Defeated

Scriptures: Good Friday, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Why did Jesus have to die on the Cross?

To save us from our sins, of course; every schoolchild knows that. Yes, but why in this manner? Whose bloodlust was He slaking? Who nailed Him to that Cross? Was it God who demanded it? Was it Satan? Or was it us?

We speak of Jesus as the Passover Lamb, the once-and-for-all sacrifice that takes away the sins of the world. And this language is right and appropriate, given that it is the language of Scripture and the Church Fathers. But we must be careful. When Scripture speaks of Christ as the Lamb of God and Passover sacrifice, it is speaking the language of love, not of legalism. We cannot take this imagery too strictly, as though God were some sort of angry volcano demanding a human sacrifice lest it erupt upon the whole island.

Jesus’ entire life was sacrifice, was self-offering. As the eternal Son of the eternal Father, the Word of God became flesh and was made Man. He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave. And everything that He did with His entire life, every breath, every word, every parable, every miracle, was an offering given for the love of humanity and the glory of God. We call this the Atonement, the “at-one-ment”. When human beings separated ourselves from God through sin, God then became one of us in order to heal that chasm. In Jesus Christ, God became Man that Man might become one with God. And throughout His entire earthly life, Jesus went about forgiving sins with nothing but a word. He forgave and forgave and forgave. And this outraged those who protested that only God, after all, can forgive sin.

Some say that God could only forgive humankind through blood. What utter hogwash. God is not so petty or so cruel. And even if that were true, even if God did require blood to wash away the sins of humankind, Jesus shed a single drop of blood at His circumcision, on the eighth day after His birth. That single, infinitely precious drop of blood was more than enough to redeem the world. Rather than demand the blood of others, God offers up His own for us all.

God does not will the death of even one of His little ones, let alone His only begotten Son. The Cross was never fated, never set in stone by God. But He could see how we would react, how we would lash out, when the Messiah came to proclaim forgiveness and the inauguration of the Kingdom of God. He could see the Cross. And so God, in His mysterious providence, “meddled” with history, tweaked the story, so that He could take this evil thing that we intended and transform it into the ultimate good. We would hand God defeat, and He would turn it into victory. We would hand God shame, and He would transform it into glory. We would hand God death, even death on a Cross, and He would raise it up to eternal life.

The God we know in Jesus Christ leaves us neither to fate nor to chance. Instead He gives us the freedom to choose, and when we choose poorly—when we choose wickedly, fallen as we are—He is so clever and so loving and so persistent in His mercy that He is able to twist that horror into joy and give it right back to us, ten times as strong. That’s what predestination is: it’s not God fating us to suffer, but God seeing what we’re about to throw at Him and twisting it back around on us for our own salvation.

The Cross was never God’s idea. He came in peace, forgiving, healing, offering salvation freely to all. The Cross was our response to that. The Cross was our attempt to put God in His place, to crush Him, to murder Him, to bury Him down deep so that we would never have to deal with Him again. And He let us do it. He took it all, every blow, every lash, every nail and thorn and splinter and spear. And He used this ghastly, horrible tragedy—this utterly unforgiveable crime—to announce our forgiveness. To conquer death and hell. To raise humanity up from the grave to the infinite joys of Heavenly union in God.

We did the one thing we thought He could never forgive, and He forgave us for it. We killed Him, and He took away the sting of death forever. We murdered God, and God resurrected us.

The Cross is not a ransom, not a payment, not the satisfaction of a debt in any simplistic or legalistic sense. If we call it ransom, it must be understood as such within the mystery of our Lord’s mercy and self-sacrifice. The Cross is God’s ultimate act of love, pouring out everything He has, everything He is, on us, on the world, even as we nailed Him to that awful piece of wood. And that’s when we knew that we were defeated. That’s when we knew that no matter how evil, no matter how cruel, no matter how hateful we were, He would always love us, always forgive us, always welcome us home. And we had nothing left. There’s nothing more for us to throw at Him.

All we can do in the face of such love is kneel, and weep, and come home.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.