Many of you will recognize today’s reading as part of the Passion of Jesus. Have you ever wondered why we use that word? Outside of the church, passion usually refers to an intense, driving, or overarching feeling or conviction. For example, some might say that art, social justice, or just being a good father and husband are passions of mine.
We might talk about passion in relation to the church in terms of personal conviction or calling, but we don’t usually talk about the “other” form of passion. You know, the passion that fuels a more basic desire. If we do talk about it, it’s not usually from the pulpit and we are usually talking about lust and sins of that nature. I will say, though, that I recently heard a wedding sermon that was unpacking the four forms of love found in the New Testament (eros, phileo, storge, and agape). The pastor very deftly acknowledged the importance of all of these – including eros or erotic love – in covenant relationships and reminded us that there is a whole book of the Bible – Song of Solomon – devoted to the importance of healthy expressions of eros in covenant relationships.
That’s still pretty far removed from the Passion of Jesus, as far as we know. Truly, I have no idea how the word “passion” became so disconnected from the story of the suffering of Jesus because the root form of the word in Latin means “to suffer or to submit;” and the usage of this word originates with the story of Jesus. Maybe it is because we submit to our passions. Maybe it is because we tend to think that Jesus suffered for us and for those times when our passions got the best of us.
That may be an answer, but is it a good one? Did Jesus have to suffer? For that matter, last week I said that Jesus was being prepared as the pascal lamb. What exactly does that mean? So often we reduce the suffering of Jesus to a mathematical equation. You plus sin equals God’s rejection. You plus Jesus equals God’s acceptance. Likewise, we often reduce the Passion of Jesus to a transaction. We say that Jesus died to satisfy God’s anger. Jesus did this for you and for me. We say things like this to our children, and we dance around the weirdness of it because it is the tradition of our faith and it gives us comfort to say it and believe it and share it.
In fact, I would say that if you grew up in the church, those statements probably made sense to you. If you did not, you probably have some good questions to ask the church. Some of the questions that I hear from those who are either non-believers or who are questioning their faith as adults (whether they were raised in overbearing fundamentalist circles or lukewarm protestant churches) are about the rather large plotholes in the statements that I just made.
Plotholes like, why couldn’t God just forgive us without requiring Jesus to die? What kind of God requires infanticide in order to love? How is it that the church, and Christians in general, cannot see the way that they have been, and continue to be, more of an entrenched part of systems of power than a force for justice and mercy in the world?
These are good questions, and we should not be afraid of them. For starters, I want to go back to the question of the suffering and rejection of Jesus and see if we can find some connections. It has been argued through the years by scholars like John Howard Yoder that the death of Jesus was the natural consequence of the course of events in the life of Jesus. He spoke truth to the powerful, and those in power silenced him – or at least they thought that they had.
This does not mean that Jesus was just a revolutionary or that he was not acting in accordance with God’s will. It simply means that Jesus was a reformer, and systems of power always resist reform. Jesus knew that his actions would result in his death, and he even timed it so that his death would happen in just the right way and at the right time – but again, why?
Why does Christian tradition teach that God needed Jesus to die, and why did I say that Jesus was being prepared as the “Paschal Lamb?” The simplest answer – though hundreds of books and blogs and website sources are dedicated to explaining it in complex theological doctrine – is that God did not need it, but God knew that we did.
How do I know this? In Genesis 22, God commanded Abraham to offer his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice, because that is what gods did. In 22:12-13, God stayed his hand and provided a ram for the sacrifice, proving that the God of Abraham was not like other Gods. Sacrifices changed over the years, but the idea and practice of ritual sacrifice remained – especially in the Passover meal that celebrated God’s deliverance of God’s people from slavery in Egypt.
It’s no coincidence that the events of the Passion of Jesus take place during Passover because the rejection and crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus were the events that formed and re-formed God’s people once more. I say formed and re-formed because these were the events that opened the door to a new understanding of what it meant to be God’s people.
In the early church, maybe even the first thousand years of the church, followers of the way of Jesus did not really talk about the sacrificial love of Jesus as a gateway to heaven or a means of personal salvation in the way that we tend to talk about it in Western Christianity. In fact, this idea of paying a penalty for my actions or yours individually was not as heavily emphasized until the Protestant Reformation!
That’s not to say that it’s a bad idea or without merit in scripture. It is to say that oversimplifying the death of Jesus as a transaction between each of us and God doesn’t do much for us as a people and doesn’t lead us into any kind of understanding of the nature of sin and its connection to suffering. Not only that, but it wasn’t really the intention of Protestant Reformers to make faith into an expression of individualism so much as they wanted us to know about our individual responsibility as members of the household of God.
In other words, if all that matters is me and my Jesus, then I don’t have to think about my responsibility to you. If all that matters is my golden ticket to heaven, then I’ll never see the kingdom of God that is unfolding before us! If I believe that God’s love is transactional, what kind of love do you think I will expect to give to and receive from others?
As I said, there are libraries full of books on the question of God’s love and why Jesus needed to die in order for us to understand the depth of God’s love, but one thing that the Reformed tradition teaches us is to look to scripture and become open to the Holy Spirit above and beyond everything else. What we see in John’s gospel over and over, starting in chapter 1, is that Jesus has come as light in the darkness. With Nicodemus in chapter 3, we are told that all who love God come to the light and that the light of God exposes those who do not love God.
So it is that Jesus, in his time of trial, exposes the desire for power and the idolatry of the systems of power in the collusion of church and state. He knew what he was doing, and at this point in the conversation (chapter 19), he realizes that nothing he can say will change the events that are coming. It was not that resistance is futile so much as it was that his immediate resistance was only prolonging and avoiding the conflict that he came to resolve.
You may remember that the religious leaders had already traded Jesus for Barabas, who was essentially an insurgent against the governance of Rome. Now we hear that the soldiers are mocking him to the delight of those gathered with beatings and a crown of thorns and a purple cloth, but the real point of drama comes in vv7-8 when the Jewish authorities say that Jesus should die for claiming to be the Son of God, and Pilate becomes afraid.
Make no mistake. Pilate is not afraid of God. He’s afraid that there are enough people who think that Jesus is the son of God that he’s going to have a full-fledged revolt on his hands. That’s when he asks the question that Jesus has been trying to get people to understand throughout the whole book of John, “Where are you from.” but Jesus does not answer.
As followers of Jesus, we understand that Jesus is silent because actions speak louder than words. We understand that Jesus is silent because he knows that Pilate will not accept the answer and that it is time for him to demonstrate what it means to say that he is “from God.”
In the space of his silence, and with the words that follow, Jesus essentially gives Pilate permission, much like he gave Judas, to do what he must do. As the drama unfolds we see Pilate on a throne of Judgement attempting to offer a pardon that is not his to give because the crowd wants nothing of it. They want the satisfaction of the crucifixion of Jesus.
The crowd is essentially asking for a state-sanctioned execution by a method that is designed to keep them under the boot of Rome – a method designed to demonstrate that Rome had authority over their souls as well as their bodies. There is so much more to say about this than time allows – that Rome was actively involving the oppressed in their own oppression – but I want to go back to the silence of Jesus before Pilate.
I can’t help but wonder if the silence of Jesus does not connect to the plotholes that I mentioned earlier – these questions about God’s need for an atoning sacrifice and the limitations of transactional love. In some way, in that moment of silence, I think Jesus may have inhaled like an exasperated parent over the conditional love that was all around him. In some ways, I think that moment is a moment frozen in time. In some ways, I wonder if it is like the silence of the church in the face of our own participation in political collusion and hypocrisy. I can’t help but wonder if the silence of the church about a faith that has become more about individual salvation than proclaiming the kingdom of God is a space where we can draw a deep breath as we prepare to act in ways that speak louder than the words.
Beloved of God, as we come to the table today, let us remember that the sacrificial love of God is freely given without condition or merit. It is not about what you have done or left undone. It is about what God has done, is doing, and will complete even in and through me; even in and through you, and to God be the glory for that, now and always. Amen.
We might talk about passion in relation to the church in terms of personal conviction or calling, but we don’t usually talk about the “other” form of passion. You know, the passion that fuels a more basic desire. If we do talk about it, it’s not usually from the pulpit and we are usually talking about lust and sins of that nature. I will say, though, that I recently heard a wedding sermon that was unpacking the four forms of love found in the New Testament (eros, phileo, storge, and agape). The pastor very deftly acknowledged the importance of all of these – including eros or erotic love – in covenant relationships and reminded us that there is a whole book of the Bible – Song of Solomon – devoted to the importance of healthy expressions of eros in covenant relationships.
That’s still pretty far removed from the Passion of Jesus, as far as we know. Truly, I have no idea how the word “passion” became so disconnected from the story of the suffering of Jesus because the root form of the word in Latin means “to suffer or to submit;” and the usage of this word originates with the story of Jesus. Maybe it is because we submit to our passions. Maybe it is because we tend to think that Jesus suffered for us and for those times when our passions got the best of us.
That may be an answer, but is it a good one? Did Jesus have to suffer? For that matter, last week I said that Jesus was being prepared as the pascal lamb. What exactly does that mean? So often we reduce the suffering of Jesus to a mathematical equation. You plus sin equals God’s rejection. You plus Jesus equals God’s acceptance. Likewise, we often reduce the Passion of Jesus to a transaction. We say that Jesus died to satisfy God’s anger. Jesus did this for you and for me. We say things like this to our children, and we dance around the weirdness of it because it is the tradition of our faith and it gives us comfort to say it and believe it and share it.
In fact, I would say that if you grew up in the church, those statements probably made sense to you. If you did not, you probably have some good questions to ask the church. Some of the questions that I hear from those who are either non-believers or who are questioning their faith as adults (whether they were raised in overbearing fundamentalist circles or lukewarm protestant churches) are about the rather large plotholes in the statements that I just made.
Plotholes like, why couldn’t God just forgive us without requiring Jesus to die? What kind of God requires infanticide in order to love? How is it that the church, and Christians in general, cannot see the way that they have been, and continue to be, more of an entrenched part of systems of power than a force for justice and mercy in the world?
These are good questions, and we should not be afraid of them. For starters, I want to go back to the question of the suffering and rejection of Jesus and see if we can find some connections. It has been argued through the years by scholars like John Howard Yoder that the death of Jesus was the natural consequence of the course of events in the life of Jesus. He spoke truth to the powerful, and those in power silenced him – or at least they thought that they had.
This does not mean that Jesus was just a revolutionary or that he was not acting in accordance with God’s will. It simply means that Jesus was a reformer, and systems of power always resist reform. Jesus knew that his actions would result in his death, and he even timed it so that his death would happen in just the right way and at the right time – but again, why?
Why does Christian tradition teach that God needed Jesus to die, and why did I say that Jesus was being prepared as the “Paschal Lamb?” The simplest answer – though hundreds of books and blogs and website sources are dedicated to explaining it in complex theological doctrine – is that God did not need it, but God knew that we did.
How do I know this? In Genesis 22, God commanded Abraham to offer his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice, because that is what gods did. In 22:12-13, God stayed his hand and provided a ram for the sacrifice, proving that the God of Abraham was not like other Gods. Sacrifices changed over the years, but the idea and practice of ritual sacrifice remained – especially in the Passover meal that celebrated God’s deliverance of God’s people from slavery in Egypt.
It’s no coincidence that the events of the Passion of Jesus take place during Passover because the rejection and crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus were the events that formed and re-formed God’s people once more. I say formed and re-formed because these were the events that opened the door to a new understanding of what it meant to be God’s people.
In the early church, maybe even the first thousand years of the church, followers of the way of Jesus did not really talk about the sacrificial love of Jesus as a gateway to heaven or a means of personal salvation in the way that we tend to talk about it in Western Christianity. In fact, this idea of paying a penalty for my actions or yours individually was not as heavily emphasized until the Protestant Reformation!
That’s not to say that it’s a bad idea or without merit in scripture. It is to say that oversimplifying the death of Jesus as a transaction between each of us and God doesn’t do much for us as a people and doesn’t lead us into any kind of understanding of the nature of sin and its connection to suffering. Not only that, but it wasn’t really the intention of Protestant Reformers to make faith into an expression of individualism so much as they wanted us to know about our individual responsibility as members of the household of God.
In other words, if all that matters is me and my Jesus, then I don’t have to think about my responsibility to you. If all that matters is my golden ticket to heaven, then I’ll never see the kingdom of God that is unfolding before us! If I believe that God’s love is transactional, what kind of love do you think I will expect to give to and receive from others?
As I said, there are libraries full of books on the question of God’s love and why Jesus needed to die in order for us to understand the depth of God’s love, but one thing that the Reformed tradition teaches us is to look to scripture and become open to the Holy Spirit above and beyond everything else. What we see in John’s gospel over and over, starting in chapter 1, is that Jesus has come as light in the darkness. With Nicodemus in chapter 3, we are told that all who love God come to the light and that the light of God exposes those who do not love God.
So it is that Jesus, in his time of trial, exposes the desire for power and the idolatry of the systems of power in the collusion of church and state. He knew what he was doing, and at this point in the conversation (chapter 19), he realizes that nothing he can say will change the events that are coming. It was not that resistance is futile so much as it was that his immediate resistance was only prolonging and avoiding the conflict that he came to resolve.
You may remember that the religious leaders had already traded Jesus for Barabas, who was essentially an insurgent against the governance of Rome. Now we hear that the soldiers are mocking him to the delight of those gathered with beatings and a crown of thorns and a purple cloth, but the real point of drama comes in vv7-8 when the Jewish authorities say that Jesus should die for claiming to be the Son of God, and Pilate becomes afraid.
Make no mistake. Pilate is not afraid of God. He’s afraid that there are enough people who think that Jesus is the son of God that he’s going to have a full-fledged revolt on his hands. That’s when he asks the question that Jesus has been trying to get people to understand throughout the whole book of John, “Where are you from.” but Jesus does not answer.
As followers of Jesus, we understand that Jesus is silent because actions speak louder than words. We understand that Jesus is silent because he knows that Pilate will not accept the answer and that it is time for him to demonstrate what it means to say that he is “from God.”
In the space of his silence, and with the words that follow, Jesus essentially gives Pilate permission, much like he gave Judas, to do what he must do. As the drama unfolds we see Pilate on a throne of Judgement attempting to offer a pardon that is not his to give because the crowd wants nothing of it. They want the satisfaction of the crucifixion of Jesus.
The crowd is essentially asking for a state-sanctioned execution by a method that is designed to keep them under the boot of Rome – a method designed to demonstrate that Rome had authority over their souls as well as their bodies. There is so much more to say about this than time allows – that Rome was actively involving the oppressed in their own oppression – but I want to go back to the silence of Jesus before Pilate.
I can’t help but wonder if the silence of Jesus does not connect to the plotholes that I mentioned earlier – these questions about God’s need for an atoning sacrifice and the limitations of transactional love. In some way, in that moment of silence, I think Jesus may have inhaled like an exasperated parent over the conditional love that was all around him. In some ways, I think that moment is a moment frozen in time. In some ways, I wonder if it is like the silence of the church in the face of our own participation in political collusion and hypocrisy. I can’t help but wonder if the silence of the church about a faith that has become more about individual salvation than proclaiming the kingdom of God is a space where we can draw a deep breath as we prepare to act in ways that speak louder than the words.
Beloved of God, as we come to the table today, let us remember that the sacrificial love of God is freely given without condition or merit. It is not about what you have done or left undone. It is about what God has done, is doing, and will complete even in and through me; even in and through you, and to God be the glory for that, now and always. Amen.
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