Memorial of Saint Barnabas, Apostle
Jesus knows better than any of us that reconciliation is really hard. Jesus reconciled us to God by enduring torture and the worst kind of death that the Roman Empire could muster against its perceived enemies. It wasn’t just painful; it was meant to be humiliating and to serve as a warning to others who might dare to defy the order and the rules of the empire.
Christians tend, these days, to focus on how his death stood in for our judgment. That is, he was the perfect substitution that God required to satiate God’s need for judgment. This way of thinking about Jesus’ passion is called “substitutionary atonement.” But, there’s another way to read Jesus’ death on the cross. It’s less about debt or guilt or shame and more about God’s ridiculous, extreme, extravagant love for us.
So, God comes to Earth in the form of a human. That by itself is ridiculous. Why would a god do that? If you’re God, you know very well that you don’t want to be human. But he does it anyway. Then he preaches all sorts of stuff—like looking out especially for the poor, loving your enemy, turning the other cheek, being peacemakers—that gets him into big trouble not just with any old state, but with the Roman Empire! And then he suffers and dies . . . for us.
But what is his point? Is it that we all got a pass because “God’s perfect sacrifice took our place?” Maybe.
That other way of thinking about what Jesus did on the cross (and these two ways of reading aren’t mutually exclusive, by the way) is that God took onto himself the sin, violence, and guilt of the world. In allowing himself to be nailed to a cross he made the point: if God, of all “people,” returns the most unjust form of violence there could ever be (torturing and killing God would seem to be the one act that has no justification) with peace and reconciliation, maybe we should too. If what Jesus did on the cross reconciled us to God—that is, made us right with God—then what is there for us to fight about?
When we pray the “Our Father” we say something quite extraordinary: “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It’s my favorite phrase in the “Our Father.” This is reconciliation. And this is why people—white people and black people and brown people and civilians and generals and police officers (some of them, not all of them, of course) are taking a knee in the streets of our towns and cities today. We need to be reconciled to one another. And one way we do that is by saying what has been done to us, owning what we have done, and owning what we have not done.
If you haven’t watched Amish Grace, I hope you will. It’s a TV film that was released on Palm Sunday in 2010. The film is based on events that took place in October 2006 when an angry white man entered a one-room Amish school house and shot 8 out of the 10 girls in the room and killed 5 of them. What is so moving in the film is the response of the Amish (well documented by journalists at the time—many of whom thought the Amish response was nuts or worse). The Amish were determined to forgive Charles Carl Roberts IV (the killer) and make sure his wife (who had no idea what was going down) and family knew that the families and friends of those girls held no grudge. It was all excessive love and grace. Just like Jesus.
The Amish believe that if they don’t forgive others, they can’t hope for God to forgive them. And so, it turns out they are very serious about the “Our Father.”
So, what does this mean for us?
We have to tell the truth about our troubles in this nation. If we don’t then we’ll never get better. And we have to hold people (especially people in power) accountable. And, we have to figure out how to love one another—which along with truth telling and accountability also includes forgiveness. In short, we have to find a way to love even our enemies. It’s what Jesus teaches us. If we are going to claim his death for our salvation, then we have to live out his teachings too.
Amen.
- Sue Trollinger