Have you been watching The Passion on TV? I have, I must say with mixed feelings. I think it is very good, particularly at conveying the atmosphere of Jerusalem during Passover in apostolic times, but what a lot has been reconstructed: the dialogue with the disciples, with Mary Magdalene and with Jesus’ mother. It makes you realise how bare the Passion narrative is in the gospels. And things are not in the same order as in the gospels, but you can’t be too critical of that, as the gospels don’t agree among themselves. In spite of all the reconstruction, there is still much in the drama which doesn’t get said. So far, Jesus has only uttered 20 or 30 sentences, hardly amounting to a summary of His teaching – but of course that is inevitable when you are just looking at the Passion and trying to convey it in three hours of drama. And what is also missing is what you gain from a life spent trying to follow Jesus. The Jesus on the screen can only be a pale reflection of the Jesus we know.
But the Jesus we know is the author of the moral landscape we are in today. The Jewish religion at the time still held to the idea of animal sacrifice as a way of appeasing an angry God. The Romans believed in killing people as a form of amusement, backed up by ideas of capricious deities. And what was going on in the rest of the world bore no relationship to the ideas of right and wrong we take for granted today. But it is not just the teaching which marks Jesus out as special. The miracles and signs played a part too, but there was something in Jesus which called for belief, a belief that he was the Son of God, the Messiah. And I think the drama does show something of this, in the way the disciples can foresee trouble in Jerusalem, and don’t understand what Jesus is doing, but nevertheless still follow Him.
Today our response to Jesus is emotional – we are not just thinking of the passion as something which happened in history. And this is never more so than on Good Friday, but the very fact that we see Jesus as special, raises a question as to what does the passion really mean. This is not just the unfortunate end of someone well meaning but who clashes with the powers that be. It has a greater significance than this, but what exactly? What is the meaning of this event which truly changed the world? This is a question I have been puzzling about for years, but I must say I have been put off by what I have seen as the church’s “official” explanation. And this is that Jesus died as a substitute for us, paying the penalty for our sins rightly demanded by an angry God. Now, the more you think about this, the less sense it makes. What kind of an image of God does this convey? What kind of justice sacrifices an innocent person? How can a God of love require such a violent act as an appeasement? How could God actually plan the crucifixion? Jesus speaks of God as our heavenly Father, a God of love. The Father sacrificing the Son in the name of justice simply contradicts this. It conveys an image which some have followed but which is contradicted by what Jesus actually said. Just think of the parable of the prodigal son or the lost sheep – no retribution there. In a word, the doctrine of penal substitution makes no sense at all and conveys an image of God which contradicts Christ’s teaching.
Now this doctrine is not exactly a recent invention, but it is something Paul and the apostles would not have recognised. For many centuries after Jesus the symbol of Christianity was the fish or the Chi-Rho monogram, or symbols of life and resurrection, not the Cross. It was the teaching, the life and the resurrection of Jesus the early church focussed on, not the death. It was only later that the theory of penal substitution was formulated and only made into the central fact of faith by the theologian Charles Hodge in the nineteenth century. This church building is older than the doctrine.
But if we are finding this theory nonsensical, what should we replace it with? Are we simply trying to put into words something we cannot hope to understand? Certainly I feel that anyone who thinks they can say what is going on in a few well chosen words has got the wrong end of the stick. But if you read the gospels, you will see many attempts by Jesus to say something about the meaning of the passion and of His whole life and ministry. There are many images employed and we need to see all of them to gain some understanding. It’s a lifetime’s study, but I can only now go through two or three of the texts we know and love and see how we can understand them.
The first one is the suffering servant passage in Isaiah 53, “He was wounded for our transgressions” and “with his stripes we are healed”. The point is that we are a party to the sin of the world, we are involved with it. Have you any doubt that if Jesus were alive one earth today that he would end up in solitary confinement in Jerusalem, or in Guantanamo Bay, or being beheaded in Baghdad? Evil is present in the world and every time we are slack in opposing it we let it flourish. Every time we say with Caiaphas, it is expedient that one should die rather than many, every time we can’t be bothered and let sleeping dogs lie we are complicit in the evil in the world. It is our sin that brought Jesus to the cross. It certainly wasn’t his. But going beyond that to say that this passage means that God planned the crucifixion is a step too far. It was foreseen, certainly, but not planned. The cross was inevitable given that evil is in the world and that suffering is the way sin is dealt with and evil loses its power. This is the central message of the Cross. This how we are healed.
The next text is what Jesus said, “The Son of Man is come … to give his life a ransom for many”. Well, who is the ransom paid to? Not God, surely? God isn’t a bandit. It’s figurative speaking and the ransom is paid to the devil, not God. And Christ did die that sin should be less, suffering reduced and the whole world live in peace. Christ did die for many, for the whole world. But who said it was a plea bargain made with God? It’s not in the bible.
And here is another word of Jesus: “Anyone who wishes to be my follower should take up his cross and follow me”. It is not that the sacrifice of Jesus was not quite enough, and needed to be topped up by the sacrifice of His disciples. It’s an example. Just as God was involved with the world to the extent of suffering the harm which so infects it, so should we be. It is not a question of standing back because Jesus has done all the work, but of involvement, with God, in fighting the evil around us.
Well, I could go on. But here is the message of Easter. Redemption is in the life, teaching and resurrection of Jesus. The cross is about sin and evil. We bear the evil as God bears our sin. This is the way the world is. The promise of the resurrection, the good news of the gospel is that this is the way evil is overcome.
On this Good Friday, we should know that God is open to the pain of the world and so should we be, for it can be overcome.