On the Eve of Good Friday

For some time now I've wondered about what makes Good Friday good.  What's the point of the passion?  How really does the death of Jesus save me and all the world?

Like many in the Western Christian church I grew up believing in the substitutionary sacrifice interpretation of the cross.  

It begins with the assumption that our sin against God has wounded God's honour, and that in order to maintain God's honour and the justice of the world God must punish us.  But because we are only human we can never repay all we have done to injure God's justice.  So Jesus, God's Son, steps in to pay the price for us by taking the punishment in our place.  In so doing, justice is served, full payment is made and we are off the hook -- free of the fear of punishment, free for a fresh start and new life with God.  

It's easy and simple to understand.  Deliciously rational in its mathematical balancing of wrong committed and payment required and made.

Except after a while -- once I moved beyond the black-and-white, super-rational logic of adolescence, it was exactly that vision of God as an honour-needy, heavenly accounts-keeper that sat more and more uneasily with me.  It was a way of being God that seemed somehow inappropriate -- even petty for the mysterious, compassionate creator of all the cosmos.

And as soon as that little crack appeared, the questions began to grow and accumulate.  Questions like:

• is it really forgiveness, or something less than forgiveness that God offers us, if full payment is still somehow required and made for things we do wrong?  even if it's God that somehow makes the payment to God?  because what does it mean really to "forgive?"
• does this idea of payment for sin appear at all in Jesus' teachings?  or does he have a different idea of how God makes things good and right with those who go wrong?
• might it be that we have assumed the necessity for someone to be punished when things go wrong, because it's the only way we know how to maintain order?  because it's how people have treated us?  and because saying this is God's way helps justify us, and helps us feel okay when we punish others (like our children, and like the poor, the weak, the vulnerable), and make them pay in some way for offending us and what we think is right?
• and, has any theory and practice of scapegoating and substitutionary sacrifice ever got us any nearer the kingdom of God?

Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" is one of the strongest contemporary portrayals of the cross of Christ as a substitutionary sacrifice.  From start to finish the emphasis of the film is the extreme, torturous pain that Jesus suffered.  And the point of the pain is that the punishment and the pain had to be great enough to pay for the greatness of the wrong we have done against God and God's honour.

I wonder, though, if the point of the passion really is the pain and the punishment, or if it's something else.  

When I read the Gospel narratives of Jesus' death it seems the emphasis is not so much on the pain he suffered, as on the powerlessness he willingly embraced.  Powerlessness against his disciples' betrayal and denial.  Powerlessness against his accuser's lies.  Powerlessness against his judges' twisted verdicts.  Powerlessness against those who mocked him, flogged him, and killed him.  

In other words, powerlessness to regain his injured honour.  And a total lack of concern about doing that.  About the necessity of doing that.

The only power Jesus hung onto all the way through was the power to love no matter what.  To love his weak and inconsistent disciples. To love his jealous and insecure accusers.  To love his cowardly and death-dealing judges.  To love those who made him hurt and who killed him.

And I wonder if this mystery of ego-sacrificing, other-embracing and accepting love is what we are meant to puzzle about at the cross.  More than we are meant to give a sigh of relief that the price is paid.

And if this -- whatever it is, is the way of God that heals -- or at least, can heal the world.

I don't know.  

I wonder ... what does the cross of Jesus show you about God?  And what does the way of Jesus show you about the way of really healing our own and all the world's brokenness?