April 14, 2006
(Good Friday)

What's So Good About It?

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Isaiah 52:13-53:12 or Genesis 22:1-18 or Wisdom 2:1,12-24  •  Psalm 22:1-21 or 22:1-11 or 40:1-14 or 69:1-23  •  Hebrews 10:1-25  •  John (18:1-40) 19:1-37
(From The Lectionary Page)

I'm waiting for the big question from my 7-year-old. Not the one about where babies come from. Been there and done that one. That’s so last year. No, I’m thinking about the question that has to do with today, Good Friday. The one that asks, why is this day called good? Jesus died by one of the most grisly methods of execution ever devised by the human imagination. If we read his death through the lens of the resurrection, we may understand the adjective good a bit better, but we're still left with the paradox that Jesus's death saves the world AND was an act of profound evil. On one hand, Jesus resolutely walks to Jerusalem. In John’s gospel in particular, he goes forth to meet his executioners. He sees in his impending death the glorification of God. In John’s gospel, he carries his own cross. And yet all four gospels are equally emphatic that Jesus is innocent, falsely accused, that his execution is unjust, motivated by expediency and power. Jesus is, in some way, supposed to die AND it is wrong for him to die.

If this paradox hasn't bothered you at some point in your life, you haven't been paying attention. It's bothered enough Christians over the centuries that a whole shopping cartful of theologies have emerged to explain it. Some are helpful, many are not. Among the least helpful, to my way of thinking, teaches that God had Jesus suffer for sins he did not commit so that God can forgive us the sins we do commit. This viewpoint suggests that the ultimate point of the Incarnation was to produce a suitable victim for sacrifice; that God had planned this all along; that God ultimately sacrificed his own Son in a way that God himself did not require of Abraham, two thousand years earlier. That this is how God so loved the world.

It’s a convenient theology insofar as it assumes that bloodshed and forgiveness are somehow linked together in the mind of God. That in order for chaos to end and order to be restored, blood must be shed. This troublesome theology enables us to project on to God all the violence that more properly lies within the darkness of our human hearts. We come to believe that we can scapegoat others because, after all, that’s how God works. Scapegoating violence becomes normative, expected, maybe even glorified in some way. We build it into our popular culture – the loner cop who blows away the bad guys with his 44 magnum, for example, thereby restoring law and order. We build it into our vocabulary: making a pre-emptive strike, for example. Kill or be killed. Fight fire with fire. Violence is normalized, blessed, and cheered.

Nothing much good about a Friday that leads us there.

Throughout the gospels, signs and wonders that Jesus himself performs point to his Messiahship. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear recognize that, in him, God is glorified. This can lead us to triumphalism OR it can lead us to a way of transformation. The way that leads to transformation suggests that God in Christ is showing us a different, better way: God’s way. In Christ, the hungry are fed, the lame walk, the blind see, the lepers are healed because God’s will for creation is always health and wholeness. Jesus is nobody’s victim, but he is our paradigm. Abused, he refuses to respond in kind. Humiliated and rejected, he does not retaliate. He does not call forth weapons of divine destruction from the cross. He does not spare himself the agony of death on a cross nor does he inflict it instead on those who would inflict it on him. He undergoes a horrifying human death and in so doing, visits the place of greatest fear within the human heart so that nothing, nothing is beyond the experience of God himself.

The crucifixion of Jesus was the great “Enough Already!” By submitting to human violence and by dying, Jesus exposed once and for all the utter falsity and futility of our insane belief in the power of redemptive violence. And he did something more. He led us to a different way: a way of unconditional, self-emptying love. God does not redeem through violence. It has never been part of God’s plan and never will be. God redeems through resurrection, in bringing wholeness from brokenness, restoration from dispossession, new life from death. Against such wondrous love as this, even death itself is powerless.

Jesus Christ did this for us one Friday in Jerusalem. Violent, witless, utterly clueless as we humans have been and still are, he did this for us. Laid down pathways of reconciliation which lead us away from scapegoating terror and cycles of violence if we can but dare to embrace this amazing, transformative, life-giving love. Why on earth would we want to persist in our old ways, in view of this stunning work of reconciliation?

It’s the goodest good there is.

And it was done for us.