Dearly Beloved,
We don't talk a lot about sin in mainline protestant Christianity. It makes us pretty uncomfortable a lot of the time. And some of us who have come from other traditions may have experienced religious abuse around the way in which sin was talked about -- so we may feel inclined to avoid the topic.
I like the idea of sin as separation -- when we sin, we separate ourselves from God, from love, from our truest and most authentic selves, from our connection with others and creation. I experience sin in my life. And by that, I mean that I sin. I make choices that distance me from the holy in me and the holy all around me. I cause harm. I do damage. I behave in ways that are selfish and destructive.
One of the things I love about Good Friday is the opportunity to lament my sin. And to lament the collective, systemic, corporate sin in which I participate daily, largely through convenience, sometimes through complicity and carelessness, and sometimes intentionally and by my own active choice. I lament that the harm that I cause is akin to hammering the nails into Christ's hands....
And somehow God still loves me (and you! and all of us!). Somehow Christ still offers the grace of: "they know not what they do" (or to make it more personal: "she knows not what she does"). And I am in good company -- the company of the disciples for sure: Judas who betrays, Peter who denies, Thomas (later) who doubts, all of them who run away and hide. We are in good company.
We are also in the company of other saints and sinners alike. I encourage you to take a look at this Good Friday reflection on Jesus' last words that is a collaboration by Scott Erickson (whose cross image is attached) and Rev. Nadia Bolz Weber. Included are powerful quotes from incarcerated men in response to the 7 last word images created by Erickson.
And here is Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney's Good Friday reflection:
Friday: Horror
The horror of the crucifixion is the horror of torture and execution cast in politically expedient and theological terms. Sometimes it seems as if the glory of the incarnation has blinded us to the horror of the crucifixion. Too many of our theologies and preaching focus on the specialness of Jesus as the child of God, as God in warm brown human skin, as the innocent recipient of this brutality, making it in the words of Phyllis Tribble, “an extravagance of violence.”* What we seem to be saying is that this atrocity is atrocious because it was Jesus or especially because it was Jesus. And he was innocent, blameless, sinless.
The horror is human beings using a choreographed lynching spectacle of death to further political, personal, fiscal, religious, corporate and national ends. Seizing the prerogative of God to measure the span of a human life for themselves and wielding it as a weapon. And continuing to do so. The day Jesus was crucified was just one Friday in that month. He was just one of dozens or hundreds that month and hundreds or thousands that year. Someone else, some other mother’s son or daughter could have been crucified the very next day. (Though not a Jewish one lest there be a riot.) There would be a next and, a next. That is the horror of the crucifixion, the horror of human beings using pain and humiliation and torture and death as weapons of statecraft and theology.
And that horror endures. The murder of Jesus framed in sacrificial terms is paired with the murder of the daughter of Jephthah (Judg 11:1–12:7) — not given the dignity of a name – also framed in sacrificial terms. They are equally grotesque as is theology that equates God with Jephthah, butchering his son for a religious sacrifice. At the end of the day, these mother’s children are dead. Their lifeless bodies profaned and savaged by the weapons of warfare and policing. These families are going home without their children and, with sights and sounds and that they can never erase from their memories.
*She uses those words as an epitaph for the Levite’s butchered wife in judges 19.
