Looking Ahead to April 18, 2025 -- Good Friday

This year we will be hearing the Passion story as told in Luke 22:39-53, 66-23:56

The Sermon title is Sacrifice? Revolution? Bait?

Early Thoughts: What do we do with this story? What meaning is there to be found in this tale of betrayal, injustice, torture and death? Why do we tell it every year?

Good questions. And ones I have wrestled with for many years without finding a wholly satisfying set of answers.

Of course we tell it every year because it is a crucial part of the narrative. We tell it to remind ourselves that the path to a renewed world is not without obstacles. But where is the meaning? Why is the cross needed?

From a purely practical viewpoint it can be pointed out that Jesus dies on a cross because he was deemed a political threat to the so-called pax Romana. When one challenges empire empire tends to strike back. The Romans and their Judean puppet leaders corked together to end the threat. But surely there is more than that...

Shortly after that first Easter Christians started to search for answers to the why questions. They started to ask what the cross could possibly have accomplished. As N.T. Wright asks in his book The Day the Revolution Began, what was accomplished by six o'clock in the afternoon on that day of execution?

Wright's book suggests that Good Friday is the day the revolution not only began but was victorious. I tend to disagree on both those specific points because I think the revolution began with incarnation and the victory comes with resurrection (although the final victory has yet to really come). But I do agree that Good Friday marks a significant event in the process of the revolution.

From the earliest days Christians have understood (though only with eyes that had seen resurrection, nobody believed this as Jesus was nailed to the cross) that somehow Christ's death was tied in to the ending of the power of sin. Various understandings of how exactly that happens have been offered over the centuries. So there is that, a major step in the revolution, the remaking of the world, is to break the power of sin (I tend to agree with Wright that the basis of that power is idolatry in some form or another). 

Some point to Jesus' death as some sort of sacrificial sin offering, as stepping in to take the punishment (which is not how the sin offerings at the Temple were actually understood in Jewish law). Others point to it as a form of bait, where Jesus allows the powers to think they have one only for the trap to be sprung and the victory revealed with resurrection. Others see it a s sign of commitment, that Jesus' passion for God's Reign was so strong that he was willing to die for the cause. There are lots of possible  understandings of Good Friday, lots of attempts to determine what had been accomplished when Jesus says "it is finished".

In the end I suspect that there are strands of truth in many of those understandings. I don't think there is one single meaning for the story we tell this day. Maybe part of how we answer the question is shaped by what we need (or think we need) it to mean to help lead us into the new and abundant life promised by Jesus?

What does the cross mean to you? What does the cross say to us in the disrupted world of 2025 (war in Ukraine and Gaza, mass deportations with no due process in the US, a Canadian election getting grittier, a trade/tariff war)?
--Gord