We just don't know
Thumbnail Image by Harry from Pixabay
Juli Belian
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
March 29, 2024—Good Friday
The truth is, we just don’t know.
“What’s so good about Good Friday?” We all have asked that question before, I expect. We may even have tried to answer it, when it was posed to us by a child, especially.
And it is hard to see what is so good about it. We may see the crucifixion as a necessary precondition for resurrection, but that is not the same as proclaiming Good Friday “good” in and of itself.
How is it that Jesus’ death on the cross is “good”? How does Jesus’ death “save” us – “us” being the world – or maybe humankind – or maybe sinners – or maybe just “us” right here?
The view I was raised with – a view I eventually rejected, for the most part – may be a view you are familiar with, too. In this view, our sin, punishable by death, puts God in a tight spot. God’s love prompts God to forgive, but God’s righteousness prohibits God from forgiving our sin without first requiring punishment for it. To resolve this problem, God gives himself in the person of his Son, Jesus, to suffer the death, punishment and curse due to fallen humanity as the penalty for our sin. Thus, God’s righteous demand for justice is satisfied while God’s love is then allowed to save us.
But there is much about this view that makes no sense to me. The proposed equation does not feel like the kind of calculation that I imagine the God of love would use to settle the fate of the human species. It makes a kind of economic sense, but I think it makes God less than God, in that God is apparently helpless to save us if something isn’t killed first. Why would that be true? Is God’s love really limited by God’s righteousness? Wasn’t Jesus’ overriding Good News to us the news that God’s love is God’s righteousness?
I learned in later years that this understanding of the Cross is only one of many ways to understand the importance of the Cross. It’s not even the oldest one, either. The oldest understanding of the crucifixion is that it was the best trick ever played. It goes like this: Ever since Adam and Eve, we all suffer and die, and it’s all down to Satan, who rules the mortal world into which we were ejected. As ruler of this broken world, Satan gets the greatest joy from our deaths. God, wanting to save us, strikes a bargain with Satan: God will give God’s son over to death on condition that Satan releases the rest of us. Satan snaps the deal up in a heartbeat only to learn on Easter that it was all a ruse: Jesus died, yes, so the bargain was kept and Satan’s control over us was broken in that moment; but Jesus rose, snatching from death its most prized possession and returning God’s son to God. In this version, Christ’s death on the Cross is not the slaughter of a lamb in substitution for my own life, but simply the moment when, the bargain having been paid, God won the battle with evil by outright cleverness. I like this story much better than the “somebody’s gotta die” story, but I acknowledge it presents its own hermeneutical challenges, since God playing poker with Satan does not easily sit next to God’s abhorrence of evil.
There are some Christian thinkers who have proposed that the crucifixion saves us by moral example: When we see God loved us enough to die for us, we are moved to repent of our rejection of God and reconcile with God by repentance.
Other theologians suggest that Jesus’ death was required to cleanse us – not that Jesus died in exchange for our death, but more analogous to the Jewish view of sacrifice as a cleansing of our sin.
There are more. Many of them seem like nice ideas, but the same problem keeps popping up like the short kid in the back of the group photo: Why did God need to die?
The truth is, we don’t know.
The New Testament writers agree that there is a relation between the sufferings and death of Jesus and the reconciliation of the sinner with God. But their writings present more of a kaleidoscope or mosaic of the Cross than a simple answer. Many pre-modern theologians did not treat the different views of salvation as fully discrete models that were isolated from one another. They moved between them to make different kinds of points about the nature of God and Jesus, or they understood them as preferences depending on one’s views of other theological questions.
But it is the doctrine of pretty much the whole of the Bible that human sin causes alienation between God and us. And somehow, the Cross resolves that.
So let’s try answering a moral question, not with moral authority, but with a parable.
Once upon a time, two parents had a child. The child was a difficult child, getting in trouble at school, then falling in with a bunch of law-defying sociopathic-appearing teens, and finally maturing into a full-fledged criminal with no interest in parents or families. The rift between this child and these parents was wider and deeper than we can imagine. The parents grieved for the child almost constantly but could find no way to bridge the gap between them until one day, one of the parents died of grief and heartbreak. This was the other parent’s last straw. With no one left in the world to love, the surviving parent took to drinking and withdrew from working and from social life, and soon ended up homeless, sitting in a pile of trash, totally drunk, begging from passersby. The child, long a resident of this part of town, passes by their parent and recognizes who they are. Now imagine that the child lifts the drunk out of the street to ask, “What has happened to you? Does Eema know where you are?” and then imagine the drunk says, “She’s gone. She’s gone.”
In that moment, there opens up an ocean of grief into which they both fall. For the first time in decades, they are in the same place, feeling the same feeling.
If your imagination can lead you to believe that after that was a new beginning for those two, then you understand the Cross – you just can’t explain it. Because how it works, we just don’t know.