Good Friday • Isaiah 52:13–53:12 • John 19:16–30 • 3/29/24
Standing near the cross, you feel the magnitude of what has happened. You have felt something like this at other deaths, other endings. Yet this time, there is something more, a strange sense of waiting. Tonight and tomorrow are pregnant with something.
Speaking in the voice of one of the Magi, T. S. Eliot writes, “I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”
Now, at the other end of the story, death has come. The cherished teacher, relative, and friend—gone. The hope that he might redress political wrongs and institute a more just and merciful society—gone. The faith that a good individual could triumph over corrupt institutions—gone. Even faith in triumph itself—gone.
This is a crucial, archetypal moment, a hinge in spiritual development, for the disciples and for us.
Losing our attachment to triumph, to winning, is essential. And sometimes only having it wrenched away will do the trick.
Why is it so important to lose our attachment to winning? Let me back up and start another way.
Standing near the cross in the wake of this disaster, in the wake of every kind of damage and suffering humans cause, we cannot avoid the big questions. Why does this happen? Why do people hurt and destroy good and innocent individuals, communities, ways of life, species, ecosystems? Why do people cause harm?
None of us can cast the first stone. The potential to harm, in small ways or large, is in us all. We cause harm when we feel so desperate for something or so attached and entitled to something that tunnel vision sets in. It blocks our awareness of how we might be affecting others as we resort to force, sometimes without even realizing it. We feel that we cannot afford to pause, that our survival is at stake—and we are wired for survival.
But we are also wired for transcendence. And sometimes the key that unlocks the shift from survival to transcendence is to give up any quest for triumph, for domination, with its emphasis on self as opposed to other, us versus them, where the other too easily becomes a mere thing to be defeated or, at best, used. That kind of triumph keeps us small. So, sometimes, to grow, we need to lose.
“I had seen birth and death / But had thought they were different.”
T. S. Eliot also speaks of “a condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything).” Costing complete surrender, as when Job gives up the insistence that God owes him anything, including an explanation.
When we give this up, we relax from solitary oppositional splendor into relationship with Divine Mystery. The complexity of all the conditions we once placed on this relationship falls away, and we are, simply, related. The fallen grain yields its harvest.
The harvest parable is part of the reason scholar Gail O’Day says that John’s gospel offers a unique theology of atonement, one centered not on ransom or sacrifice but on relationship. For John, she says, restoring relationship between God and humankind is a mutual process. The divine contribution comprises the Incarnation and Jesus’ entire life journey as well as his death. In return, human recognition and response (what John called belief) are needed for the circle of restoration to be complete. The fruition of this is the believing community, rooted in the Word. This is the harvest from the fallen grain.
In depicting non-sacrificial atonement, John is consistent with a strand in the Hebrew scriptures. As scholars Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler put it, “blood is not the only way ancient Israel effected atonement.” There was also repentance and reform, expressed in Hebrew by a word for turning and returning. In Deuteronomy 30, if the people turn back to God, God will likewise turn back to them. The concept is seen again in First Kings, in Jeremiah, and in Hosea. This is atonement without violence.
This background makes it easier to recognize that today’s passage from Isaiah, read on its own historical terms, is also not a story of sacrifice or ransom. Levine and Brettler point out that ritual sacrifice required an unblemished victim, whereas Isaiah describes the central figure (whose identity remains controversial) as “marred beyond human semblance.” Levine and Brettler also note that where the Greek translation seems to say he was wounded in payment for the people’s transgressions, the original Hebrew says merely that those transgressions caused his wounds. That, along with other aspects of the text that they bring out, points away from an interpretation of ritual sacrifice or ransom.
Nor, I think, can this mysterious figure be suffering in place of the people since the people are suffering too: “by his bruises we are healed” implies that we are in need of healing. Thus, Isaiah’s servant figure is suffering with his community. Like Jesus, he does so without resisting. Somehow, it is that choice to suffer with others that is healing.
In making this choice, the healer relinquishes safety for the sake of relationship, of solidarity. In turn, as we stand before the cross and relinquish our hopes of triumph, we relinquish our separateness and open ourselves to communion.
On both the human and the divine sides, relinquishment has power. But not in the sense of purchasing power, of buying our redemption. As David McKee reminded us Sunday before last, God’s house is not a marketplace. Rather, the power of relinquishment is in the space it opens up for relationship. God empties God’s self to live and die among us. Among us! For our part, with that death, the space that had been taken up by any triumph we had hoped for, expected, or thought was ours is now empty. Standing near the cross, today and tomorrow, let us acknowledge and honor the power of that empty space.