Saturday, April 11, 2015

Good Friday 2015

How easy it is to respond to one’s own fear of dying by bringing death to others instead. The Temple priests during Jesus’ time had an uneasy relationship with Herod, the Rome-sanctioned ruler of Jerusalem, and Jesus’ followers were unsettling the balance. They were proclaiming Jesus as a new king, and if they didn’t stop, the Roman authorities were likely to come in, replace the Temple leaders, and start executing Jews like they did the last time the Jews took issue with being under occupation. The Temple priests were, as we all are, afraid of death - for themselves and for their people - and so the High Priest, Caiaphas, advised that it was better for one person to die than for a whole people to be slaughtered. He responded to the threat of his own death by bringing death to someone else, instead.
Pontius Pilate, the prefect of Judea, also enjoyed a comfortable relationship with Rome, but only so long as he was able to keep the Jewish people in line. Pilate was put in charge of military order at the pleasure of the Emperor, and the Emperor would not be pleased if the Jewish people tried to revolt and throw off their Roman oppressors. And when the Emperor was not pleased, people died. So, fearing a similar fate, Pilate responded to the threat of death by letting a falsely accused individual die.

Peter, the disciple Peter, responded to the threat of death by denying that he knew Jesus, committing his own kind of murder against Jesus. He didn’t stand by Jesus, or throw in his lot with Jesus. Peter, fearing death, pretended that Jesus was already, in a sense, dead to him. He didn’t know Jesus. He killed Jesus by denying his relationship with him.

The early community of Christians who took the name of John, who put together the Gospel from which we heard the passion story today - they, too, were afraid of death. They were being persecuted by the Roman government, and they were afraid of portraying the Roman Empire in any way that would make them angry - and kill them - and so they did everything they could to avoid negative attention. They wrote the Passion story in such a way that it was the Jews  - only the Jews and all of the Jews - who were responsible for Jesus’ death while the Romans got away guilt-free. In order to avoid their own death, they composed the Passion story so that the Jews were sneaky and deceptive and guilty, while Pilate, historically known to be a vindictive and brutal ruler, is described as being accommodating - he goes out to meet the demanding priests so that they do not defile themselves - and as merciful - he would rather not kill Jesus but asks the Jews to pick someone else - and as just - he finds no case against Jesus and so wants to excuse him. The Gospel portrays Pilate as wanting to release Jesus but bowing to the pressure of the threatening Jewish priests. The writers of the Gospel were afraid of dying at the hands of the Romans, and so, through their own portrayal of the story, they brought death to the Jews instead.

The threat of death does strange things to us. It causes us to panic - to try to make deals and to offer others in our place, to throw strangers under the bus, to avoid the consequences of our actions and scapegoat others, to deny that we deserve the very death we face. The threat of death prevents us from standing up for others, from demanding justice for the marginalized, from speaking up when others receive abuse. The threat of death causes us, directly or indirectly, to bring death to others.

But Christ calls us to die. Christ calls us to trust him, and follow him, even though the path leads to death. 

He does this because he knows, and has proclaimed, and has experienced, that death is not the end. We do not, actually, follow Christ to death, but through death. Because it is only by making our way through death - not around it, or away from it - that we receive the new life promised to us by God and shared with us on Easter. It is only by facing our own death, and accepting it, that we can die and receive new life. Now this is not to say that being a Christian means having a death-wish, or being nihilistic. Christ does not call us to actively seek out death. But death is inevitable, and Christ calls us to accept it as a part of our life, rather than trying to force others to take our place.

He does this because we can only receive the new life promised by God after we die. Die to sin, die to selfishness, die literally - however you want to understand that death - we must go through it and die before we can receive new life. God cannot fill a pitcher that is already full. God cannot give us new life when we are clinging to the old one. You have to dump out the stale water if you want fresh water instead. 

It is the inevitability of death - the fact that we all must go through it rather than around it to get to Easter Sunday - that makes this day both solemn and Good. Jesus died rather than bring anyone else to death. He did not offer up the lives of the other disciples in exchange for his own. He did not offer to stop healing the sick or preaching good news to the poor in order to escape his own death. He was surely afraid to die - but he also knew that death was the only way forward to new life, life which God would share with the whole world. In this way, he is both our model and our salvation, comforting us when we fear our own death and transforming those deaths into something more meaningful.


Easter is coming - but we will only get there when we accept the reality of Good Friday, that we too often respond to our own fear of dying by bringing death to others - either intentionally or unintentionally. Let us then accept our own death and our own death-bringing, and prepare ourselves to move through it, so that we might truly receive the new life of Easter that is promised.

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