(from Holy Thursday 2014) Think of all the various elements that make up a Passover meal and then ask yourself how important is it that Jesus did not compare himself to the Passover lamb? In Matthew, Mark and Luke, it would appear that Jesus is celebrating a Passover meal. At least the text implies that. John’s gospel has no such indicators. That is because in John’s Gospel the Passover has not yet been celebrated (18:28). In John’s Gospel, Jesus is crucified and expires at the same time the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple. Gert Theissen (The Gospels in Context) has argued that underlying Mark’s chronology are certain clues that the meal is not a Passover meal. In other words the tradition Mark inherited has been modified by the Gospel writer (or his tradition) to look like a Passover meal and thus indicates that the early tradition and John’s Gospel are both suggestive of the fact that Jesus dies before the Passover. In John’s Gospel, John the Baptist introduces Jesus as “The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Is it not the case that in the sacrificial ritual only a goat bears away the sins of Israel and that on one day, Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)? How then can a ‘lamb’ take away or remove sin? Those who require the Bible to be perfect spend needless hours trying to harmonize the accounts. The Gospel accounts, in this, as in many other places, all reflect the ongoing processing of the implications of Jesus’ death. In all four cases, they are seeking to make a theological point. Each Gospel in its own way seeks to understand Jesus’ death in the light of the greatest event of Israel’s history, the Exodus, the time when God delivered the people of Israel from certain death at the hands of their enemy. It is not for nothing that in Luke’s Gospel when, in the Transfiguration account, Jesus is on the mountain it says that Jesus, Moses and Elijah speak of his impending ‘death.’ Interestingly the word used here is not the normal word for death, ‘thanatos,’ but the word ‘exodus.’ The three were speaking of the mighty act of deliverance Jesus would accomplish. While the figures of Moses and Elijah are well remembered for their bloody acts of violence inflicted upon the enemy other, Jesus’ death was about the bloody violence inflicted upon him. This is the necessary reframe I think the Gospel writers are all seeking to capture in one way or another in the Passion narrative. Jesus’ ‘exodus’ or act of deliverance would be accomplished not by bringing violence into the world but by taking upon himself the violence (sin) of the world. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it “God lets God’s self be pushed out of the world and onto the cross.” It is not sin in general that is removed, not the everyday missteps that you and I make. Rather it is that which is at the heart of all human sin that is removed, our tendency to make others our victims, our habit of blaming others for our social crises. What is removed at the cross, what is ‘taken away’ in the death of Jesus is the end result of violence, namely, death. Jesus’ death is God’s way of delivering us from death and from the fear of death. The violence done to Jesus is the same violence we see every day in our newspapers. The difference is that in our newspapers, and in our lives, violence evokes more violence, a counter-violence we call justice. We seek an eye for an eye and a life for a life in our way of trying to stop the virus of human vengeance and violence. God chose the opposite; God allows God’s self to be the singular place where all human violence is brought to a pinnacle. God bears in God’s self our violence. We are God’s persecutors. None of us can escape this. We must acknowledge that had we been there we would have joined the angry mob, or we would have sought to force Jesus to act with violence (Judas) or we would have denied having ever known Jesus for fear of reprisal (Peter). We would have been the ones to stand in judgment, righteous judgment against Jesus, the law breaker. As far back as we go as a species, the law breakers have always been our sin bearers. They are the ones we judge unworthy, they are the ones we blame for our woes. They deserve what they get. God steps into our world, the nonviolent Logos, the principle of Love, steps into our world which needs the blood of scapegoats and innocent lambs to survive, and brings an end to all this wickedness by taking upon God’s self all the anger, hatred, anxiety and fear we could muster. God takes upon God’s self death itself. God brings into God’s very heart that which we most fear: death and its consequences. God takes into God’s innermost being our vilest hatred, our ugliest lies, our distorted imaginations, our insatiable thirst for justice and vengeance and absorbs it. God hangs dead for us. This rescue, this ‘exodus’ doesn’t look like much. In fact it looks rather ordinary, just an other dead body, a crucified criminal. Yet this exodus, this deliverance was extraordinary for two reasons. First is that it completely demolishes the notion of the wrathful God, the punishing God. This God bears punishment, this God does not mete it out. This God, the God of Life, bears death, and bears it with us and thus for us so that we might see that our violence will only produce one thing: forgiveness. God in Christ forgives us from the cross. God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self, not counting against us the false accusations, or the torture or the mocking or the hatred or the pain or the anguish or any other vile thing we did that day. God does not even count our rejection against us. This God absorbs all of our violence and thus, and this is my second point, does away with violence as the mechanism by which we solve our problems. God does away with our scapegoating, our finger pointing, our endless accusations against one another. All that we do here in our lifetimes, the blaming, accusing, and justifying of our anger and systems of punishment are forever rendered powerless and pointless in Jesus’ death. They just don’t count in God’s book. Instead we are given a meal, a meal where we come together to acknowledge our tendency to persecute and hate and destroy. We are given bread which we break, a body which we crucify. In the breaking of bread we are owning up to our scapegoating tendencies. We are also given a cup, a cup which says that in the old world, under the power of the old where eye-for-eye was the measure, now a new measure for injustice will be given, a measure that makes no sense to a world grounded in violence and scapegoats. That is the measure of forgiveness. God has forgiven the whole world in Jesus. As Paul says in Romans 11, “God has placed all under sin”, that is, God doesn’t sort out the good people from the bad people. God has reckoned with the reality that we all engage in scapegoating others. Thus God is just to forgive us all, for while many are victims, all are persecutors. Even those of us who have been victimized have one way or another participated (because we are socialized into it) in using the blame game. None of us is exempt. None of us is truly innocent. Holy Thursday may be the day on which Jesus died. We will celebrate Jesus’ death tomorrow. Today we celebrate the singular ritual that binds us all together, first as the satanic accusers, then as God’s forgiven children. We celebrate our Exodus, our journey from death to life, all in one meal. This, for me, is what makes today so very special.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 12:42:12 +0000
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