The Violence of Good Friday

"See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. Just as there were many who were astonished at him--so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals--so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate." (Isaiah 52:13-15)

There is a part to Good Friday that has always troubled me.  On the surface of things, you have the execution of Jesus, in itself a gruesome event in a depraved situation. It wasn't a quick execution.  It was slow, painful, public, and morbidly humiliating. Why did the Romans have to do it that way? It was justice meeted out as spectacle.  Behold the power of the empire.

Dig a little deeper, and you get to the levels of meaning that the church gives to Jesus' death. As I studied theology to prepare to become a pastor, I struggled with the classic substitutionary atonement theory, which says that Jesus was the perfect life that was sacrificed to a voracious God, because sinful humanity couldn't pay that price for itself.  I grew to reject the idea of this unhappy God, who needed to be placated, satisfied with bloody justice.  I started to embrace fresh understandings of how Jesus' death was ultimately meaningful because it witnessed to the love of God for us, which was willing to sacrifice itself for our sakes, to show us the height and depth of that love.

But there is another level of Jesus' death that just won't go away.  What is it about Good Friday that continues to unsettle me?  Is it that the scene continues to play itself out?  Is it that we still must witness similar acts of bloody justice every day?  Is this what the church means when it says that Jesus continues to be crucified in our midst?  Or is it the way that violence continues to both repulse me and provoke me at the same time?  Why is one man's plight so riveting, and so repeatable?  Why does violence have to be so handy?  Why can't it be pushed farther to the margins of our human society?

I'm tired of violence. I'm tired of bloody justice, of human justice.  I'm tired of enforced rules, of retribution through control.  I'm tired of the violence of the state, and I'm tired of the violence of the enemies of the state. I'm tired of people being hounded for minor infractions.  I'm tired of people being sacrificed to perpetuate the revolution. I don't want our justice, or my justice. I want God's justice.  I want a just end to the need for justice.  I want God to come, expose it, and wipe it away.  I want kings to shut their mouths because of it.  I want Easter.