Good Friday

By The Rev. Dr. Molly Scherm

​Many would agree that Christmas is the most beloved holiday of Christians, and Easter is certainly the most joyous.  We can’t deny the centrality of Good Friday, however.  The cross, the instrument of Jesus’ execution at the hands of the Roman state, is the universally-recognized symbol of the Christian faith.  It stands at the front of our worship spaces and on our steeples, and we wear it around our necks, bow when it passes by at the head of our processions, and carve it on the headstones when we bury our dead.

I think I have probably shared the story, before, of one of my earliest memories of my own religious thought.  I don’t know how old I was, though I’m sure it was sometime during my elementary school years, when I asked my Aunt Tinka “If it’s the day Jesus died, why do we call it Good Friday?”.  This is an interesting memory because my Aunt Tinka was probably the most unlikely person in the family to ask such a deep religious question.  Tinka was a good Congregationalist, but she did not talk about faith.  She must have been quite taken aback by my question. 

Her reply, after she paused to consider her words, was the explanation of Good Friday that we all grew up with.  It was something like this:  “Jesus died to save us from our sins, and that’s a good thing.”

I doubt if I found the answer helpful as a child, and I still struggle with the same question - not why we designate today as “Good Friday”, of course, but the question of how to make sense of Jesus’ death.  What it means to me, to us, that Jesus, the embodiment of God’s love in the world, chose to submit to the world’s evil.

It seems that Christians have always wanted to rationalize Jesus’ death, from the earliest days of the Church when Mark wrote in his gospel that “Jesus came…to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45).   

We have a holy week hymn that sums it up perfectly, and we’ve all sung it many times: Here are middle verses of the hymn “There is a green hill far away”.

He died that we might be forgiven
He died to make us good
That we might go at last to heaven
Saved by his precious blood.

There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin.
He only could unlock the gate
Of heaven and let us in.

Surely the ugliest, most pernicious element in this kind of theology is the notion that God the Creator required sacrifice, required Jesus’ brutal death in order to accept humankind, to offer forgiveness.  Theologian Bruce Epperly says that this brand of theology justifies Jesus’ crucifixion as “sacred violence”1.   The reason many of us have struggled with Atonement theology is that a God who requires “sacred violence” is not the God who Jesus preached and Jesus embodied.

So if we reject traditional formulations of atonement theology, where does that leave us?  How else are we to understand Jesus’ sacrifice, his willing acceptance of his own execution?  I think there are two ways to think about this that provide me, at least, with something that makes more sense than the explanations I grew up with.

The first is that Jesus went to his own death not because God needed it, but because it tells a truth we needed to hear (and still do).  

Jesus’ death was the inevitable end to the confrontation between his message of radical love and service and the power structures in the religious and political establishments of his time.  Jesus had riled people up.  He challenged the purity system of the Temple establishment AND the economic exploitation of the Temple.  He threatened (in the minds of the Roman authorities) to instigate discontent.  He would not go away quietly.  He had to be silenced.  The way of the power structures in that time and place was to execute those who instigated discontent.  I don’t think the world is much different today.

Jesus was innocent of wrongdoing.  He was killed because the power establishments of Jerusalem were trying to preserve their own power, to maintain a status quo that served their own interests.  

The crucifixion is not just a historic event.  As with so much of the gospel story, it’s a demonstration of who we are, and here it is: we are still working to preserve our own power and control.  We still demonize those who are different from ourselves.  We still want to avoid and silence those voices that challenge us with truths that don’t fit easily into the ways we think about ourselves and the way we think thing are, that challenge the ways we like to do things.  We judge others and do what we think we need to do to get others to conform with our own interests. 

Jesus knew that confrontation was coming: he predicted his own death on many occasions.  The Creator knew it was coming.  That is different from wanting it or needing it.  As far as I can see, God did not REQUIRE Jesus to die in order to forgive us our sins. 

Jesus preached and lived love, compassion, and acceptance throughout his ministry, and he lived it until the end.  Although the gospels make it clear that facing up to the violence of  the world’s powers was not easy for Jesus, he trusted in God.

Perhaps we needed Jesus to die in order to provide a stark enough truth to shake us out of our complacency.  Jesus’ death provides us the means to face up to our own deepest failings.  
    Our fear of death that stands in the way of our trusting God
    Our fear of losing control that stands in the way of our trusting God
    Our fear of pain and suffering – whether physical or psychological – that stands in the way of our trusting God.

Jesus’ death provides an ugly picture,  BUT it has the capacity to transform us, just as life-shattering experiences often provide us with the opportunity to radically reconfigure our lives.  Jesus’ death has the capacity to transform us because it is followed by Easter.

But I said there were two ways of thinking about the crucifixion that can speak truth to us today, and the second is closely related to the first.

There’s a way of thinking doesn’t rationalize Jesus’ death.  It doesn’t find reasons to call it “good”.   It accepts that this is the nature of a fallen world, that human sin and self-interest continue to crucify, and we are the witnesses.
Christ is crucified in the deaths of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, and before them, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
Christ is crucified as hard-won policies protecting the environment are dismantled in the interest of economic gain.
Christ is crucified when weapons of destruction are deployed in the service of ensuring political dominance.

The gospels all testify that a group of women stood by to watch the crucifixion, including Mary Magdalene, Mary, Jesus’ mother, and others, and John’s gospel adds that John, the beloved disciple, was there too.  

Theologian Diana Butler Bass recently posted a reflection on witnessing evil.  Here’s what she suggests:

“Witnesses watch events unfold, even when hearts break. Even when tempted to look away. Witnessing is more than being a bystander, an onlooker. Witnessing is active — it means bearing testimony to what one has seen, to provide evidence of the truth of a thing, no matter how shocking, brutal, or inhumane. Witnesses tell a story…”
Bass goes on to say:
“We all must witness. Because witnessing the pain turns us from mere bystanders to actors, to be part of the story on the side of victims. To not let the authorities lie about the suffering, violence, and injustice.”2

So perhaps this Friday is “Good” because it shows us who we are without God, and it shows us that Jesus told us the truth.  It shows us that Jesus’ way of love and mercy are what saves us.
It can be good if it helps us to move beyond being bystanders, and helps us to tell the stories we need to tell, and to take an active part with God in changing and healing the world.
In this Holy Week, let us pray that we may be touched and transformed by the cross, that it may be for us a way to the generous and compassionate and bold living that God calls us to.

In Jesus’ name, and for his sake.

1http://www.patheos.com/blogs/livingaholyadventure/2015/03/reclaiming-good-friday-salvation-without-divine-violence/#ixzz3VX1orYp2
2 “Witnesses to the bad news”, Diana Butler Bass, the Cottage, January 15, 2026




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