Good Friday

It's Good Friday ... strange term for an ugly day.

When Rome said to Jesus:

"No more of this young man."

"To your room, and there'll be no supper for you."

Rome was the top dog.

Its version the story.

Raise a question? "I wouldn't if I were  you."

"Cross us, and we'll cross you."

Some Christians, when Empire looked good to them,

Said: "Jesus died for our sins."

Now, here was an idea Empire could dig.

An idea that really worked, for the sake of Empire.

"We may be bad," but we're forgiven."

Jesus died for our sins, right?

All is good.

So, let's get on it with it.

Empire in Jesus' name.

Blood and guts spilled by the ton.

Slavery, torture and death.

All in Jesus' name.

Wow ... what a pack of lies.

What a terrible day.

When the church looked at Friday,

and called it Good!

Missing Out on the Sermon on the Mount

I grew up in a mostly evangelical environment, Dutch Reformed specifically.

It was very much about salvation, but with a clear intellectual dogmatic foundation. Folks weren't afraid of thinking, but it was clearly determined by boundaries, beyond which one didn't go, because there was no need for anything more than what was already available within the tradition. We had the answers, and we knew how to read the Bible.

One of the ways of reading the Bible was how the Beatitudes were read - primarily as something quite ideal and beyond our reach, of value for reminding us how much we're sinners, and how badly we need the atoning death of Jesus - who, having died for our sin, puts us right with the Father, so that we can have eternal life. To safeguard our eternal God, we're careful not to violate the essential and personal moral strictures that have mostly to do with alcohol and tobacco, theater attendance, card-playing, and sex. Making money, as much as you can, was just fine. If you had money, you gave to your favorite charities including the church, to maintain buildings and programs and missionaries - locally, perhaps, a rescue mission, retirement homes, colleges and seminaries.

The fact that the Sermon on the Mount is the longest discourse given by Jesus doesn't register with evangelicals - fact is, much of the Gospels fail to register, drawn to Paul as evangelicals are, and if they're reading the Old Testament at all, drawn primarily to the historical books dealing with conquest and war, temple building and priest-craft, kings and queens, power and punishment.

By sidestepping the Sermon on the Mount as an ethical discourse for daily life, evangelicals relieve themselves of a tremendous ethical burden, and if pushed, will often reply, "Well, no one's perfect."

True enough, but Jesus, who seems to understand that rather well, yet proceeds with the Sermon, even saying that one might be as "perfect" as the Father in heaven is perfect, or complete; meaning: that one can ethically love others, be fair and decent, and treat all with kindness. In other words, as the word in Greek rightly means, one can be "complete" - i.e., one can have all the components of divine benevolence - not on the same scale, but with similar intensity and broadness.

Granted, we're not perfect, not even complete, whatever that means, but lack of perfection shouldn't stop anyone from trying. I mean, is this not what we learn in school, in sports and music and painting and marriage? Just because we're imperfect is not reason to give up, but rather reason all the more to persist.

Yet in the evangelical community, the lack of perfection becomes, when it comes to the Sermon on the Mount, not an encouragement to try, but a reason to simply "flee to Jesus for mercy and salvation."

I missed out on the Sermon on the Mount when I was growing up ... I was clear that I was a sinner in need of grace

I learned that fornication and Onanism were sinful, and so was drunkenness. I heard plenty of sermons about sin and salvation and Jesus "dying for my sins." And likely these days, I would hear plenty about homosexuals and abortion. But I never heard anything about justice, poverty and war; I remember hearing a bit about Communism, but never a question raised about Capitalism.

I never learned the great ethical lessons of the Christian faith, rooted in the Prophets and given new meaning in Jesus, and, yes, even Paul, when read finally in the light of Jesus, and not the other way around, as was the custom in preaching and Bible Study.

It was only years later that I discovered how important is the Sermon on the Mount and that Jesus offers this ethical discourse with a full realization that it was not going to be easy, but that it was possible "to be perfect as our Father in heaven."

A Non-Violent Atonement???

A Palm Sunday Message (2009) by the Rev. Frank Stricklen, a Pittsburgh Presbyterian pastor and musician whom I met on Facebook.

The hopes of a nation were riding with Jesus on the original Palm Sunday. Could this be the Messiah? He certainly had the pedigree. The two genealogies in the New Testament attest to the fact that he came both from the line of David and from that of the Levites. Messiah was to be both King and Priest and Jesus could be both. So every eye was on him as he made his way down the parade route.

Now this was no lavish parade. No grand spectacle. This was a spontaneous celebration by an oppressed people expressing what hope they could muster with whatever they had on hand. Not the lavish pageants of roman excess but the meager and paltry celebration with rags and leaves and whatever could be found by people under the boot of Rome who had little to celebrate and less to celebrate with. Jesus even rode in on a borrowed animal. Still. Every eye was one him as he entered the city and approached the temple. All eyes watched as Jesus walked in and looked around before deciding it was too late in the day to do anything and left. Still the people watched, and waited, and hung on every word. But gradually their patience wore thin and inside a week, as Jesus failed to live up their expectations, he was carrying a cross through the same streets as the now jeering crowd trampled the dried up palms into the dust.

Dust. Less than 40 days ago, we were reminded that we are but dust and to dust we shall return. Indeed, the Creation account reminds us we are made from dust, from the same substance as the earth. (Perhaps so we would value the earth and take care of it. There’s the green commercial for the day.) The Hebrew word for Earth is Adamah and the name of the first man is Adam which literally translates as earthling. We are a people of dust. But what gave us life was the spirit of God. Spirit and Breath are pretty much the same word in Hebrew. So God breathed us full of spirit and gave us life in hopes that we would remain in fellowship with God.

Alas, we chose otherwise. We chose to exercise our free will and go our own way. We sought to recreate God in our image and to act as if we were masters of the universe and as if all of Creation was our plaything to do with as we pleased. In short, we fell. And fell hard. And what God had said would happen did happen. We began to die. Maybe death was a punishment for sin. But more likely it was just a consequence. Perhaps we cut ourselves off from life and breath when we distanced ourselves from the spirit of God that was our breath. Maybe, without God, we are nothing more than dust and when we’ve been apart from God long enough, that breath, that spirit just ceases to be in us and we die. Like it or not, this story and the grisly events of this week remind us of our sin and the resulting death and that we had nowhere to go and no recourse for ending that cycle.

So we needed a saviour. A messiah. A universal king who could reconcile us to the One who gave us breath. Someone who could atone for us. Set things right. Wipe the slate clean. Give us a do over.

And that is what happens in this week as the palms of Sunday give way to the passion of Friday. But today of all days, as Pittsburghers reel from the senseless death of three policemen who answered a call and lost their lives in an instant, how are we to reconcile God’s desire to love us and be in relationship with us to the grisly death of Jesus on the cross? Read St. Anselm and you’ll hear that it is God who demands death and sacrifice.
We crossed God and now God is going to cross us back. We dishonored God so someone has to pay with their life. Since a human besmirched God’s honor, then a human must pay the debt. And since no human can do that, God lovingly gives the only begotten Son as a scapegoat--human enough to pay the debt owed by humans but divine so as to be able to do what humans cannot. That is, live a perfect and spotless life so that the sacrificial lamb is unblemished and without spot. We made a debit by rejecting God and now Jesus will offer his life as a credit to wipe out our debt. Done. Finis. Mission accomplished. His death pays our debt. Sound familiar? You’ve probably heard it all your life.

But another church father, Athanasius says “Hey, wait. Hold on a minute. Don’t you think that Jesus’ life was also redemptive and not just his death? Didn’t Jesus’ entering into our flesh through incarnation redeem humanity? Wasn’t his life and his teaching and his healing and his preaching and his obedience and his relationship to God also redeeming our fallen nature as he lived in our flesh the life that God had hoped for us all along? And sure, God used the cross and death for redemption. But wasn’t the resurrection redemptive and also the ascension where Jesus carried our flesh into heaven making it possible once again for humanity to live in and relate to God? So then a question comes to mind. If all of Jesus’ actions in our flesh helped redeem us, and it wasn’t just about death and punishment, then who demanded a bloody cross? Was it God or us?

Some modern theologians are beginning to talk about the fact that, rather than demanding the cross, God may have used it, a la Romans 8, to make good out of a horrible tragedy. Perhaps it was we, uncomfortable with having the divine so close and coming up short in comparison to his perfection, who decided we needed to get rid of this guy. Perhaps he was monkeying with our perceptions of religion so that we could no longer act as if we were good enough to earn God’s favor. Rather than admit that we are utterly dependent on grace and give up the illusion of being “good people,” maybe we religious types did Jesus in so he’d quit blowing the curve for the rest of us. Perhaps it was just our sin that nailed Jesus to the cross and God used that for our redemption, making all things-even this horrific and grisly death-work together for good.

But let’s go even further. The scripture today says that “unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies,” there can be no new life, no rebirth. Maybe death, rather than being the punishment we’ve come to associate with the Fall is actually just God’s intervention on our behalf. Perhaps, when God created the world and humanity in the eternal possibility of life and relationship with Godself, all of Creation was in a state of eternal springtime, ever vibrant, ever alive, ever drawing from God’s restorative love and power, with no need for rejuvenation. Perhaps, as God created us, in full knowledge of the depths to which we would sink, God foresaw how we would fall so far short of God’s hopes for us and demand Jesus’ death and how God would use it to redeem us. And maybe, at that time, God introduced the seasons to help us understand God’s ability to snatch victory out of the hands of seeming defeat by making the power of death moot, just a winter, a temporary season of rest from our fallenness and our wanderings so that we and the earth could be reborn into an eternal springtime of love and justice and restored relationship with God. Perhaps the seasons that we have come to know so well are God’s way of letting us know that death is temporary. That through Christ we will one day enter into God’s eternal season of love where death, pain, sickness, sin and harm will no longer be permitted or remembered. As we emerge from the season of winter, we can take comfort in knowing that the seeds and, indeed, the seeds of faith, planted in hope but seemingly lifeless, will spring forth into new life, a colorful testimony to the love and power of God. The sheaf of wheat and cluster of grapes on the piano today, reminding us that one of our own has gone to be with God, point to the fact that those who go before us to God, those who die and are planted in the ground in hope, rise to be with God in a new season we can only long for as we continue to live in the Kingdom dimly seen and not fully come.

That is the promise that we carry with us as we move through the darker days of Holy Week toward that dawn of light and life that is Easter. Thanks be to God. Amen.


You can visit Frank's website HERE.