A Good Friday Homily preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka
“I came into the world,” Jesus said, “to testify to the truth.” And Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” For centuries, Christians have attempted to answer this question, specifically, “What is the truth to which Jesus came into this world to testify? What is the truth that Jesus sought to reveal in his life and teachings and especially, in his death on the cross?” In theological terms, attempts to explain the truth and the meaning and the efficacy of the cross are called “theories of atonement.”
Today, the most popular theory of atonement in Western Christianity is one articulated by St. Anselm, the saint whom we will celebrate here at Christ Church on April 20th. He was the Archbishop of Canterbury way back in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and he argued that Christ came to reveal the truth that we have all offended God’s honor because of our sin and, since God is a God of justice, someone must pay the debt that we have accrued as a result of this offense. And because God’s honor is infinite our debt is infinite as well. So in order to pay this infinite debt, God sent his beloved Son Jesus Christ to bear the brunt of the punishment so that we can enjoy his forgiveness. Anselm’s theory of atonement has become the dominant understanding of the Cross among evangelicals, who often insist that believing this particular theory is absolutely necessary for salvation. Although Anselm is a brilliant theologian and one of my favorite saints, there are many problems with this theory. The main problem is that it makes God the Father into a cruel judge and actually turns the Father and Son relationship of the Trinity into one of sado-masochism, in which the sadistic and abusive Father brutally punishes his masochistic Son for something that is not even his fault. Fortunately, John’s Gospel offers a very different understanding of the Cross…
After witnessing blood and water flow out of Christ’s pierced side, the narrator of the Gospel first wants to make sure the reader knows that this really happened. He says, “He who saw this has testified so that you may also believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.” This is obviously very important for the author, who then interprets the meaning of Christ’s pierced side in light of the Hebrew Scriptures, quoting a part of Zechariah 12:10 “They will look on the one whom they have pierced.” The first century readers of this Gospel would have known the rest of this verse from Zechariah, which reads, “And I will pour out a spirit of compassion so that when they look on the one whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.”
Right before Jesus is pierced in the side, the text says that he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. The Greek, however, can also be translated as, “He bowed his head and gave up the spirit.” By referencing Zechariah in this context, the author of John suggests that Jesus is pouring out the spirit of compassion promised in Zechariah while he is dying on the cross so that those who look on him will have compassion on this innocent victim of religious and political violence. However, this holy spirit of compassion does not stop there. The spirit arouses sympathy not only for Christ but for all victims of oppression today, in whom Christ continues to suffer. The spirit stirs up compassion within us for all those who are hurting and suffering, for those who are being slowly crucified by a system that keeps them malnourished, abused, terrorized, vulnerable to gun violence, homeless and forgotten.
According to the Gospel of John, Jesus dies on the cross to reveal that God is not a violent and bloodthirsty deity. Jesus dies so that we can see God among the victims of our world and to begin to see the ways in which we ourselves (and the system in which we live) are, in fact, the violent and bloodthirsty deity. In other words, “We have met the violent, bloodthirsty god and he is us.” This is the truth for which Jesus was born, for which he came into this world to testify: that God is not a God of violence and wrath but a God of compassion. And the Cross of Christ is God’s invitation for us to have compassion, to “be compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate” (Luke 6:36). The cross of Christ is an invitation to wonder in what ways are we ourselves supporting or benefiting from religious and political violence, an invitation to ask, “Who are the people in our lives that we falsely accuse, blame and mistreat? Who are the people in our lives that we cruelly dismiss and reject? On whom is God calling us to have compassion today?”
During the time of St. Anselm, another theologian named Peter Abelard understood this truth of the cross. He saw the cross as a call to compassion and an invitation to see Christ among all those who are suffering. Peter Abelard wrote a hymn titled (“Alone thou goest forth, O Lord”), in which he prays in the last verse, “Tu tibi compati sic fac nos, Domine” which has been translated as “Give us compassion for thee, Lord.”[1] This is the prayer that the truth of the cross invokes in us. Give us compassion for thee, Lord, so that we may learn to have compassion on one another, so that we may recognize and repent of the ways in which we continue to cry out “Crucify him!” Give us compassion for thee, Lord, so that we may have compassion on ourselves because sometimes we are our own worst enemies and our own worst victims. Give us compassion for thee, Lord, because it is your holy spirit of compassion that will sustain us as it sustained Christ, even through death, and it is your holy spirit of compassion that eventually leads us to life beyond the grave.
[1] Francis Bland Tucker (1895 – 1984)
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 