Friday, April 18, 2014

Good Friday: Who is Responsible?


A Homily for Good Friday All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC April 18, 2014 Thomas E. Wilson Rector
Who is responsible for Jesus’ death? Was it God who needed a debt to be paid for all of our sins? That answer makes a twisted kind of legal sense but is repulsive because it reflects a kind of God who is backed into a logical corner and is locked into a simplistic answer. 
 
Is it the envy of the religious establishment that wants to rid itself of this outsider? Jesus was an outsider and a disrupter of the way things always had been. Most establishments can put up with a little bit of variation, but religious institutions are notoriously in need of an outward stability so they can proclaim so called timeless truths that are nothing more than fossilized habit. I can see where they would want him out of the way - life would be so much easier.

Was it the fear of the occupying forces that the situation might get out of hand and some blood needed to flow to stop the unrest? Ruling forces are always ruled by fear; fear of rebellion, fear of exposure, fear of the next cycle of decision making. Until fairly recently, most countries used public executions for the dual purposes of entertainment for the masses and putting the fear of the state into people’s hearts. The theory went that executions reduced murder rates and especially lowered the murder rate of the state’s law enforcement personnel. However, that theory falls apart as studies have consistently shown that, in the US, the states with the highest rates of death penalty convictions also have higher murder rates and especially higher rates of murder of law enforcement personnel than those states with no death penalty. But logic has never deterred people from their strong beliefs based on fear.

Was it the people in the crowd who always enjoy violence toward others as entertainment? We have had a love affair with violence long before we invented video games where we can practice killing people as we kill time or produced television shows or movies that demonstrate the oh-so-many entertaining ways that we can bloodily dismember people with our weapons. And how we adore our weapons! Every year brings a new crop of murders where someone walks into a public place and slaughters innocent people. Every year we shout “No more!”. Except that shout turns into a whimper if it is suggested that the end to our love affair with violence and weapons begins with us, and we end up closing our eyes, crossing our fingers, and hoping that the annual slaughter does not return.

So, the envy of religious rivals, the fear of the ruling authorities, and the blood-lust of us humans were all partly responsible - that is, if we see Jesus as a victim. But John’s Gospel, which we read for today, doesn’t see Jesus as a victim but as the one who chooses the time and place of his death. Jesus is in charge, and he acts as a mirror that reflects (a) the religious authorities who have replaced the God of love with the God of hate to project their own hates, (b) the political authorities who try to create fear, projecting fear as a way to cover up their own deeper fear and (c) ourselves and our complicity with violence toward fellow images of God.

Jesus is not a victim; he is the gift giver. He gives himself. In John’s Gospel, the authorities come to take Jesus by force, but they fall on the ground. Jesus gives himself over to them. He is brought before the religious authorities, and he gives himself to them as the truth that they refuse to accept. Jesus is brought before Pilate and shows Pilate how weak and fear-ridden Pilate, the one who is supposed to be in charge, really is. 
 
Jesus is brought before the crowd and offers himself as an alternative to the bandit Barabbas, and they choose Barabbas, the one who embraces violence, as the one who is closer to their hearts.

Jesus gives up his mother to the beloved disciple to help heal the pain that the disciple and mother both feel.

Jesus gives up his spirit; it is not taken from him, but it is a gift from him to God and to us. 
 
In the end Jesus will give up his death as he allows himself to be risen, and his new life becomes a gift he keeps on giving.

We call it Good Friday, because Jesus gave himself as a gift for us to see ourselves and to enter new life.

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