April Fool's Day is Palm Sunday. On the liturgical calendar it is called Palm/Passion Sunday. The change came because with decreased attendance at Good Friday services, folks would jump from the triumphal entry to the resurrection and miss the crucifixion. The clergy thought that folks really should hear the crucifixion story so on Palm/Passion Sunday you may hear both the triumphal entry and the passion story in one.
My sermon for this Palm/Passion Sunday is entitled "Letting Go of the "Good" in Good Friday." It is the next installment in my Lenten series of sermons regarding beliefs to let go in order to grow. I and I imagine others have let go of the need for substitutionary atonement. This is the idea that Christ dying on the cross was part of God's plan. Here is the story in a nutshell:
Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the garden. In so doing they sinned. They committed the original sin. By sinning they dishonored God and could not be in God's presence. So they were cast from the garden. Not only that, but their sin was transmuted generation by generation. All humanity, by nature of its humanity, is in a state of sin. They owe a debt to God that they cannot pay. Humans owe the debt but only God can forgive the debt. But God just can't cancel it. So God becomes human. Because Jesus is born of a virgin, he is not tainted by human sin. Jesus, the God/human cancels the debt by dying on the cross taking the sin of the world onto himself. Jesus is substituted for us. All who believe in this story have their debt of sin cancelled. They get to go to heaven when they die. All who do not believe in this story are still in their sin. They get to go to hell. One could tell the story more elegantly, but that is the story in essence.
I raised a bit of hoopla at my previous church when I wrote an
article in the local paper challenging this doctrine. I offered a critique of Mel Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ." I wrote that instead of his death we could benefit more by reflecting on his life:
I believe there are more important things about Jesus' life than his death, namely his parables, which were an invitation to cross over to a new way of thinking, loving and living. Jesus' passion for justice, his acceptance and elevation of the marginalized, his love of enemies are just some of the things that mark his greatness as well as the hope for humankind, in my view.
I think ultimately, it was Charles Darwin's theory of evolution that put this dogma in the museum of "fossilized beliefs that once were interesting." If humans evolved from lower life-forms and over billions of years of evolution, then the Adam and Eve story is obviously a myth. They didn't exist. There was no garden, no fruit, no command not to eat of it, no disobedience, no sin, no need for atonement. Jesus dying on the cross was not part of any great plan of salvation since humans didn't need saving. I wonder if this is the real objection to evolution by fundamentalist Christians. It isn't that they need Genesis to be literal, but the theory of evolution casts the whole theory of Christianity as it is popularly conceived into doubt.
I suppose one could find the "truth" of the Adam and Eve story, original sin, virgin birth, and substitutionary atonement in a mythical/metaphorical way, but I don't really see the point. I think the idea of Jesus dying for our sins makes of mockery of the execution of Jesus. The historical person of Jesus died on a Roman cross. There were not just three lonely crosses on a hill. There could have been hundreds perhaps thousands of crosses. Rome crucified anyone who it perceived could make trouble. Rome brought the peace that way.
A good read for "good" Friday is Josephus. You can read his
works on-line. He describes the bloody executions by Rome. Jesus wasn't alone. He was executed as a Jew like many of his countrymen. To suggest that his death was somehow "good" is to suggest that the burnings of Jews at Auschwitz was "good" or that the genocide in Darfur is "good." There is nothing good about it. The cross symbolizes the meaninglessness of terror, cruelty, and violence for which there is no answer. If the cross is to mean anything for us today, it is that it represents the absence of goodness. It is the horror of humanity's crimes against humanity.
What does the cross mean to you?
