Friday, April 3, 2015

Not a transaction but a promise

Scripture: Matthew 27:1-61

He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, ‘I am God’s Son’” (vs. 42-43).
            God doesn’t want to deliver his only son from death. Of all the crazy, counter-intuitive things that we believe as Christians this has to be near the top. We say “God is good all the time” and then we talk about a God who does not act to save his son from death when he has the ability and even the reason to do so. This is not Abraham on Mt. Moriah raising his knife over the bound Isaac; this time God does not intervene. This is an actual sacrifice; not a test; and our theological justifications for it overshadow the true terror of it. Did Christ have to die? Yes, sure, we can say that from the comfort of our place in history, but in the moment could any of us honestly believe it?
            But this idea of God, the Father, looking down upon his son, dying on the cross, is one we must forever rid from our conscience, because it’s nowhere near that simple. As Christians we believe something stranger; we believe that God himself came down in human form, 100% human and 100% divine, and it is God that was raised up on that cross as surely as it was Jesus Christ in the flesh. That’s strange, but it also frees us from asking absurd questions of this story. It means that this wasn’t divine child abuse, but instead it was God’s own self-sacrifice in his divinity and his humanity. And when Jesus cries out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he reminds us just how deeply human he has become.
            For the last couple millennia, people have debated passionately about why Jesus had to die. There are nearly as many atonement theories as there are Christians to think them up, many as plausible as the next. Many also raise some serious concerns. All of us need to step and back and understand that we’re not going to be able to wrap our heads around this one. We can’t make Jesus’s death into a transaction because it will always lose its absurdity, its imminence, and its importance when we do so. The act of the crucifixion is a singular moment for us to ponder, reminding us that some things are so sacred that we will only ever make them more banal by trying to get behind the curtain.
            Most importantly, we cheapen the act itself when we obsess with the mechanics of it. Suddenly, it’s not enough that God loved us so much that he died for us; now our salvation needs to be a mathematical equation with no remainder. It must be tidy and neat. It must be a transaction between God and the devil, or between God and us. But Good Friday isn’t tidy; it’s not neat. And it’s a humungous reminder that God works with the big picture. Yes, God can intervene; yes, miracles are real and wonderful and mysterious and we should be open to them, but, more than that, we have a God who is concerned with the cosmos, and if God is willing to enter into human form and die on a cross, then we had better understand that there is nothing so terrible that we go through where God hasn’t been, and, conversely, there are no guarantees that we won’t walk that path to Golgotha in our own way, at our own time.
            The authorities were looking for a reason, wanting a proof, and jeering Jesus when he fails to provide one for them to their expectations. Why wouldn’t he? Immediately we jump to atonement theories, about God needing to pay our debt, etc, etc. But all of that obscures the immanence of it: God died on the cross because God is a God of the big picture, and because suffering and sin and death came into the world with Adam and Eve we now are in need of a bigger resolution than mere healing, bigger even than bringing somebody back from the dead. Jesus raised Lazarus, but Lazarus died again eventually. We need something else; something that defeats death.
            Today is Good Friday, because today the last enemy is defeated; today death has lost its sting. That’s what the chief priests failed to see: the big picture. So do we. All the time. We’re short-term gain people. But we have a God who is wider, bigger, and more willing to suffer than we are. Thanks be to God for that, because it gives all of our suffering meaning. It doesn’t mean we won’t; it doesn’t mean things will work out in the end—at least not if by “in the end” we mean that our lives will be healthy, wealthy, and long. No, we will die. We might even die young. The small picture of our lives is variable, tenuous, and fragile. But God on the cross promises something else: Salvation, which is always wide, always seeking out the lost, encompassing more than we would expect, bigger and better than we can imagine.

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