We have just participated in the recitation of the most tragic story imaginable. In fact, this drama of the Passion of Jesus Christ is beyond any human tragedy. In a stage play, the tragic figure may be heroic and self-sacrificing and noble, but also has a blind spot, a “tragic flaw” — often the exaggeration of a virtue.
But the person of Christ Jesus does not display any such tragic flaw. Instead, we have just reenacted the telling of a story of a person totally innocent, who never denied his deepest truth, & was executed for living out that truth. As the church enters into the most solemn week of the sacred year, Holy Week, this is the mystery we ponder — the innocent dying to free the guilty.
Over many centuries Christians have thought deeply about this central mystery, and this reflection can be summarized under the one word, “Atonement.” You have probably heard different explanations about “Christ dying for us.” Some of these explanations depend too much on human courtroom imagery, or a medieval sense of a feudal lord offended by some servant or vassal.
That’s a legalistic view that imagines God the Father as outraged by human sin; but as God, is unable to receive justice from a finite creature, a human being because the offended party (God the Father) is infinite. Therefore an infinite Being, God the Son, makes restitution by his death, satisfying God’s justice.
Maybe there was a time when such a theology could really help people make sense out of this most tragic story imaginable: the death of Christ Jesus on a cross. In that view God shows no love. Some theologians call it “divine child abuse.” And the church has never endorsed just one explanation of the Atonement. The universal church is open to other understandings of the atonement.
One that makes much more sense to me, and to many people I speak to, is to view Christ Jesus in the role of the hero, unafraid in confronting worldly evil. Jesus knew what would happen if he spoke out and confronted evildoers — that not all of them would repent. Some would try to eliminate him for good.
And for too long the church has entertained a dubious speculation about who was more to blame — the Jewish leaders or the Roman rulers. Jews or Romans, old world or new world — none of that really matters. The tragedy is that we all participate in human evil. Some of the things we’ve done, and some of the things we still do, add to the evil that infects this world. Whether they are sins of commission or sins of omission, we’re caught in sin’s tangle.
We’re often suspicious about the kind of love which other people offer us, wondering when their self-giving will end, and when the payback time will start. And part of us just can’t believe that God would really love us without limit. We have some idea of how bad we can be — so how can God put up with us?
We have all rejected God’s love in the past, preferring to trust our own ways; trusting in our intellects, or our hard work, or any number of finite human works. We have all known that blazing embarrassment of realizing that God loves us even as we are imagining something devious, something that will bring us shame.
Rather than accept God’s love, sometimes we choose the path of rejection, keeping divine love at some imaginary distance (since we really can’t lock God out).
What is our hope, caught as we are between our high ideals and our weaknesses? I suggest we keep our attention, this Holy Week, not on our ups and downs, but on the unfolding of the story of God made human, Jesus Christ’s story.
And our church dares us to do this, not with our heads bowed down like a reed, but with joy! Joy that we can share in the new life of Christ Jesus who died for us. Take to heart the bold words at the beginning of the first liturgy of Holy Week, today:
Assist us mercifully with your help, O Lord God of our salvation,
that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts,
whereby you have given us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord.