One of the films which some of our teenagers watched this week in their Holy Week film evening, was ‘Jesus Christ Superstar.’ They saw the section after the Last Supper where Jesus goes to the garden of Gethsemane to pray. In the gospel he prays that the cup of suffering will pass from him, but at the same time he hands himself over to the will of God. As in the Lord’s prayer, so now he prays, Thy will be done.’ In the film this turns into an impassioned plea for some answers. Jesus sings, ‘I want to know, I want to see why should I die… Show me there’s a reason for your wanting me to die.’ But no reason is forthcoming and so the song ends with the words, ‘God thy will is hard, but you hold every card. I will drink your cup of poison, Nail me to your cross and break me, Bleed me, beat me, kill me, take me now before I change my mind.’
And this is not the only moment in the film where the characters seem to believe that everything is fixed and they can’t change it. God holds every card. Now I think all this is profoundly wrong, but it needs to be thought about carefully. It is of course the case that the New Testament presents the idea of Jesus going along a path that has been prepared for him, playing a part that has been written for him. The gospel writers didn’t believe that any of this was accidental. But at the same time, all the early Christian writers were working on answers to the question ‘Why did Jesus have to die?’ The only answer that Jesus in the film presents is that God wants it and wills it. It is God who nails Jesus to the cross. And it is that idea which I think creates a profoundly wrong impression. It is not God but the world which crucifies Jesus. God does not intervene to stop it, but God does not nail Jesus to the cross, humanity does.
At the historical level Jesus dies because Israel is occupied territory, The Jewish leaders are trying to keep the peace with the Roman occupiers because that way they think they can protect Judaism and its Temple. The Jewish leaders are disturbed by Jesus, even frightened, perhaps, of what impact his teaching may have on the precarious status quo. Jesus does not fit into an established pattern; he does not submit his teaching to the qualified authorities. He and his followers use titles in a way which puzzles the authorities, and which may upset the Romans if they come to hear of it. There have been previous examples of false Messiahs and uprisings against the Romans and the consequences have been dire. At the time of the Passover the population of Jerusalem is greatly increased, and the Roman garrison is doubled. For the Jewish leaders to hand over to the Roman authorities someone who looks like a trouble maker, is a sign of good faith which may reduce the tension. They calculate that with their leader arrested his followers will not make trouble. As far as it goes that is perhaps a sufficient explanation of why Jesus died. Everyone was just trying to do their job from the high priests down to the soldiers who raised the cross.
This is the kind of world in which such things happen. This is a world in which fear, injustice, betrayal, and cruelty always have their victims. Nevertheless in this instance, the victim is God’s messenger, God’s representative, God’s son. We have made such a world that in it even the representative of the greatest good, the greatest love we can imagine is put to death. That is the measure of the world’s fall from grace. We have crucified the Son of God. If as Christians we begin by seeing this as the first message of the cross we shall at least never be comfortable in such a world.
I said that God does not intervene, he does not will that this should happen but he allows it. And to go further we are taught that God sent his son into such a world, not simply to suffer but to save the world from the evil and suffering it has created for itself. No loving father would will his son to suffer but together they might accept that the son has to submit to evil in order to overcome it. And so we come back to the question, why does the son have to die in order that we might be saved? In what sense is this suffering for us?
The first suggested answer from the New Testament is contained in the response, ‘By your holy cross you have redeemed the world.’ To redeem something means literally to buy it back, to pay a price or ransom for something, most often a captive, or freedom for a slave. As an image used in the New Testament its usage is rather unclear. Who is buying back what from whom and for what price? The answer seems to be Jesus by his death releases us from slavery to sin. We might then ask why death is the necessary price for freedom from sin? Perhaps the answer is that slavery under sin is a kind of death from which only the death of a sinless man can release us. Sin demands another death if we are to be let go. Such language works for the early Christians because they could personify and objectify sin in this way. For us it is harder perhaps. Might it be that our sins and failures evoke a sense of deadness, or hopelessness in us; and we can only be rescued from such deadness by the knowledge that a man who is not so deadened by sin is willing to rescue us spiritually and emotionally by giving up his life for us?
Another obvious image which the cross relates to is that of sacrifice. Sacrifices were part and parcel of ancient religions including Judaism. The blood of the sacrifice wipes out or expiates sin. The victim dies as a substitute for the sinner himself. The sacrifice somehow restores a balance in our relationship to God which has been lost by our sin. We can understand this imagery at one level because we can be moved by the sacrifice which soldiers fighting on our behalf make for us, or which nuclear engineers make when they go into a reactor to shut it down in an emergency, exposing themselves to radiation on our behalf. And we might think of Jesus fighting for us on the cross against sin and the devil and winning the victory at the cost of his own life. And, moreover, there is a dramatic irony here because Jesus fights back by allowing the enemy to do its worst. In this victory his weakness is stronger than the strength of his enemies. And that is a lesson which the 20th century learnt again in the non violent resistance of Gandhi or Luther King.
The examples I have given so far depend largely on images drawn from an ancient culture. Underlying all the old images is the sense that this is something done for us, that it is costly, and that we could not do it for ourselves – we need someone form the godward side to do this for us. And what it achieves changes our relationship to the sinful propensity in all of us.
Perhaps all we need do is focus on the preposition which all the most ancient statements of belief contain: Christ died for us – this is done for us. The ancient world needed to objectify spiritual realities in the concrete images of sacrifice, or battle, or ransom or a court room transaction. Perhaps we can lay aside the imagery and focus on the purpose. This was and is done for us. Something as costly as the life of God’s unique representative on earth is horribly put to death for us. It is how that idea works in our hearts and imaginations that is important. Here is a tragedy in which the son of God willingly plays his part because he knows that the consequence for all who remember it will be cleansing – the meaning of the word ‘catharsis’. This story is cathartic. Each Good Friday we recount the story, we live through the story, and emotionally it can drain us. We are forced to look at the world as a world in which such things happen. We are forced to think about how such things go on in our world which we are unable to stop and which we wretchedly grow accustomed to. And perhaps we are also forced to think about our own suffering – the lesser tragedies which even so cause us great pain and which we long to explain but cannot. We bring these tragedies into the greater tragedy of the cross. We set our woundedness alongside his.
And so finally we hear how God allows his son to become the victim of our sin and the sharer of our suffering; and maybe this story can lead us to feel all the emotions which all tragedy invokes in us, anger, despair, grief, and the desire that such things need not be, that ultimately the world is not a tragic place. Such emotions are draining, they leave us at the end of this day, as the disciples were left – empty. And yet perhaps we might call this a purified emptiness, an emptiness which has witnessed sin and suffering in a series of events carried through for us. For us, for me; our emptying out in this way is for our good. The emptiness has been achieved so that good may come of it and that is why we call this Friday good. Good Friday must be, that Easter may come to heal, to answer, to fill the emptiness with hope and expectation. And that is why we call this Friday good.