Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick Good Friday
Posted on
April 3, 2015
Good Friday; Trinity Church Hartford
Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick
All the events we celebrate in the Christian calendar are, each in its own way, seen through the lens of human interpretation. Those who remembered Jesus and those who collected those memories and wrote them down were contributing to the various interpretations of what his life, and especially on this day of Good Friday, his death meant to his earliest followers and the church which succeeded them. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the dominant interpretation of Jesus’ death contains some unexamined, disturbing, and troubling views about God that distort, even pervert, what the death of Jesus could mean to us today. There is, I will suggest, an alternative interpretation of the death of Jesus that modifies the view of God in the dominant interpretation and places Jesus’ death into a different and less problematic narrative.
Let me remind you of the reigning interpretation of Jesus’s brutal death on a cross. This interpretation has a variety of nuances within it but they are all variations on the same theme. And that theme is that God required someone to die a bloody death so that God could then forgive the sins of humankind. Because humanity sinned against God, God demanded his pound of flesh in compensation. And since human sin was infinitely vile, the pound had to be of infinite worth to pay for it. In fact, it had to be a truly innocent and sinless life. And only God’s own son could meet that standard and so he had to die so that we could live. And finally this whole scenario had to have been planned by God ahead of time, at least from the moment sin entered into the world with the fall of Adam and Eve.
Now I don’t mean to be disrespectful of this traditional view of God often set forth on Good Friday, or at least I don’t want to critique it without offering another, and in my opinion better, interpretation of this event that is still true to the essential meaning of the Christian narrative.
The assumption behind the pound of flesh theme is that God’s honor, or reputation as a divine being was in some way tarnished by the sin of Adam and Eve. Such a besmirching of the divine honor then required someone to pay for it, to compensate for it, or as it was put theologically, to atone for it. The sin of Adam and Eve was assumed to be universal, pervasive and endemic in all human beings who were born after Adam and Eve. “In Eve’s fall we sinned all” as the Puritans used to put it, referencing the doctrine of original sin which asserted that everyone is born sinful and no one can attain salvation without God’s forgiving grace. But in the dominant interpretation of Good Friday someone had to pay the price of human sinfulness because it was an affront to God. And that someone had to be the one who had harmed God’s honor in the first place. And that had to be a human being. And so the Church eventually came up with an interpretation of the death of Jesus as an atonement in which a human being (Jesus) could substitute himself for all humankind, even though he was innocent of sin, and offer himself up to God (since his divine nature was of infinite worth and thus had to be accepted by God as full payment for human sin). In the transaction of the cross God’s demand that someone pay him for the dishonor which his creatures had done through their sins would be met and God’s anger appeased.
I have to confess that I find serious problems with this theological interpretation of Good Friday. It seems to present us with a God who cannot be satisfied unless an innocent person is sacrificed in order to appease the wrath of God at being dishonored. This view of God makes God seem more like a vengeful tyrant willing to order child-sacrifice in order to satisfy something in himself. (And the doctrine became known as the doctrine of satisfaction). This view of God makes the divine Father even less appealing than a sinful but repentant and compassionate human father who forgives the sins of his wayward children without demanding that they sacrifice themselves to appease him. The psychological implications of the idea of a divine father demanding retribution from his children through their deaths or the death of someone representing them, are chilling, especially when they have been used by some human fathers to justify treating their children with severity and abusive punishment.
It’s interesting to note that the Good Friday gospel we have just heard does not explicitly invoke the atonement by sacrifice motif. But that motif became an important part of the Christian theological tradition through the work of an 11th century monk by the name of Anselm of Canterbury. A creature of medieval culture, Anselm pictured God as a princely monarch or Lord whose status or honor in that culture was dependent on those below him in the social pecking order acknowledging their Lord’s superior status. Respecting the Lord’s honor required the subservience and abasement by those lower down the hierarchical order of status. But if a lower status person failed to obey the higher status person’s commands, the latter’s honor was impeached. And such an insult to his honor required satisfaction or repayment for the insult. Anselm argued that sinful human beings “owed” God a repayment for their sins whose very existence was a constant reproach to God. In a fine if tortured example of medieval scholastic logic, Anselm then argued that since what was owed to God was infinite (since God’s honor was infinite) it would take an infinite being of infinite worth to pay it. But since only finite beings actually owed that debt to God, since only human beings had acted sinfully and incurred the guilt of sin, it would take a being who was at the same time both infinite and finite to pay it to God. Hence, Anselm concluded, the logic of atonement required an innocent divine but also human being to die in order to appease God’s anger at the besmirching of his honor. Thus we get the theological justification for thinking of Jesus as both divine and human simultaneously.
Jesus was not a mindless puppet in this drama. His perfect divine will freely accepted the fate ordained for him by God and he willingly offered himself up to God in payment for the sins humanity had committed. And because he was himself guiltless, God could accept Jesus’ offering of his innocent life as sufficient payment for humanity’s sins and, having received the payment, could now forgive the sins of humanity because the divine honor had now been satisfied.
One can certainly see the attraction of this view: humanity gets forgiven, God is satisfied, and we can get on with our lives in thanksgiving to God for what God has done for us. But, there is a serious price we pay for this theological explanation of Good Friday. And that price is a view of God that is cold, formal, and harsh. God is pictured as a remote lordly tyrant whose well-being or honor is damaged to the extent that someone must pay for the damage. This is a God pictured almost exclusively in terms of the formal justice of the law court, a justice that is blind to compassion and mercy, a justice that manifests itself by the rigorous and impersonal standards of accusation, guilt, retribution, and repayment. This is not a God who can transcend characterization as a medieval monarch and break free from the legal constraints of who owes what to whom. This is not a God who loves and forgives without exacting someone’s death as the price for that forgiveness.
But there is another interpretation of the death of Jesus which, I believe, takes us closer to the heart of God, a heart that is not defined by the strict standards of justice, a heart that is closer to the real God, the God of compassion, love, and mercy. This is a God who loved the world so much that he sent his son Jesus into it to reveal and to embody, literally to incarnate in and through his words and life, the true meaning of God’s love for humankind. He did not predetermine or predestine his son to die a bloody death in order to appease the divine wrath or restore the divine honor, but instead to show, if it comes to that, how death can be meaningfully met, not on legal terms, as demanding retaliation, but on the terms of forgiveness such as Jesus mercifully offered to the thief on the cross next to his. In this interpretation of Good Friday Jesus was not predestined by God before time began to die in this way. Instead, we might suggest, his death was the result of human jealousy and fear on the part of those whose earthly power and honor were being threatened by the new life and new way of being that Jesus taught and embodied. Jesus’ willingness to trust in the power and love of God rather than in the political and economic powers of the world which are built on fear and domination and discrimination and injustice earned him the wrath of those who wielded these powers. It was these powers, and those who controlled and administered them, and not the will of God, that couldn’t stand the threat Jesus posed to the status quo which was built and defended on the basis of unjust privilege and oppression. And so Jesus dies at the hands of the fearful. And yet in his death he demonstrates how one can face one’s death if one is willing to live according to what God intends for humankind: to preach the coming of the Kingdom and to point to new life for those still under the sway of the old life built on the threats of death and exclusion from power. The people of Jesus’ time had the choice of accepting Jesus as a window into the heart of God or of rejecting him as a challenge to their pursuit of self-interest and the retention of worldly power. Those in power chose to reject him not because God had written the script and required Jesus’ death but because particular powerful human beings, using their free will which God chose not to annul, were writing the script in defense of their practices of injustice. And where was God in all this? The message of Good Friday is that God was with Jesus not only through the agony of his death but also into the joy of his resurrection. God was with Jesus on Good Friday, as God will be for us at the moment of our death, not as the one who commands it but as the one who suffers through it with us and brings us safely out the other side into resurrection and everlasting new life. Through the promise of resurrection we are also invited to face our own deaths with hope and trust and confidence that even death cannot separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Good Friday is always followed by Easter Sunday because that is the glorious mystery of divine love. The final word is not a bloody sacrifice to appease the divine anger, but the final word is love even in the midst of death.