Sin and Grace in Good Friday
Good Friday | John 18:1-19:42
“What is truth?” Pilate asks. This may be the most revealing sentence in the Passion from the gospel of John.
As Pilate speaks to Jesus, weighing his options, deciding whether to execute him, he asks Jesus why his own people would do this to him.
In a different timeline, Pilate might ask a different question. Given all he may have heard about Jesus, he might ask Jesus Why aren’t you a king?
But that’s not this timeline. And certainly not this gospel. Here Jesus says:
“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.”
And Pilate asks casually:
“What is truth?”
Because he’s a politician. And truth, as we know, is relative and manipulatable.
But also, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t belong to the truth.
The Truth
Here’s our problem today: The Truth (with a capital T) isn’t the same as ontological truth. God is the Truth. When we speak of truth (with a small t), we’re talking about actuality, events occurring in an objective state, a kind of way of experiencing the world with absolutely no subjectivity at all.
Which, when we think about it, is kind of weird. Humans have seen the same events and come to different conclusions for thousands of years, and we still think we can speak of the absence of subjectivity. And further, that truth is absent from a subjective experience.
Truth is a story. A story of love and sacrifice and hope and grace.
To hear that, however, we have to recognize that Christians have spent nearly two thousand years wringing hatred, scapegoating, and violence from this gospel. Presenting us with our own sin in reading it now.
Not because John doesn’t speak the Truth (with a capital T). But because it is impossible for us to read this with eyes of Truth. Because it isn’t all true.
“The Jews” isn’t true.
John’s repeated use of the phrase is impossible to ignore. And even our best attempts to read it with positive intent will leave us thinking the wrong way. Because it isn’t just that John is lumping a people together, he is introducing a binary: “The Jews” vs. Jesus.
No amount of recognizing that Jesus is Jewish will keep us from placing him in opposition to “them.”
And even if we were to set aside the potentially antisemitic character of this phrase, it will still render Jesus and his movement in opposition to traditional Judaism.
There is no way to fix this, either. There isn’t a word we can substitute. Because it isn’t only the leaders or all of the leaders. We could say Judeans, but it isn’t all of the Judeans. And it certainly isn’t the Jewish people in total because the vast majority of Jewish people in Jerusalem this fateful day still supported him.
Those people shouting crucify him! are people gathered to watch an execution! It isn’t the pilgrims who came to honor and worship God—it’s people who thrill to witness death, not honor the sacrifice suited to God. It is people who can’t see The Truth.
And this is before we even think about the supposed truth of Pilate’s apprehension in killing Jesus in a form reserved exclusively for political dissidents and insurrectionists.
Sin and Blame
We read this Passion in hopes of witnessing The Truth (capital T) and untruth gets smuggled in. And we don’t know what to do about it.
So I ditch John for a few years. But our tradition is built on it. Our very sense of Holy Week is built on John, not Mark.
And we are the inheritors of sin, which includes antisemitism and pro-Roman propaganda. Even as Rome executes Jesus for rebellion against the Empire, John gets us to think they didn’t even want to! Oops! I slipped! How’d he get up there?
Crucifixion is the most gruesome of executions. It is torture. And it is public. It is the sign of Roman power through intimidation. It is everything Jesus rejects.
And he accepted its torture upon himself.
We need to be honest with ourselves and one another about Jesus, his oppressors, and what he sought. Because our own sin is rife with distorted truths. About how we treat one another. How we make community. How we express love to God—and from God.
Our tradition has struggled to do this. And worse, is often unwilling to do this.
And yet, there is also a truth about Good Friday and the Passion that we always encounter.
I just read that the literary critic, Northrop Frye observes that this day each year, Good Friday, brings us closer in time to the moment of Jesus’s crucifixion than to yesterday or tomorrow.
Isn’t that true? That when we read the Passion, we all go there and feel the intensity of it? I often shed more tears today than I do all year!
Meanwhile, I don’t know what I had for lunch yesterday!
We find the truth buried in a flawed accounting of The Truth anyway. This doesn’t excuse it, however. And I agree with Amy-Jill Levine: we need to change the lectionary. I am more convinced of this than ever.
But we are here. Longing, like Peter, for the events to change as we experience them again. Absorbed in The Truth. Renewed by grace with eternal life. We shed tears again for the child of humanity, mistreated and rejected, abused and cast aside. Made out to be a criminal, tortured by guards, lynched by the state.
Is it any wonder so many look away?
They go to work on a traditional day of obligation. Or find something else to do than face the darkness of the cult of death. We shouldn’t want to experience this again, joining in communal time travel.
We know what happened.
But in it, we find The Truth.
And The Truth reveals our human failings: our weakness and foolishness. The Truth reveals the way our avoidance strategies perpetuate UnTruth. A way that can never resemble the Dream of God, full of grace and peace.
It isn’t that we must not look away, it is that we must reject the ignorance avoidance grants us.
Just like we don’t have to watch every video of a modern lynching, but we must not avoid the truth videos reveal. Particularly the lack of Truth and Grace in murder.
This is who we are.
And it’s why we can’t rush to claim our human failure—because that’s just pessimism dressed in a fancy suit, pretending to be theology.
This isn’t who we were made to be. And we aren’t bound to fail. Otherwise Jesus wouldn’t have bothered. The whole project is predicated on God in Jesus believing in us. Having faith in humanity.
Ensuring the very potential that we can have nice things.
We don’t worship a cult of death, but a God of Life! And our work today and tomorrow is to put our faith in Life. In Truth. In hope.
Because we are not bound by traditions of oppression and scapegoating, avoidance and empty piety. We are freed from these by a God of Life. Who longs for our flourishing, delights in our creativity, and celebrates every opportunity we take to love like we long to be loved.
This, too, is who we are. Not just who we are capable of being, who God longs us to be. But who God trusts we are.
Love incarnate eternally—full of Grace and Truth.