Friday of the Fourth Week in Lent

Today's Mass Readings

Sometimes I ask my theology students the question, “Why did Jesus have to die? After all, wasn’t he just a really nice guy who went around healing people? Wasn’t he just about loving people? Isn’t he just a great moral teacher or very good example of how we live our lives? Why did Jesus have to die?” Then my students have to sit and consider for a moment. Is a person or group of persons usually moved to rage to kill someone just because they’re “nice”? If he has a good “moral message” is that enough reason for mobs to hate him? After all, I say, there were other people roaming around the world then proclaiming good messages like “love your neighbor”, but they didn’t get killed!

No, I suggest to my students. Jesus may indeed be all of these: a loving person with a good message and a desire to heal people. But what do WE mean by all those things? WE mean someone who is gentle, kind, perhaps even tolerant. Today’s readings push us to think about what God means by those things.

Today’s first reading (Wisdom 2:1a, 12-22) is a prophetic statement about who this Messiah, Jesus, will be – and how people will be able to identify him. He will not be the nice, smiling, helpful guy. Instead he will be “obnoxious” – he will always be saying that we’re doing the wrong thing, that we don’t know what we’re doing, that in fact, what we think is the “right” thing to do is a “violation of our training”. His life will be different from ours – notably different. He will always find fault and will always present an alternative to our way of living. Who wants to be around someone who always nitpicks and finds everything to be wrong while being what we might call a “show-off” himself? And so, we will hate him.

And so it is: Jesus roams around the country speaking in sometimes unintelligible parables, preaching against the so-called “good” practitioners of the faith – the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees. They know he is somehow speaking against them. How dare he! He practices a way of non-violent resistance against Roman authority that goes against the sentiment of many Jews - that there ought to be an army raised up against those Roman oppressors. But instead, he raises up no army, and offers no resistance when they come to arrest him. He looks out for the weak and the poor – the ones that they tried to avoid because they were impure.

I suspect Jesus’ strange way of life back then would be equally strange to us today. Why does Jesus have to die? Because he is always showing us a different way – one that is radically distinctive from the “way things are” in our own perception. We, no less than they, are prone to seeing ourselves as the “good ones”; we, no less than they, see that might makes right; we, no less than they, tend to avoid those who walk, talk, act differently.

And so the gospel foreshadows for us what we know is inevitable. Jesus will be killed, not because he was “nice” but because he meant business. God is, indeed, doing something new in the world, and it is radically different. This Lent, will we take the opportunity to be radically changed ourselves, as a result?

- Jana M. Bennett