In my adult years, I’ve grown frustrated with Good Friday for many reasons. Often the church service makes me yearn for more: more drama, more sadness, more shock at the horror of the story. Often the theology makes me queasy as well, with all that focus on sin and worthlessness; Jesus as blameless, God as stern, and we are at fault. Parts of that theology ring true, but there are so many ways that the theology of substitutionary atonement can go wrong that I hesitate to preach from that position.
Many of the earliest Christians, who were still Jewish after all, saw Jesus as both Messiah and prophet, one who came to announce the inbreaking Kingdom of God, but also one who came to let society know where God saw that the community had gone astray. Old Testament prophets spoke of the sins of society as a whole, not individual sins; for example, an Old Testament prophet would criticize policies that left citizens without enough food, and worry less about whether or not I ate every scrap of food on my plate. Many church denominations through the ages have been much more focused on individual sin, not societal sin, like injustice. Did Jesus really have to die on a cross because I would be mean to my baby sister two thousand years after his death? My fifth grade Sunday School teacher told me he did, and even at the time, I thought this idea was much too simplistic.
When I discovered the theologians who focused on crucifixion as capital punishment, I felt like I had discovered a way that the story made more sense to me. Jesus was crucified; he wasn’t stoned to death or beheaded with a sword or thrown to lions (or other cruelty in the Coliseum). Crucifixion was a Roman punishment reserved for enemies of the empire: revolutionaries, insurrectionists, and runaway slaves and those who would upset the social order. Christ crucified meant that he had so upset the social order that he needed to be dispatched in this public way that would also serve as deterrent to others who might be considering similar actions.
With crucifixion in mind, does the story of Jesus’ life make sense to us? Is his message that revolutionary that Rome would step in and kill him? But the more important question to me now: why do so many denominations focus more on the Crucifixion than on other elements of the story? I’ve been to more than one Easter service that seems stuck in Good Friday with lots of talk of sin and worthlessness than the amazing act that God performs.
These days, I approach the Good Friday story by seeing lots of people in the grip of something they don't understand, working within power structures they can't control, power structures that are spiraling away from what people thought they understood towards chaos and pandemonium. I see people with great disappointment that Jesus was not like Barabbas, the insurrectionist.
Once we might have thought of the chief priests and Pilate as the ones having the power. Now I think about the larger sweep of history, and even Rome's power seems fleeting. These actors have political power, true. But political power can be so precarious. The last few months and years have reminded us of that fact over and over again.
The story of the Crucifixion reminds us that we all suffer--even God who comes to be human with us suffers. There are some Christians out there who would tell us that if we just pray hard enough, we can avoid the sadness that's out there: our illnesses will go away, wealth will fall into our laps, prosperity of all kinds await us if we just trust in God enough. While these things can happen, they are not promised. More than once, Jesus seems to say that followers can expect to suffer just as he did.
The Good Friday story tells us what is at stake. Even God must suffer in the most horrible ways. God comes to earth to show us a better way of living our human lives, and in return, the most powerful earthly empire at the time arrests him, spits on him, presses a crown of thorns into his flesh, tortures him in other ways, and crucifies him, making sure that he is dead.
It's good to remember on Good Friday, and during all of our Good Friday times, that God can make beauty out of the most profound ugliness, wholeness out of the most shattered brokenness. We will explore that idea more on Easter and the weeks following Easter.
Good Friday reminds us of all the ways our hopes can be dashed, of all the ways that we can be betrayed and abandoned, of all the ways that it can all go so terribly wrong. N. T. Wright says, "The greatest religion the world had ever known and the finest system of justice the world had ever known came together to put Jesus on the cross" (How God Became King, page 208). It’s no wonder that we’ve spent so much time and energy trying to figure out what it all meant.
For today, let us sit with Good Friday: the sadness, the horror, the wishing that our salvation did not have to look this way. Let us remember how much our societies want to break anyone who offers a different vision of a more just world. Let us stand in solidarity with those who are shattered by our societies. Let us trust in a God who gives us free will to make disastrous decisions, but who will also show us in spectacular ways that the forces of death and destruction will not have the final word.
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