A Good Friday Reflection: It's Time to Take a Fresh Look at the Cross

At so many levels, the cross simply doesn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense to the original disciples, and, if we’re really honest, it doesn’t always make sense to us either. After all of the powerful, miraculous things we saw Jesus do, from walking on water to healing the blind and the lame, from cleansing those 10 lepers, to raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus’ dying on the cross defies logic. His succumbing to human power – particularly corrupt human power – when he was so incredibly powerful, just doesn’t make any sense.

Now, I know that many of us, when faced with the paradox of the cross, will be immediately tempted to parrot the Christian party line that we’ve all been taught for years and years - that Jesus “HAD TO die for our sins,” or that “God’s plan from the beginning was to send his only son to pay the penalty for sin, a penalty that God’s divine justice demands.”

I realize that is the traditional theological explanation for all this blood, and it’s certainly the one that I grew up with. But have you ever wondered why God would HAVE to do anything? Does God really HAVE to have some innocent man pay for everyone else’s sins with blood? Folks, I think it’s time we realized – if not for own sake, for our kids’ and grandkids’ sake - that the traditional explanation for Jesus’ dying on the cross isn’t working anymore; at least it isn’t working for the millions of folks from younger generations who want nothing to do with us and with our Christianity. Listen to this compelling argument from contemporary theologian Tony Jones:

“A lot of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the dominant interpretation of Jesus’ death as primarily the payment required of a wrathful God. For one thing, we don’t experience God as uber-wrathful toward us. For another, it simply doesn’t make sense that God would set up the whole system so that he has to kill his own son just to make it work. It just doesn’t smell right.”

Putting it bluntly, to folks my age and younger with a post-modern mindset, why would we ever want to love and worship a God who demands blood - INNOCENT blood - to pay for guilty people’s sin? That just isn’t a God I want to cuddle up to and worship. And I don’t think I’m alone here. There has to be another way for us to understand all this Good Friday injustice, violence, and blood.

What if violence simply is NOT in God’s nature? What if, long before Jesus arrived on the scene, God decided that He didn’t want any more blood shed, not animal blood, not human blood, not any blood? And what if God particularly didn’t want another drop of blood spilled for Him or for His sake? What if God was looking for a way to stop all the madness and violence and this sense we humans have clung to for thousands of years of having to pay Him something, of having to give him some fresh meat to keep Him from smiting us?

Well guess what? God was trying to stop all this blood sacrifice and payment for sin, 4 and 5 hundred years before Jesus even came! Read the prophets – Amos, Hosea, Joel, Micah, and Malachi! Every one of them says something likes this: “I hate your religious rituals, though you bring me burnt offerings and sacrifice offerings, I will not accept them! I despise these offerings!..For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, says the Lord.”

The prophetic message is filled with God’s attempts to put an end to all our sacrificing and shedding of blood to forgive sin. But we didn’t listen. We missed it! So what DOES God do to get his point across, his point that violence is NOT his way, and that blood will NEVER accomplish anything other than more blood and more violence?  What does God do…? He submits to violence…He submits to violence in its worst, most heinous form. He allows his son, his only son, to submit to human violence and die by its hand.

Then, to be sure we get His point, this crucified One raises! He appears to his followers and shows them the wounds and the holes, and he promises THEM that no matter how or when THEY die, they too will raise up; they too will live on. They’ll resurrect, just like Jesus. He assures them that no matter how things APPEAR to work in their world, violence does NOT win. Death does NOT get the last word. Instead, what APPEARS so powerful here on earth – namely violence, brutality, bloodshed, and death - really aren’t that powerful at all.

And then, in case we still missed the point, God has the followers of his crucified son go on doing exactly what Jesus would be doing if he were still around. The disciples of the crucified Christ carry on preaching and teaching, healing and caring for the poor, just as if their Lord were still with them. Can you imagine how that must have ticked off the Romans and the Pharisees? Here they went to ALL that trouble to arrest, torture, and kill the ringleader of this Christian movement in a very public, dramatic and example-setting way, but it didn’t change a thing! In fact, his disciples went right on acting as if their Messiah were still around, as if he’d come back from the dead, as if He were still alive IN THEM.

        

         Maybe this clip from the film “Gandhi” will help you understand what I’m  trying to say about finding another way to understand the meaning and purpose of the cross. Let me set the scene for you. Gandhi is helping the Indian people achieve independence from the Brits, who have ruled their country oppressively for nearly 90 years. He is teaching the Indian people – Hindu and Muslim alike - that to become self-sufficient, they must break Britain’s economic hold on their country’s valuable natural resources, particularly salt. In this scene, a planned non-violent protest is about to occur at the country’s largest salt mine. Having heard about this protest in advance, the British powers had Gandhi arrested the night before, thinking that would derail the protest. But all of Gandhi’s followers went right ahead with this incredible and courageous protest, as if their leader were right there with them. I warn you that this is difficult to watch; but I believe it will be worth it. (scene 19 - from the Salt Mine – 4:35 where line after line of unarmed protesters march up to the armed soldiers guarding the salt mine and get beaten and bloodied. Each fallen line of protesters is tended to by the women protesters and the next line of sheep step up to be slaughtered. This awful scene lasts through an entire day and into the night. Martin Sheen, playing an American reporter phones in his narration of this, ending with the following line:)

“Any moral ascendancy that the West formerly had was defeated here today….India is free!” Gandhi’s disciples defeated the violent, tyrannical occupation of the British empire NOT by returning her blows, but by RECEIVING its blows, by exposing the impotence and immorality of the Empire's violence. 

Could Jesus have been doing the same thing? What if God DIDN’T “send” Jesus to the cross to “PAY FOR our sins,” but rather allowed Jesus to be subject to the worst, most extreme form of human violence, in order to show us just how weak and wasteful such violence is? Maybe God wanted all of us to live in the sure knowledge that violence has no place in the kingdom of God, that violence will never achieve what God wants us to achieve. Maybe the cross was meant to teach us that we no longer have to be afraid of weapons and those who wield them, because in the end, it is love that wins. Love always wins in the end.

Friends, Good Friday confronts us with a sort of ultimate choice, the choice of how we are going to live the rest of our lives. Will we live in accordance with the principles of violence and bloodshed to bring about our will, or even worse, what we perceive to be God’s will? Or will we live non-violently, fearlessly living out the radical and courageous love of Jesus?

  

God wants people who are willing to march non-violently into the unjust salt mines of this world. And God wants us to do this, NOT because He’s some sort of vampire with a sick taste for blood, but because He showed us in Jesus the ways of violence and torture are ultimately both powerless and ineffective. Even when Jesus himself was tortured and killed, both He and his principles lived on in the actions of his followers. And no matter how many Christ-followers the Romans killed, the power of Jesus, his love, and his non-violent way could not and would not ever be defeated.

So while today may SEEM like a day when those who shed the blood of Jesus won, it is a day when they lost. While today may SEEM like a day when God, once again, demanded innocent blood to appease Him, it was actually the day God hoped to put an end to the spilling of blood forever, by showing its ultimate impotence.

Friends, there IS another way to understand this bloody mess of a cross. God is not a vampire. He neither wants nor needs our blood, any more than He wanted or needed Jesus’ blood. I don’t think God caused or wanted Jesus to die on that cross. But he may have allowed it in the hope that we might finally get it through our thick heads that violence in any form will never solve the world’s problems, and blood, no matter whose it is, will never bring us closer to God. And this truth, this ultimate truth that violence and bloodshed will never be a part of God’s will, should compel us to live non-violently and fearlessly, knowing that what was true for Jesus is most certainly true for us: that in the end, love wins.

On this “Good” Friday of 2016, may we expand our understanding of the cross. May we open ourselves to the deeper truth that Jesus didn’t merely die to “pay for” sin, but rather to expose and to reveal just how impotent and worthless all our violence and bloodshed really are. May we be a people with the courage to stand up in love against violence in every form (stretch out arms), knowing that, ultimately, love wins…Love always wins. For the God of the scriptures has made it clear again and again, that God desires mercy – NOT sacrifice. Amen.