How do we come to grips with the meaning of Good Friday? the
bible itself has many images: ransom, offering, reconciliation, and others.
Such horror requires that we attach meaning and purpose to it. In some way or another we have been stressing
the understanding of Anselm, 1,000 years ago. In his view, sin attacked God’s
honor, and God used the cross to restore justice and honor, with Jesus at the
fulcrum point of a humanity that sullied God’s honor and the divinity that
sought to restore it. Calvin, among others, turned the critical issue from
God’s honor to a sense of pardon for deserved punishment, with a criminal case
model. Somehow, the death of Jesus transferred both guilt and punishment on to
Christ. The transfer of punishment model is breaking down, I think, and is
buttressed by constant repetition more than a grasp of it. I often go back to a
little girl who heard the usual model of good Friday and replied: “well I live
Jesus, but I hate God.” Many have a difficult time imagining God as a dispenser
of eternal punishment for minor offenses. Guilt is not the pervasive sense that
dogs our thoughts. In a world of slaughter, it is almost impossible for some of
us to concur with a model of redemptive violence.
Miroslav Volf, a prominent theologian at Yale, disagrees and
says that Jesus is not a third party who mediates between an angry God and
humanity. Jesus represents a god who was wronged and still embraces humanity.
My recent Christian Century magazine had an extended piece by a British writer
making a case for the cross showing solidarity with the human experience of
suffering, an identification, not separation, from the plight of humanity.
A more ancient view saw it as posed between death and life,
fate and freedom. Look at pictures o the harrowing of Hell. You see images of
Jesus leading people from the abode of death into the light of heaven. In some
pictures, you can see a devil throwing a fit that its power is and jurisdiction
is fleeing away. The question would become
if the abode of death itself was the issue or did the abode of death
contain some punishment in it beyond death itself? As Alan Lewis wrote, it is a
fearsome thing to confront the specter of God in the grave.
More and more, I am attracted to the idea of the cross as
medicine, a sort of homeopathic medicine, for sin-sick souls. I think of John
3, before the great declaration of salvation, not condemnation. Jesus refers to
a serpent in the desert during the exodus in the wilderness. If the people
looked up toward an image of the serpent, they were healed. (Think of the
symbol of the pharmacy in drug stores). The cross is filled with irony. The
instrument of execution leads to a life where we are assured that God
understands, is with us in our joys and sorrow in the deepest valley
imaginable. The cross draws the poison out of human life, a sort of spiritual
poultice. It’s a vaccine against an arrogant, triumphal view of the faith and
its way of life. It is alos a protection against the poison of shame, perhaps
our deepest wound. the cross takes shame and grace over disgrace.
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