It is so hard to believe that it is Good Friday.  I am a pastor and I feel rested and energized.  Good Friday has traditionally been a day for us to look deeply into the suffering and death of Jesus and see our part in putting Jesus on the cross.  The feeling of deep emotional guilt which used to comfort me, in some strange way, as I beat my chest and made promises that I would do better, is gone.

I have no desire to lift up the gruesomeness of the death of Jesus but instead want to share the amazingness of his life.  I remember when my uncle Pat died and I went to the funeral.   Person after person got up and shared a story of how Uncle Pat had changed their life.  We laughed and cried and left feeling emotionally wrung out.  We did not focus on how he died but why he lived.  It was the best way possible to remember my uncle Pat.

Likewise I would like us to celebrate this day, as Mel Gibson puts it, the passion of the Christ, as what Jesus was passionate about.   What if Good Friday were more like a really great funeral than a display of how violently he was murdered. I guess we have been told that we need a violent gruesome death to show how much Christ was willing to endure on our behalf in order to muster up enough guilt that we will try to do better.  This just doesn’t work for me anymore. 

In 1098 a book was written by Anselm of Canterbury, a prominent bishop of the church.  The book was entitled, “Cur Deus Homo?” (Why the God Man) and set out to answer the question of why Jesus had to die. He posed the theory that God is like a Feudal King.   In order to maintain dominance and order of His subjects, He must deal very seriously with any insubordination (sin) lest his good name be threatened.  If someone committed an act against the Feudal Lord they must be put to death as a deterrence of others getting the same idea.  Anselm painted God with this brush and coalesced the similar thinking of other theologians into a formula that answered the question of, Why did Jesus have to die?  Their answer was to pay the debt to God for our sin that we could not afford.  So Jesus died on our behalf to save us from the consequence of our sin.  To reinforce this they told us that our eternal destiny hung in the balance as the reward or punishment for believing this. 

According to this formula, God does not forgive sin. Instead the debt is satisfied by the substitutionary (in our place) death of Jesus.  If the debt is satisfied, in theory it can’t be forgiven.  You don’t finish paying off your mortgage and then the bank calls and says, We have decided to forgive your loan, tell your friends.”  I believe God forgives us because God loves us.

So why then did Jesus die?  I believe that He spoke truth to power.  He upset the status quo of some powerful people and they killed him.  It is not his death that inspires me but that death is not the end.  Even if you don’t believe Jesus was ever raised by God from death, his truth that love is more powerful than hate, has lived on in the lives of those who follow him.

This may be a new way of looking at this and a lot to take in.  It was for me the first time I heard it.  Feel free to disagree.  You would be safely within Christian orthodoxy.  I am not interested in a debate and I won’t try to change your mind.  

Tim Tahtinen