A Holy Saturday Reflection for March 30, 2013

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for Elijah.” And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. (Mark 15:33-37)


Dying has to be the loneliest of all human experiences. Even when others are gathered around the one dying, the process is singular and cannot truly be shared. Death is a solitary business.

A lot of people were gathered around Jesus as he approached death. Even though he died with two others, each death was individual. Jesus suffered his death by himself.
There is a common theological understanding of this isolation in death that says that even God abandoned Jesus to die alone with the sins of the world. The conclusion is that such abandonment was a theological necessity, evidenced by Jesus’ agonized lament, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Any Bible footnote will tell you that he was quoting from Psalm 22, which goes on to speak of danger and physical suffering, even suffering that sounds eerily akin to a body undergoing crucifixion.

But this cry from the Psalm is more that just the cry of one feeling abandoned and alone. It is the cry of Israel. It is the cry of the world. It is a cry that looks around at evil, suffering, pain, exile, and death, and despairs that there is no rescue. It is a cry that fears that God has left the building.

Has God abandoned Jesus to carry the weight of the world all by himself? Or, is Jesus crying out on behalf of Israel and all of the world, identifying himself with universal suffering, and taking that pain to his heavenly Father who, rather than abandoning Jesus, is experiencing the fullness of his pain within God’s self?

And when Jesus breathes his last, does God exhale too?

A Good Friday Reflection on Death

Why does anyone have to die?

The obvious answer is that all people must ultimately die. The joyful celebration of birth is always shadowed by the grim reality of death. For every new human life that appears, a corresponding grave will be dug. The end of life is a surety, and it is guaranteed that each will have a trajectory of its own.

But the general and abstract acceptance of death is not what really troubles us. It is the death of someone who matters, someone we have come to love and value. It is the death of a cherished person that tears at our hearts and causes us to ask,
Why this one? Does this death mean something?

We look for meaning in death because we have a difficult time believing that death just happens. We project intentions and purposes onto God in order to explain why our loved one left us too soon, why thousands were swept away by natural disasters, why a person who has contributed generously to others would suffer a wasting disease and then disappear from our midst. We look for answers when we experience these losses, and the rationales offered by well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) people do not generally bring comfort.

It is common for people of faith to attempt theological responses to these questions. Some of these answers suggest things about God that might cause us to wonder if this God is different than Jesus described as the one “who so loved the world” (John 3:16), or as the one characterized in First John as the very essence of love (1 John 4:7-8). We sometimes hear of a God who allows a beloved child to die so that the family will learn some important lessons, or that the death of thousands by tsunami or earthquake is a result of God’s retributive wrath, or that God has in mind a greater good that requires the taking of a human life. These responses are often the product of a narrative that is unable to tolerate mystery or to accept the randomness of evil and suffering.

In Luke chapter 13 there is a scene involving some people who ask Jesus about the deaths of some local Jews—one violent episode that occurred at the hands of the local Roman governor, and another tragic accident involving the collapse of a tower. Jesus’ response suggests that his questioners were looking for the meaning behind the tragedies:

He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? . . . Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:2-4)

Jesus refuses to assign to these losses the deeper meaning that his questioners desire. He merely tells them, in effect, that they too should watch their steps.

It is difficult for us to imagine that the God of the Bible—the God who is filled with love and mission and purpose—would allow anything to occur without reason. After all, either God is in control or he is not. All things must have meaning, otherwise we would be living in a random, chaotic universe, and our lives—lives that we have come to believe are precious to God—are subject to forces that are not God. We have trouble with this, and so we should. Rarely can we get away from the conviction that the cause of something has to be related to its meaning.

That people will one day die is a scientific certainty that we can affirm. It is the art that confounds us—in the deaths that matter to us, there has to be some kind of meaning.

There is a theme that the Bible appears to embrace: We humans live in a dangerous, broken world. The desire of God—that all of creation would live in open, unhindered relationship with him—has been countered by humanity’s preference for other things. By our own devices we have opened ourselves to all that the forces of the universe can deliver: Natural disasters, hostile environs, the horrors of human sin, the fear of death. In the end we find only the conviction that this state of affairs is not as it should be. There is clearly something wrong with the world.

When it comes to Jesus, the question of his death has fueled theological debates for centuries. The death of one so important, one so pivotal in our perception of human history, cannot easily be explained away as another random and tragic occurrence, especially since there is resurrection to follow. We long for reasons and our reasons craft our theologies about what it means to find the new life that we believe defines us as the people of God. What we conclude about this particular death matters because it speaks significantly about how we see the character of God, his mission in the world, and his destiny for the human race and all of creation.

Holy Week is a time when we reimagine the story in fresh and new ways and rehearse it within our ancient traditions. My hope is that we would continue to wonder and marvel at this great mystery that we have come to call The Atonement, seeing it not merely as a theological concept but also as a living reality that defies our categories and unravels our attempts at simplification. It is also a story that must continue to be told.

(This is an excerpt from Atonement at Ground Zero: Revisiting the Epicenter of Faith, to be released in late 2012 (Wipf and Stock Publishers)

Stumbling Toward the Cross

As we draw nearer to Holy Week, I am sharing another excerpt from my book Atonement at Ground Zero: Revisiting the Epicenter of Salvation (to released in the Spring 2012).

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It should be no mystery that human beings are drawn to the idea of atonement. After all, it would be the rare person who would not agree that there is something wrong with the world and, by association, with all people. As Christian thinkers throughout the ages have wrestled with atonement theory, the looming realities of evil, guilt, and shame have demanded their attention. Various cultures have sought to appease their deities with sacrifices and rituals; Christians have tried to understand how it is that Jesus takes care of everything for us. In this book I have tried to explore that understanding primarily through the experiences of those present at or near the time of Jesus’ death.

None of those present at the ground zero of Jesus’ crucifixion would have divorced him from the life that led to the cross. His death was not an isolated theological event but rather an explosive, mind-numbing experience that translated quickly into joy, hope, and mission. Even those who did not know Jesus before the crucifixion—such as many among the gathered crowds and the executioners—would have seen a real, live human being dragged to the cross and nailed down like a wind-blown shutter. For all present, Jesus’ death was tied intimately to his life.

During a class session in systematic theology, my seminary professor—a man not shy about stirring up controversy—asked the question, “If, in the garden of Gethsemane, under the great stress of anticipating his impending arrest and crucifixion, Jesus died of a heart attack, would he have died for our sins?” I didn’t immediately know how to answer his question, but I expected a lively and spirited class discussion to explode any second. I was not disappointed.

My professor was not attempting to disparage the reality of the cross. Rather, he was attempting to get us to think about the implications of the incarnation. If, indeed, in Jesus the fullness of God dwelt (Col 1:19); if, indeed, Jesus is the Word made flesh (John 1:14), then God has done something in and through the entirety of Jesus’ existence on earth that defies complete and full comprehension. The cross is not God’s cosmic gamble, his hope-against-hope that Jesus doesn’t miss his opportunity for crucifixion; the cross is the penultimate event in the life of the one who became “. . . like his brothers and sisters in every respect” (Heb 2:17a), yet an event that was ultimately turned on its head by Jesus’ resurrection.

While the separating of Jesus’ crucifixion from the full story of his preceding life and subsequent resurrection is faulty theology, it would be no less faulty to treat his death as an event that was incidental because of its human inevitability. We are helped when we remember that we are not asked to come to grips with the man Jesus who is sacrificed by God for the purpose of God’s satisfaction, but rather with the Son . . . “whom [God] appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Heb 1:2b-3a).

Atonement theory stumbles when it separates the Father from the Son and pits them against each other in a tragic and violent relationship of appeasement. When the Son becomes a perfect, sacrificial other who brings satisfaction to the transcendent God who demands such a requirement, then our understanding of the depth of relationship that is shared by the Father and Son suffers from abuse. While the relationship of the eternal Father to the suffering and dying Son raises questions about the nature of God, creating a chasm between the Father and Son that is bridged only by the Son’s death is a solution grounded more in the concept of blind western justice than in the doctrine of the Trinity.