Good Friday 2026

John 18:1-19:42 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2018%3A1-19%3A42&version=NRSVUE)

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"There's a perfectly simple sense of the word 'sacrifice' which is not what is being meant [by Jesus' death]. And that is the way in which, for instance, I, a priest, offer a sacrifice to some divinity who presumably needs it for whatever reason. Or that someone demands of me a sacrifice for someone else, like some of the people [during Covid] were saying: well, all these old folk we aught to allow them to die for the sake of the economy. That's a sacrificial model of priesthood. That is it specifically and exactly not what is being asked for here. If that's what you think you're doing when you say the word sacrifice, then please don't say these prayers. That's the wrong thing to be doing. 

"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 babies 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, I would 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 to allow the child to live. We used 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, 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 about it. 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, and *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's self-giving up into the midst of us to enable us to live free from the world of sacrifice. That's what's called the one true sacrifice. 

"And please notice that means that all other sacrifices are not true sacrifices, they're fakes, they're nine-dollar bills, if you like. They're either not the real thing at all or they're a cover-up, but the 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."

- James Alison, from video "Meditation on Sacrifice" for Good Friday 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uFK91bdZxw)

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"In Jesus Christ, God is trying to show us the only way to peace. Violence will never end as long as we think that our righteous violence is the only way to stop it. So, in Jesus Christ, God submits to our supposedly righteous violence in order to show us another definition of righteousness, one that is completely without violence. It is a righteousness that comes through the faith of Jesus when he went to the cross, trusting in a God of life, trusting in a God who would raise him on the third day in order that we might begin to live with that same faith in a God of life."

- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from sermon delivered on April 13, 2001 (https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/festivals/goodfriday_2001_ser/)

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“We have seen that Jesus knew from the beginning what he was doing, completely possessed as he was by his quickened imagination of the ever-living God. It was this which enabled him to stage a solemn mime in the midst of this death-based culture, so that he might be killed as a way of leading people out of that culture based on death, allowing us to come to be what God always wanted us to be, that is, utterly and absolutely alive with Him.

"What Jesus' entirely living imagination means, then, is that he was working so as to bring to existence what God had always wanted, but which had become trapped in the violent and fatal parody which we have seen, and which we tend to live out. So what Jesus was bringing into being was the fulfillment of creation, and this he knew very well as he was doing it. [...]

"This means something rather important: the understanding of God as Creator changes from someone who once did something to someone who is doing something through Jesus, who was in on what the Father was doing through him from the beginning. Creation is not finished until Jesus dies (shouting tetelestai -- it is accomplished), thus opening the whole of creation, which consequently begins fully, in a completely new way, in the garden on the first day of the week.

"This means, and here is the central point: we understand creation starting from and through Jesus. God's graciousness which brings what is not into existence from nothing is exactly the same thing as Jesus' death-less self-giving out of love which enables him to break the human culture of death, and is a self-giving which is entirely fixed on bringing into being a radiantly living and exuberant culture. It is not as though creation were a different act, something which happened alongside the salvation worked by Jesus, but rather that the salvation which Jesus was working was, at the same time, the fulfillment of creation.

"This was the power and the authority in Jesus' works and words and signs. Through him the Creator was bringing his work to completion. The act of creation was revealed for what it really is: the bringing to existence and the making possible of a human living together which does not know death; and Jesus was in on this from the beginning. Such is our world that God could only be properly perceived as Creator by means of the overcoming of death."

- James Alison, Raising Abel, pp. 54-55

[Source of quotes from Paul Nuechterlein's sermon and James Alison's Raising Abel, and for discussion and reflection on all of this week's lectionary texts, see https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/festivals/goodfriday/]