“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” Even on the cross, he welcomed his mother and
the beloved disciple, his family of origin and his family of choice, into
relationship with one another, to become one family: “Woman behold your son; behold your
mother.” At the same time, Jesus
experienced the full limit of human pain, both physical and spiritual, as he
cried to God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, and to those who
crucified him, “I thirst.” He ended his
life as he had lived his life, with a final act of radical trust in God, saying
“It is finished. Father, into your hands
I commend my spirit.”
To fully understand the crucifixion, we need to understand
to the depths of our being that those who betrayed, arrested, condemned, and
crucified Jesus were not the dregs of society, were not bad people doing bad
things for bad reasons. They weren’t the
“usual suspects” sorts of folks – drunks and prostitutes and other so-called
notorious sinners - with whom Jesus
often hung out and whom the religious leadership condemned. No, those who put Jesus to death were the moral
elite, the so-called good people of their day, those leaders charged with preserving
and maintaining the Jewish faith, with the highest tradition of ethical and
humanitarian concern, and the civil leadership of Rome, the greatest empire the
world had known to that day. Jesus was
not only condemned to death by the good people of the day, but those good
people thought that in putting Jesus to death, they were doing a good thing for
good reasons – to remove one whom they saw as a threat to the religious and
civil institutions they were charged with preserving. This
is why Caiaphas said in John’s gospel, 12th chapter that it was
better for one person to die for the people than for the nation to be
destroyed. The crucifixion of Jesus was
an act of self-preservation by leaders who were confident in their own
righteousness. At the same time, Jesus,
the one crucified, responded with radical self-giving and self-emptying,
identifying so completely with those considered unrighteous that he died a
criminal’s death. As Paul wrote, “God
made him who knew no sin to become sin for us, so that in him we might become
the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)
The crucifixion of Jesus was brought about by good people
who thought they were doing a good thing for good reasons. This reality should shake to the core our
notions of right and wrong, should cause us to question deeply and be
profoundly humble about our own sense of goodness before God. It’s so easy for
us to say in self-justification, “Well, I’m certainly not perfect, but at least
I’m not like that slob over there.” And
it’s exactly when we say such things that we’re in the mindset of those who
crucified Christ. Indeed, in John’s
gospel, 16th chapter, Jesus told his disciples that when the Holy
Spirit came, the Spirit would “prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness
and judgement: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about
righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer;
about judgement, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” There’s more packed into this brief sentence
than I can unpack in our time together, but suffice to say that the death of
Jesus on the cross turns our notions of right and wrong upside down. We commonly
think of sin in terms of violating purity codes, in terms of falling short of
some standard of purity by eating or drinking or otherwise consuming something
we shouldn’t, using language we shouldn’t, and so forth. And certainly we should avoid ingesting
anything that will harm our bodies – when we do so, we are turning our violence
inward, doing violence to our own bodies, temples of the Lord that our bodies
are – and we should avoid careless and profane and violent speech. But Jesus is
saying that the worst crimes of humanity are committed not when we “drink,
smoke, or chew, or date girls or guys who do”, but when we try to force others
to conform to our own standards of righteousness, and use violence to do so –
as those who killed Jesus did. And think
about it – the worst crimes of humanity, the atrocities and bloody horrors that
decades or centuries after the fact we warn our children against repeating,
have been committed by people who at the time saw themselves as good people
doing good things for good reasons, who thought their violence served God’s
purposes – just for some examples, the
Inquisition and all the bloodshed between Protestants and Catholics – Christians
killing Christians in the name of rightly worshipping Jesus who commanded his
followers to love - the Salem witch trials, the persecution of Jews and other
religious minorities throughout the centuries, leading up to the Holocaust, lynchings,
and on and on, and on some more.
Those who crucified Jesus were following a very old script,
probably written in fire and brimstone at the dawn of recorded history by
Satan, upholding what theologian Walter Wink called the “myth of redemptive
violence”. Now, what is the myth of redemptive violence? This myth of redemptive violence is written
into the script of every Western movie, every war movie, every horror movie,
most crime and drama movies, and motivated the real and bloody crimes of
history such as the Inquisition and the Holocaust – is that there are good
people and bad people, and that the way to get rid of all the evil in the world
is to kill all the bad people. That
script assumes, of course, that we’re the good guys and those other people out
there are the bad guys messing it up for everyone else. What Good Friday shows us is God himself
becoming man, living a perfectly sinless life, going about teaching and healing
– and the so-called good people of the day felt threatened, labeled Jesus as a
bad guy, and killed him. The good
people felt threatened, and so they projected their own sin and the shadow side
of their character that they couldn’t bear to see in themselves onto Jesus, so
that Jesus became their scapegoat. And
this realization that Jesus was crucified as a scapegoat by the good people of his
day should make us feel profoundly uneasy, because I think most of us consider
ourselves good people. The crucifixion
shows us that it is exactly when we think we’re on solid moral ground,
particularly in condemning the sins of other people, that we’re most likely to
commit or condone atrocities – often in God’s name. This is why Jesus was relentless in telling
his followers not to judge others, relentless in telling his followers to
remove the beams from their own eyes before attempting to point out the
flyspeck in somebody else’s eye. The events of Good Friday call upon us to fall
on our knees before God and confess our own sins, not those of our neighbors.
What is the alternate to the familiar script of redemptive
violence? Jesus showed us the alternative
on the cross: redemptive suffering. Franciscan author Richard Rohr reminds us
that in suffering on the cross, Jesus took the absolute worst that humanity
could dish out and transformed it into the absolute best thing for
humanity. Richard Rohr describes Jesus’
work on the cross this way:
“Jesus takes
away the sin of the world by dramatically exposing the real sin of the world
(which is ignorant violence rather than not obeying purity codes); by refusing
the usual pattern of revenge, and, in fact, “returning their curses with
blessings” (Luke 6:27-28); and, finally, by teaching us that we can “follow
him” in doing the same. There is no such thing as redemptive violence. Violence
doesn’t save; it only destroys—in both short and long term. Jesus replaced the
myth of redemptive violence with the truth of redemptive suffering. He showed
us on the cross how to hold the pain and let it transform us, rather than pass
it on to others around us.”
The religious and civil authorities of Jesus’ day thought
that by arresting, condemning, and killing him, they would soon be rid of a
troublemaker. Two thousand years later,
Jesus, God’s holy troublemaker, the Savior of the world, is very much still
with us. Those who tried to get rid of
Jesus such as Annas and Caiaphas, and those who were complicit, such as Pilate
and Herod, are footnotes in the gospel stories; indeed, it’s only because of
their role in the gospels that we remember them at all; otherwise they’d be
forgotten entirely except by scholars of Middle Eastern antiquities. Jesus triumphed over sin on the cross – not
by avenging himself against it, but by taking the violence upon himself and
defusing it, like someone throwing themselves on top of a live grenade in order
to contain the violence of its explosion and save lives. This – throwing himself on the exploding
grenade of sin – was the mission of Jesus.
As followers of the risen Christ, it is our mission as well.
“O love of
God! O sin of man! In this dread act
your strength is tried.
And victory
remains with love:: Jesus, our Lord, is crucified!” Amen.
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