Good Friday 2024

John 19:17-18; 28-30 (NRSV)

And He, bearing His cross, went out to a place called the Place of a Skull, which is called in Hebrew, Golgotha, where they crucified Him, and two others with Him, one on either side, and Jesus in the center.

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After this, Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said, “I thirst!” Now a vessel full of sour wine was sitting there; and they filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on hyssop, and put it to His mouth. So when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished!” And bowing His head, He gave up His spirit.

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"There’s nothing like a little redemptive violence to bring us all together. So is this the way God works? Is this God’s plan, to become a human being and die, so that God won’t have to kill us instead? Is it God’s prescription to have Jesus suffer for sins he did not commit so God can forgive the sins we do commit?

"That’s the wrong side of the razor’s edge. Jesus was already preaching the forgiveness of sins and forgiving sins before he died. He did not have to wait until after the resurrection to do that. Blood is not acceptable to God as a means of uniting human community or reconciling with God. Christ sheds his own blood to end that way of trying to mend our divisions.

"Jesus’ death isn’t necessary because God has to have innocent blood to solve the guilt equation. Redemptive violence is our equation. Jesus didn’t volunteer to get into God’s justice machine. God volunteered to get into ours. God used our own sin to save us."

- S. Mark Heim, Reflections on Mel Gibson's film “The Passion of the Christ” (no longer available online)

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"The word sacrifice keeps on popping up in our Eucharistic praying. And some of you have let me know that you find those words difficult. And I want to say, for very good reason. Let me discuss with you a little bit about what is meant, and what is not meant, by the word ‘sacrifice’. 

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"I’m going to use the example which my mentor, my guru, René Girard, always used when explaining the double meaning, perhaps – two possible sets of meanings behind the word ‘sacrifice’. He always used the story of king Solomon’s judgment of the two prostitutes. You remember the story: two prostitutes, both of them had daughters at the same time, they both lived together. During the night the daughter of one of them died, so the mum quickly swapped babies with the other one; and the other woman, when she woke up, found her baby dead but it wasn’t her baby. So they took the matter to the king for judgement. And the king said: bring me a sword, I will now cut it in half the baby so that you can each have half. Whereupon one of the two women said: that’s splendid, quite right, then we’re both in the same position. And the other one said: no, let the other woman have the baby, I would prefer that the baby lives than that I win.

"Of these two you could use the word ‘sacrifice’ perfectly easily: one woman was prepared to sacrifice the baby to be equal with the other woman, and one woman was prepared to sacrifice her right to the baby in order to allow the child to live. We use the word ‘sacrifice’ for both. But they’re obviously completely incommensurable in meaning, they’re not the same thing at all. One is involving killing something, and the other involves letting go of something, giving something away, for the sake of life.

"Now, it’s only conceivably in the second meaning that we can possibly refer to Jesus’s going up to death as a sacrifice. I should say that it was language with which he was familiar and he was perfectly happy to use. So we shouldn’t be too shy of it. But he was happy to use it precisely because he was bringing it to its fulfilment and actually exploding it from within, because rather than this being the account of us sacrificing someone to God, or – in some particularly terrible notions – God demanding that we sacrifice someone to God, as though God needed bloodlust satisfying or something like that.

"It’s exactly the reverse: God gave himself up to us. We are the angry divinity, if you like, in the picture. And God is giving himself up into our midst, into the midst of violent and sinful humans, precisely so that we can be utterly amazed by the generosity, by the power, by the forgiveness in that act. And so we realize we never need to perform any kind of sacrificial logic ever again. That self-giving up into the midst of us, so as to enable us to live free from the world of sacrifice. That’s what’s called the one true sacrifice.

"... [T]he self-giving of God up to us sinful humans, so that we may be amazed, forgiven, loved, reached at our most violent, and enabled to understand how much we are being let off – that’s the sense, if you like, of the word sacrifice, the same sense as the good mother in the Wisdom of Solomon. The good mother was opening up the possibility for the baby to live. Well, Jesus is opening up the possibility for us to live.

"Now, one might say: well, that’s just what Jesus was doing, what about what we’re doing? Well, our way of sharing in what Jesus was doing is by giving thanks, that’s what the Eucharist is. We start to give thanks and we find ourselves able to share inside that self-giving. Someone who is giving himself to us and enabling us to turn into givers of ourselves away to others, which is why I use the word ‘sacrifice’ very happily when I pray. I’m thinking not of anything that I’m doing; I am thinking of what is being done for me, and with what joy I am going to be turned into someone capable of doing that for others."

- James Alison, from video "Meditation on Sacrifice Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uFK91bdZxw)

[Source of S. Mark Heim quote, and for discussion and reflection on all of this week's lectionary texts, see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/festivals/goodfriday/]