Good Friday – Mark S Winward
The Question of Blame
Who in the world is responsible for this outrage? Naked, beaten, and rejected, the greatest teacher in history comes to Jerusalem preaching the love of God and neighbor, only to be put to death in the most gruesome and demeaning way imaginable. Who is to blame? Some say the Jews—a response that has fueled much of the persecution of Jewish people throughout the ages. Others insist the Romans were responsible for this travesty. I want to suggest this afternoon a different way of looking at this question.
The Role of Religious and Secular Authorities
Despite their corruption, I don’t think we can completely blame the Jewish religious establishment. On more than one occasion, Jesus had publicly proclaimed that “he and the Father were one” and that “no one comes to the Father except by him.” Yet the Law of Moses clearly stated that to claim equality with God was blasphemy—and the Law dictated that the penalty for blasphemy was death.
Neither can we blame the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, despite his apparent apathy. After all, the religious officials turned Jesus over to Pilate to carry out the Law. More importantly, Pilate allowed the people the opportunity to free Jesus.
A Choice of Obedience
Ah, then it must have been the people, right? The people bear the blame for executing Jesus Christ! But let me ask you: if Jesus was who he said he was, do you really think he was in any danger from the Jewish Council, or the Romans, or even the crowd? Remember what Jesus said in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53). Jesus was not compelled for one moment to go to the cross; rather, it was his choice in obedience to the Father.
Our Responsibility
Surely, then, I cannot be implying God is to blame for Jesus’ death? On the contrary, we must ask why Jesus came in the first place. Jesus was not a helpless victim of a miscarriage of justice. Jesus was on a collision course with the Law as soon as he revealed who he actually was: the Messiah, the Son of God, and—in some mysterious way—God Himself. The point is this: God in the person of the Son came reveal himself and to die on the cross for the crimes against heaven committed by you and me. The blood of Jesus Christ, beloved, does not rest on the hands of the Jews, the Romans, or the Jerusalem mob; it rests with us.
The Agony of Separation
It is impossible for us to imagine the infinite pain Jesus suffered on the cross as a result of our crimes against heaven. In that unimaginably terrifying moment, Jesus experienced the separation from God that our sin brings upon us, both here and in the life to come. If Jesus was indeed who he said he was—both the Son of God and God-become-man—then when the Creator of all that is suffered the agony of the cross and died, the Godhead was torn in a way that is unimaginable to us limited, earthly creatures. In an extraordinary book called Reliving the Passion, Lutheran pastor Walter Wangerin provides a powerful image of what Jesus must have suffered:
No human mockery can match the voice of the storm for mortal scorn. Lightning flashes. The hill outside the city is white-wet and empty. Silhouettes stutter and black out: three crosses, the guards, some women at a distance. Those who laughed at the central figure this morning are gone. No one is laughing now.
Thus the first hour of the afternoon, and the second, and the third.
The few who stood the storm are still on the hill at the end of three hours—the ninth hour of the day. The lightning has fled. The thunder has exhausted itself. But the blackness persists—and suddenly a voice worse than thunder, because it is a human voice, a horrified wailing, arises: Eloi! Eloi! My God! My God!
Who is that? The one in the center. The one in the perfect center of elemental darkness, the focus of this storm, him: Eloi! Lama sabach-thani? Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, him. He hangs in an abyss, that one. Him.
My God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Who answers him?
The thunder is silent. The city holds its breath. The heavens are shut. The dark is rejection. This silence is worse than death. No one answers him. No, not even God. Not even God, his Father, because he who has become hateful in his own eyes now is hateful likewise to God, his Father.
Jesus. Him. It is against him that heaven has been shut.
In this terrible moment of storm, the loss of light for humanity is at once the loss of love and life for its Christ. He has entered the absolute void. Between the Father and the Son now exists a gulf of impassable width and substance. It is the divorce of despising. For, though the Son still loves the Father obediently and completely, the Father despises the Son completely because he sees in him the sum of human disobedience, the sum of it from the beginning of time to the end of time. He hates the Son, even unto damning him.
This is a mystery, that Christ can be the obedient, glorious love of God and the full measure of our disobedience, both at once. But right now this mystery is also a fact. And the fact must seem to last forever. Hell’s horror is that it lasts forever.
And this, precisely, is the bitterest drop in the cup: that, crying down eternity unheard, separated absolutely from God—from the God he cannot help but love even still—Jesus is in Hell. The darkness that covers Jerusalem from noon to the middle of the afternoon, it is no less than the damnation of the Messiah, who wails and gnashes his teeth in an utter solitude from now (so it must seem) unto eternity. Hell is eternal. And he has descended into Hell.
The Eternal Plan of Love
The cross is nothing less than the collision between the justice and the love of an infinitely good and unfathomably loving God. Before all things came to be, before time itself, when God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—contemplated the creation of the universe, the cross was in the mind of God. Yet God still longed for a relationship with us. So he created humankind with the freedom to turn against Him—knowing full well we would. He created you and me knowing the cost of that relationship would be the cross.
Before time itself, God yearned beyond our wildest imagination to know us. And before time itself, He knew that we would tragically and rebelliously turn against Him who loved us, perversely going our own way. God said through the prophet Isaiah, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way…” (Isaiah 53:6). But he yearned to be in relationship with you and me so much that, despite our disobedience, despite the cross, and despite the Godhead itself being rent asunder, he chose the path of love to create us. From the very beginning, God loved us so much that he was willing to pay an infinite cost to restore our relationship with him.
Our Response This afternoon is a good time to ask how to respond to such a costly sacrifice, such unfathomable love, and such amazing grace. The truth is: there is nothing we can do to repay the outrage of the cross. But one thing is clear: what God deserves is nothing less than every corner of our hearts and our full measure of devotion in serving others in his holy name. Amen.