| Readings: | Isaiah
52:13-53:12 Psalm 31:2,6,12-13,15-16,17,25 Hebrews 4:14-16;5:7-9 John 18:1-19:42 |
| Date: | April 18, 2025, Good Friday |
For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?"
We gather here today to venerate the Cross. Which raises the question, what is the truth about this cross we are asked to hold in high esteem? Like the answer to Pilate's question, the answer is not simple but rather deep and profound. For instance, the very shape of the cross, two intersecting lines, could symbolize an intersection between love and sacrifice, the divine and the human, secular power and religion, life and death. Quite a bit of truth to reflect on there.
The General Instruction of the Roman Missal does not give explicit instructions for people to follow to venerate the Cross. It suggests a genuflection or perhaps kissing the cross. But unlike the instruction that we say Amen when receiving communion, it does not specify what the person venerating the Cross should say. As I started to think about this, I realized that what we think or say as we venerate the cross depends very strongly on what we believe is the truth about the cross, what we understand the cross to stand for. I suspect that if I asked each one of you here why the cross is important, your answer would reflect the deeply ingrained belief of Catholics that, by dying on the cross, Jesus saves us, individually and as a human race. So my first thought about what to think or say is, "Thank you".
But what is the truth about how Jesus dying on the cross saves us? Many of us would explain it using a fairly historically recent explanation that borders on heretical. Since the reformation this prominent explanation of how Jesus dying on the cross saves us is that he offers his life as a substitute for ours to satisfy the God the Father's need to punish humans for our sins. In academic circles this is known as the penal substitutionary atonement theory. I suggest that this borders on the heretical because Catholic theologians from Anselm through Aquinas up the present reject that penal aspect of this, which implies that our sins cause God to have wrath, in the human sense, and that God therefore requires a bloody sacrifice to satisfy that wrath. As the Fransciscan priest Richard Rohr expresses it, this implies that God the Father is unfree to love and forgive of God's own volition but rather God requires blood sacrifice to forgive us. This is a very untrustworthy image of God which undercuts everything else we know about God. Fr. Rohr goes on to argue that instead of thinking of the crucification as a one time transactional event between Jesus and the Father, that we think of the crucifixion as just one moment in Jesus' ongoing revelation of the infinite and participatory love of God in human history.
Thomas Aquinas says that because of the dignity of the life Jesus laid down for us, for it was a life of both God and human, and the extent of the passion and grief Jesus endured, his death was not only a sufficient but a superabundant atonement for the sins of the human race.
In other words, Jesus' death was but one aspect of God's willingness to do anything to show us how much God loves us and how much God wants us to love in return. So when I venerate the cross in a few moments, I will say, "Thank you, ... and I love you, too!"
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