SUNDAY 20 MARCH 2005 : Palm Sunday / Passion Sunday
Matthew 21: 1-11; Philippians 2: 5-11; Matthew 27: 11-54
It was almost 40 years ago that I was first really faced with trying to make sense of the death of Jesus. It was during one of those long, rambling, late night / early morning conversations the young are capable of having when the rest of us want to be comfortably tucked up in bed. I can’t remember what else we covered in that ‘meaning of life, death and the universe’ conversation but I do remember my flatmate wondering aloud, “Why did Jesus have to die?” I can only vaguely recall my response, and I can also recall my discomfort at the question and my response. I can recall thinking that I knew what I should say, and I can recall that my response wasn’t what I believed I ought to be saying. I can remember feeling rather uncomfortable about that.
What I think I felt I ought to have said was that Jesus had to die in order that we might be saved. The trouble was, I didn’t quite know what that meant. I knew it seemed to be the primary emphasis of most of the hymns that were sung around this time of the year, but somehow even then I didn’t find that particularly convincing. Saved from or for what somehow hadn’t ever been made clear to me. A succession of Sunday school teachers and Bible class leaders not to mention the preaching of three successive ministers didn’t seem to have clarified that issue for me. I find myself wondering now if it was because they didn’t find it particularly plausible either, or perhaps I hadn’t listened clearly or was even then resistant to the notion of needing to be ‘saved’.
So I think I answered my friend something along the lines that Jesus was crucified not because he had to be, but because the authorities had to do it to get rid of him. It was, after all, the second half of the nineteen-sixties, and we had all kinds of romantic notions about Jesus as a revolutionary hero. Prominent on one of the walls of our flat was a poster, “Wanted – Jesus of Nazareth, Dead or Alive”, with a picture of Jesus looking like Che Guevara with a halo. I think I had begun to pick up such notions about Jesus not so much from the preaching and teaching at my home church as from discussions and studies in the Student Christian Movement.
It’s an interesting question, that – “Why did Jesus have to die?” It is a rather different question from “Why did Jesus die?” The “have to” introduces a note of something inevitable, something planned or preordained. And, off course, that has been the dominant theology for the past thousand years or so. A colleague ten or so years ago in an address asked the question about Jesus having to die in another way – he asked, “Did he jump, or was he pushed?”(1) Someone else poses the question, “Jesus - sacrificial lamb or political scapegoat?”(2)
The basic Christian myth that gets re-expressed from Palm Sunday, through Passion Week and on into Good Friday is that Jesus jumped. He was, and he knew he was, and he accepted that he was the sacrificial lamb. Jesus chose to go to Jerusalem, chose to ride into the city in such a provocative fashion, and was arrested and died because God’s plan was that he had to die in order for something very important to happen. Further on in Jesus Christ, Superstar, from which the Palm Sunday “Hosanna Heysanna” that we sung earlier this morning comes, there is a powerful scene of Jesus wrestling with his awareness of impending arrest and death saying to God that he would accept God’s will, and would follow through what had been started.
As we begin Holy Week and approach Good Friday, it is inevitable that someone is going to ask the “why” question again. Many of us ask it because the answer we were given in the past is just no longer plausible. Jesus died, it says, as the ‘sacrifice for our sins’. It sees Jesus’ death within a developed theology about humankind’s essential sinfulness, guilt, and need for forgiveness. Because we have all sinned against God and are guilty, our sins can only be forgiven if an adequate sacrifice is made. God provides the only acceptable (to God) sacrifice in the form of the perfect human being, Jesus. Because Jesus died, forgiveness is now possible – with the proviso that forgiveness is only possible for those who believe that Jesus died for our sins.
This is all a rather strange theology. It implies a limitation on God’s power – that is, God can forgive, firstly only if an adequate sacrifice is made, and secondly only if the sinner knows about and believes in Jesus and his sacrificial death. To my mind it creates a rather repugnant image of God as one who requires the blood of an innocent man to be spilled, an innocent man, moreover, who is claimed to be his own Son. It also creates a distorted image of God whose forgiveness is conditional – if you believe this, then God can do that.
This is not an understanding of God many find plausible. Apart from anything else, it relies on the old understanding of an original perfect man and perfect woman who disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, and so their descendants, humankind, are for all time stained with sin which can only be removed through the death of Jesus and believing in the ‘saving’, ‘cleansing’ power of that death. We know, because we are post-Darwinian people, that in fact there was no original perfect couple who fell from grace in Eden. Rather, we recognise that there was a slow evolution of human beings physically, morally and spiritually over tens of thousands of years, and that this continues as human beings, like the planet and like the universe, continue to grow and emerge into something more full and complete. We are incomplete – the evil we do, our moral failures, are not the outcome of some mythical original sin, but rather are the outcome of our evolutionary struggle for survival and our as yet incompleteness.
Not only is the traditional dominant understanding of the death of Jesus implausible and unacceptable to many because of how it ends up depicting God, it is implausible and unacceptable because it doesn’t explain things in terms of how we know things really are. That is, it presents Jesus’ death on the cross as necessary because it was part of God’s plan of salvation, rather than the much more plausible explanation that it was the consequence of what Jesus was doing. It also skirts the simple fact, not that Jesus died on the cross, which is a rather soft statement, but that Jesus was killed. He didn’t simply die, like you and I will die; he was executed. This is one of those simple facts that everybody knows, but whose significance is often overlooked because of the dominant ‘religious’ interpretation of his death.
We as Christians participate in the only major religious tradition whose founder was executed by an established authority. If we ask the question, “Why was he killed?” the historical answer is he was killed because of who he was and what he did. He was killed because of his politics. He was killed not because he was a deeply spiritual man, a mystic, nor because he was a healer, nor because he was a wisdom teacher. Those things were not enough to get a person killed, even in first century Israel. He was killed because he was a social prophet in the tradition of Micah and Hosea and Jeremiah, who condemned the gross inequalities and inequities perpetuated by temple religion and the vicious, impoverishing and dehumanising policies of the occupying power and its client rulers, the descendants of Herod the Great. He was killed because people caught on to his social vision, and he attracted a following. He was killed because he was dangerous and threatened the status quo. He was killed – probably inevitably – because of his single-minded passion for God’s justice; but not inevitably because God had preordained it so in order to ‘save’ humankind.
In the decades after Good Friday and Easter, the early Christian movement preserved the memory of Jesus’ execution. It also saw additional meanings in his death, and several interpretations of the death are found in the New Testament. The passage from the Letter to the Philippians was one such interpretation. Scholars believe Paul was actually quoting words from a very early hymn or liturgical affirmation. It doesn’t claim anything about the execution of Jesus ‘saving’ people. It does claim that having followed through on the consequences of who he was and what he did, the execution of Jesus was a rejection of him by the religious and political authorities. But where the authorities said “no” to Jesus, God said “yes” – who Jesus was and what he did was a disclosure of God’s purposes. God affirmed that – in the language of the hymn – when God “highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name.” What the authorities rejected, God vindicated, and so Jesus is given the highest title of all – “Lord”, a title used both of God by the Jews and of the Emperor by the Romans.
Why did Jesus have to die? The majority of mainline biblical scholarship does not think that the interpretation that Jesus “died for our sins” goes back to Jesus himself. Jesus did not think that the purpose of his life was his death. His life purpose was what he was doing as a healer, as a wisdom teacher, social prophet and movement initiator. His death was the consequence of his purpose, but it was not his purpose. To use recent analogies, the deaths of Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr were the consequences of what they were doing, but not their purpose. Like them, Jesus courageously kept doing what he was doing – including, if there is a kernel of truth in the narratives, provocatively and prophetically riding into Jerusalem on a donkey – even though he knew that it could have the fatal consequences that it turned out to have.
And so, following this sermon, we will not sing one of the traditional hymns associated with Passiontide, ones which speak of Jesus’ death for our salvation. Rather, we will sing a contemporary hymn which pleads the cause of those who suffer torture and worse as a consequence of their political, social or religious viewpoints. And it pleads the cause of those people before the one who was killed as a consequence of his commitment to God’s justice, and who Christian tradition confidently claims was vindicated by God and is the one who challenges and inspires and empowers us to live boldly as he did he.
God of freedom, God of justice, / you whose love is strong as death, / you who saw the dark of prison, / you who knew the price of faith -/ touch our world of sad oppression / with your Spirit's healing breath.
Rid the earth of torture's terror, / you whose hands were nailed to wood, / hear the cries of pain and protest, / you who shed the tears and blood: / move in us the power of pity, / restless for the common good.
Make in us a captive conscience / quick to hear, to act, to plead, / make us truly sisters, brothers, / of whatever race or creed - / teach us to be fully human, / open to each other's need.
© Shirley Murray
(1) Rev Dr David Bromell in an unpublished address at St Lukes c1997
(2) I know I read this recently - but can't
find the reference