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April 2, 2010, GOOD FRIDAY, All Souls' Episcopal Church

 Then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God. (Hebrews 10:9)

     We pay attention when someone we love is about to die. As we remain with them during the last few hours and minutes of their earthly life we tend to take note and remember vividly what it was they did and said up until and including the time of death. That devotion to detail is evident in the accounts of the death of our Lord Jesus. The passion narratives are long readings precisely because the writers would leave nothing out, seeing every detail as laden with meaning, every moment precious. We are told that he was made to bear the very instrument of his execution – his cross - uphill to the place where we killed him, and so he carries the cross just as surely as he has bourn our grief and carried our sorrows. We are told as well that before he was made to carry his cross we tortured him.

      The horrible, painful, flogging with a whip must have done extreme damage to his body, and especially his back, and yet, strictly speaking, that wasn’t torture; that was a form of corporal punishment which Pilate ordered thinking it might placate the angry mob, but that was to no avail because we would settle for nothing but death; only his death would bring us, the angry mob, satisfaction.

      The torture consisted in the mocking, covering his head so he could not see and then hitting him and saying: “Tell us, prophet, who hit you?” The torture also consisted of dressing him up in kingly robes of royal purple, slapping a crown of thorns on his head, and making fun of him by bowing to him and calling him a king, and spitting on him before leaving him naked and exposed. According to a manual on the subject:   

 The purpose of all torture is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioral level. As the subject regresses, his learned personality traits fall away in reverse chronological order. Psychologically, torture often creates a state where the mind works against the best interests of the individual, due to the inducement of such emotions as shame, worthlessness, and dependency. A person's sense of self can be shattered. The tortured often have nothing familiar to hold on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones, language. Torture can rob the subject of the most basic modes of relating to reality, and thus can be the equivalent of cognitive death.

       They were trained to kill his body and his spirit as well, but they had never tortured anyone like Jesus; never tried to induce feelings of shame, worthlessness, and dependency in someone who just hours earlier had literally divested himself of all signs of authority, knelt down as the lowliest slave, and washed the feet of his disciples. How can you peel away the sense of autonomy of one who is one with God? They could not reduce to cognitive death one who said, “No one takes my life from me; I lay it down,” and “Not my will but thine be done.”

      After all this; after the whipping, after the torture, after the exhausting ascent under the weight of the cross, after nails tearing through flesh, his first words are words of forgiveness. His first words are those of an intercessor, praying for the very ones who were doing all this to him. His first words tell us what this is all about; what all this is for: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” Forgiveness does not presume justice but justice presumes forgiveness.

      Forgiveness presumes only love, a love which seeks to overcome duality and achieve a more perfect union which is relational; fusion without confusion. We sometimes tell ourselves forgiveness is conditional but that is only because we have no intention of forgiving in the first place. Forgiveness does not presume justice, but justice always presumes forgiveness. Justice is concerned with more than mere crime and punishment; it aims for the union of rightly ordered communion and therefore presumes what the Orthodox author, Thomas Hopko, calls the forgiveness which says we will carry on in a spirit of love living in communion one with another, not allowing what was done in the past to poison our future together.

      There are a number of metaphors which illustrate how the sacrifice of Christ brings about reconciliation and fulfills all justice. The Bible speaks of Christ’s death as the great atonement sacrifice in which the perfect lamb is perfectly offered once and for all by the perfect high priest. Scripture speaks as well of Christ’s death as a ransom paid for us. We are also told that Christ Jesus is the new Adam, the new man ushering in a new creation of which he himself is the first early harvest. We are told as well that Christ Jesus paid the price for our sins. St. Paul writes: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” St. Peter writes that “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” This is what we refer to in the Prayer of Consecration when we speak of a “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction.” I would like to focus upon these last two metaphors.

      St. Paul calls our Lord Jesus “the new Adam, or, “the new man.” The early Church Fathers thought deeply about how Christ, the new Adam, in contrast to the old Adam, lived his life in perfect obedience and union with God. The theologian we most associate with expounding upon all this is Peter Abelard, a twelfth century philosopher. It is sometimes called “the exemplary theory of atonement.” We see this understanding in the Prayer Book Collect for Palm Sunday in which we thank the God who “sent our Savior Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility.” The Epistle lesson which then follows is from the second chapter of Philippians in which we are told of how Christ Jesus took upon him “the form of a servant and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross,” with the admonition, “Let this mind be in you.” The old Adam, or “the old man” was created on the sixth day of the week, a Friday. The old Adam disobeyed God in the garden. It was very early on a Friday when our Lord Jesus, the new Adam, was in a garden where he was perfectly obedient, praying in agony and bloody sweat, “not my will, but thine be done.” The disobedience of the old Adam led him to the tree. The obedience of our new Adam led him to the “tree of the cross.” His was a perfect human life, perfectly lived and perfectly offered.

      The teaching that our Lord Jesus Christ paid the price of our sins and suffered and died on our behalf was best summed up and explained by St. Anselm, the Eleventh Century theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury. This view teaches us that sin incurs a debt which must be paid. Only someone who had not sinned and therefore was not in debt could pay that debt on our behalf. This understanding assumes justice.

      If I defrauded someone or destroyed someone’s property I would be hugely relieved and grateful if they just waved it off and said, “It’s okay; it’s covered.” And yet, I would still want to pay things back somehow, to make restitution. I wouldn’t feel complete and whole otherwise. It would give me a sense of satisfaction.

      The understanding of the atonement which Anselm helped us comprehend argues that the long, moral arc of the universe not only bends toward justice but cries out for it as well. The Law as it is understood in the Bible does not consist merely of a list of rules written on parchment. It acknowledges that as there is for every action in the physical world an equal and opposite reaction, so something similar exists in the spiritual realm, and that any action or attitude is of a sinful nature which is not based upon the loving kindness of God, which does not flow from the spirit of the love of God, which is not reflective of the wholeness which lies beyond opposites. This understanding of the atonement does not present a picture of God simply waving off our offense. Nor does this present a picture of God filling in for us; doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. God loves us more than that. Instead, God sends us the perfect man who can offer the perfect sacrifice for his fellow human beings for all of time. He is one of us. Jesus is one of us. He is our friend. He is our brother. He is our own flesh and blood. That is his mother over there by the cross weeping, doubled over in grief as if a sword is piercing her very soul. He is one of us. He is her son. He is one of us. That’s who God sends to deliver us. He sends us one of us because he loves us so much.

      Our Lord Jesus can make the perfect offering for us once and for all of time because his human nature had perfect integrity; it was fully and completely whole. He didn’t owe anything to anybody. He hadn’t defrauded anyone. He was in no one’s debt. When he began his public ministry following his baptism he resisted every temptation to allow anything, even the whole world, to come between God and him. There is no part of our Lord’s life which he would look back on and say, “Oh, I hope they don’t find out about that.” Instead, he is able to make the perfect offering precisely because he is exemplary. (You can’t have Anselm without Abelard.) Our Lord Jesus had complete custody of his life. No one and no thing exercised control over him. He did not share joint custody with sin of any kind. He had complete custody and was therefore able to make a complete offering.

      Our perfect and eternal savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, has two natures. He has a human nature and a divine nature. His divine nature is the one undivided God. His divine nature is substantially the very God who demands justice be done. In our Lord Jesus Christ, “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” (Psalm 85)

      What we observe today is nothing less than what we proclaim at Christmas: that the light which shines in the darkness cannot be overcome. We observe today what St. Paul declared when he wrote that “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.” It has been said that to understand the church’s doctrine of the Holy Trinity is to understand that “God is Love.” It may also be said that to comprehend the Christian Faith amounts to understanding why we call this Friday ‘Good.’

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