Sunday: Good Friday C
Reading: John (18:1-40) 19:1-37
Preacher: S. James Steen

Every Holy Week I find myself deeply moved by the ancient rituals which we reenact around the last days of Jesus' life.  Part of me is amazed that I am able to put aside some very serious theological questions which these liturgies raise and to give myself over to such total participation.  I believe the main reason I can do this is that I never fail to experience myself "drenched in the love God," as one elderly priest put it. 

But issues do remain, and this year, especially, other people have raised with me questions similar to my own.  Briefly stated, they are questions about the nature of God and how it is that the events we celebrate this week, and especially this day, actually "work." 

The great Jewish Scholar, Abraham Heschel, once said that he could never accept Jesus as the Messiah because Jews could never believe that God would sacrifice his son, subjecting him to torture and an agonizing death.  What kind of father would do such a thing!

            Hearing the Passion According to John, as we just have, it's not difficult to understand why non-Christians, and probably a vast majority of Christians, would hold such an understanding of how Christians interpret Jesus' suffering and death.  Early in this passage, when Peter strikes one of the men who has come to arrest Jesus, Jesus tells Peter to cease and desist; for this is all part of the plan.  And at the very end of the passage, just before Jesus dies, he says, "It is finished."

What John gives us is a Savior who is following every detail of a carefully scripted play.  This Jesus is not so much a man who is faithful to his mission to show, by how he lives and dies, what it means to live completely according to God's precepts of love and justice.  In John, Jesus is more a superhuman actor who has been handed a script by God, a script which he follows self-consciously and flawlessly. 

This view of Jesus is very different from the view we find in the Gospel according to Mark, the earliest Gospel, where Jesus' life ends with the words "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Unlike the Jesus of John and of Mel Gibson, this Jesus joins Heschel in asking, "What kind of God would sacrifice his son?"  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Speaking of what he had been taught as a child, Jeffrey John, the Dean of St. Alban's Cathedral near London, recently asked, "What sort of God [would this be], getting so angry with the world and the people he created, and then, to calm himself down, demanding the blood of his own Son?  And anyway, why should God forgive us through punishing somebody else?  It was worse than illogical, it was insane.  It made God sound like a psychopath.  If any human being behaved like this we'd say they were a monster."

Last month, Pope Benedict reminded the faithful that, in the 21^st Century, hell still awaits all but the redeemed, and its punishments are eternal.  So, I ask a further question: "What kind of God would sacrifice his son in order that all might be saved, and then provide himself with loopholes that allow him to keep sending perhaps most of the worlds population to hell, a place which must be as crowded as a New York subway at 5:00 p.m.?"  For this same man, before he was the Pope, said that there is no salvation outside the church, and I don't think he's talking about the Anglican Church, or the Methodist Church, or the Muslim "Church," not to mention all those other religions, and not to mention all those people who don't even consider themselves religious.

At St. Paul & the Redeemer we often speak of radical hospitality.  It's a term which describes our understanding of how Jesus taught and lived.  It also describes what he taught about his Father, not an angry God who could only be appeased through violent sacrifice, and who is always looking for a new excuse to exclude and punish the very creation he has pronounced "Good."  This Father does not have to be appeased.  He is forever seeking to draw us to himself, like the father of the prodigal, unable to contain his joy at the return of the wayward son, not waiting for the child to beg for forgiveness, but racing out to embrace him, to kiss him, and to convince him how much he is already loved.

There are always those who object that this is a mushy form of Christianity that lacks bite.  We should listen to these people; for to the extent that this is true, we may not be radical enough in our hospitality.  It was this very way of being that let Jesus to the Cross.  But he didn't just passively welcome sinners to his table, which - had he stopped there - was annoying enough to the religious authorities of his day.  He went further and challenged those in power, when their policies excluded others: when they kept the poor poor, or made them even poorer, when they led to the ostracization of the sick and disabled, and when they drew hard and fast lines between the clean and the unclean.   

I believe that in the eyes of the God who created us and who has always loved us, we have always been saved.  Our problem is not convincing God to save us.  Our problem is that we find it so difficult to believe that it could be that simple, that God could just love us, period.  And here, I think is where the Cross has power.  For it shows us that when a human being shows love for others, out of the  knowledge of being deeply, radically, loved by God, no matter how severe the consequences, the ultimate outcome will be transformation and new life.  This does not give us a God who steps in and relieves us from suffering, and you may say, "Alas!"  But what it does give us is a God who is beside us, better yet within us, even in life's darkest hour, transforming us for life.

An extremely powerful illustration of this comes not from a Christian writer but from a Jew, Elie Wiesel, the holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner, who wrote of his experience of Auschwitz.  Many lost their faith there; but for some it led to a new, deeper realization of God's presence.  In one horrendous passage, Wiesel tells how a young boy was punished by the guards for stealing food.  He was hanged by piano wire, while all the other prisoners were forced to watch:

"For more than half an hour the boy stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony before our eyes.  We were all forced to pass in front of him, but not allowed to look down or avert our eyes, on pain of being hanged ourselves.  When I passed in front of him, the child's tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed.  Behind me a man muttered, 'Where is your God now'?  And I heard a voice within me answer him, 'Where is he? Here He is. He is hanging here on this gallows'."

Amen.