He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity, and as one from whom others hide their faces….But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. (Isaiah 53:3a, 5)
This reading from Isaiah, the Suffering Servant hymn, is found in the Good Friday liturgy in the earliest known lectionary, from the 5th century. It draws parallels between Jesus and the annual Day of Atonement ritual in ancient Israel. This was (and still is) the holiest day of the year for Jews, Yom Kippur, the day when in ancient times the High Priest would take two goats, sacrificing one on the altar, and putting his hands on the head of the other to lay on it the collective sins of the community. That second goat—the scapegoat—would then be released into the wilderness, where it would carry off the sins, neither the goat nor the sins to be seen again: God had put the sins of the people away, cast them out.
During Holy Week we read another ancient hymn, Psalm 22, several times. This is the Psalm that starts out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Jesus quotes this Psalm on the cross; Jesus knows the isolation that suffering causes, and cries out with this ancient lament. Lament, which we seldom hear in our lectionary readings, speaks to us not only of pain and suffering but also of endurance in the face of trial. Some have thought that when Jesus cried from Psalm 22 on the cross, he was doing so because he was utterly abandoned by God. But the doctrine of the Trinity makes this impossible. Jesus is God, before time and forever: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” God cannot be separated from Jesus, nor from the Holy Spirit—they are one. No, Jesus used this Psalm because he knew how it ends: The Psalm brings to completion the lament from Isaiah, by saying “Yet you are the God who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother’s breast. I have been entrusted to you ever since I was born; you were my God when I was still in my mother’s womb…But you, O Lord, do not be far away!…from the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me…For God did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.”
Recalling Jesus’ Passion and reliving it every year in Holy Week is a call for us to stop being numb to suffering—to Jesus’ suffering then, and to the suffering of those around us now—because the Gospel of Matthew tells us these are the same suffering. “For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me…Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”
We know that Jesus, who was without sin, suffered—not because of his own faults—but because of ours. If you ask the average American Christian on the street, “Why did Jesus suffer and die on the cross?” you’ll most likely hear the answer, “It was to atone for our sins. He did it as a substitute for us, as our scapegoat, so that God’s wrath would be appeased.” I mentioned in a sermon a few weeks ago that this kind of view is called substitionary penal atonement.
But the violence of the Cross was not God’s violence—it was ours then—and it is ours now. Although it is easy, and comforting, to turn our face from those we see each day who are suffering, and to agree as a society that “they” suffer mostly because of laziness or stupidity or lack of responsibility for their own lives, Jesus’ innocent suffering calls us to consider how much we—implicitly and explicitly—individually, as a people, and as a community—make “them” be the scapegoat for our own selfish way of life. To worship on Good Friday at the Cross of Jesus Christ is to not turn our eyes from suffering.
Each time I look away from the homeless person in the intersection, from the sick children of hard-working immigrants with no insurance, from those who live in the hopeless grind of poverty, from those outcast from our society for whatever reason…I am looking away from Jesus…I am rejecting Jesus…I am hiding my face from him, just as surely as if I were there at Calvary long ago. Jesus’ public suffering teaches us that there are no easy scapegoats. There is no casual sending away of innocent victims to carry off our sin—our sin has real, tragic, consequence. Jesus entered into our world, bearing the full weight of humanity and facing our sin head-on, sustaining the world on his arms of love and mercy. He calls us not to turn our faces from him—not to turn our face from his face, then, nor from his face today. In light of the issues like climate change, pollution, energy and natural resource abuse, extremes in the distribution of wealth and healthcare, senseless violence that we claim we can do nothing about, racism, and classism—in light of these and so much else—how many of our neighbors today are silent, suffering servants, wounded for our transgressions, bearing our griefs, carrying the diseases of our culture of tribalism, greed, and consumerism. We may not use Roman crosses to do our dirty work of death and destruction, but perhaps it would be more honest if we did. So, on Good Friday, part of what we do is confess: All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way. The rites of Holy Week—the foot washing, the weeping before the cross, the drama of Easter Vigil—are nothing but empty rituals if they don’t challenge us to make our own lives be lives of suffering servanthood, like Jesus’ life, lives of redemption and reconciliation for all of God’s creation.
This is what Holy Week is all about—we trivialize the Cross—we make it cheap grace, when we limit our understanding of it to simplistic, substitutionary penal atonement. Why would God, who back in the stone age forbade Israel from offering human sacrifice like all the other tribes around it were doing, require human sacrifice to save the world? This point is so important I will repeat from my earlier sermon: God didn’t sacrifice Jesus to take out God’s rage and anger on Jesus rather than on us—The Lamb of God is not offered to God by humanity as our substitute, but the Lamb of God is God’s own self offered to us, reconciling us and the world to God, exposing our idolatrous system that promises order, safety, peace, and protection through violence. The Crucifixion should reorient us from a theology of retributive justice and atonement and payment, to a theology of sacrificial love.
This is the only way the Cross makes sense. God’s love is not transactional. God loves us—God has loved us from the beginning when God created us, God loves us now, and God will always love us, forever. What God wants is for us—for all of creation—to be in a loving relationship back with God (and with each other). Christ’s life, death and resurrection are an affirmation of God’s radical love grace towards us—”Greater love has no one that this, that they give up their life for their friends.” The Cross is the ultimate message from God, face-to-face, in person, that cannot possibly be misconstrued: power, force, coercion, and violence are not the ways of our loving God. God, in Jesus, acts in love and forgiveness, even to those who killed him on the cross—even to us—and shows that there is ultimate victory in God’s love, even over our addiction to the power of death. God didn’t require Jesus’ death—we did. The cross shows us a God of love and forgiveness, a God whose nature is love in such fullness that Love is even willing to sacrifice itself to prove to us what we refused to understand otherwise. So it is, finally, absolutely, on the Cross, Jesus doesn’t save us from God—Jesus shows us God.
