How the Passion reminds us of our purpose
Good Friday  |  John 19:1-42

The last General Convention of The Episcopal Church authorized several changes to the Good Friday liturgy for trial use. We’ve included those changes today, which are intended to help deal with the elements in the service, including in the Passion Gospel from John, which have contributed to anti-semitism, supersessionist and anti-Jewish theology, and a long history of persecution and violence. These changes have been a long time in coming and I am grateful that we can finally make these changes alongside our neighbors in faith.

For several years, I have made minor changes on our behalf, inviting us to read the other Passion narratives on this day instead. While they also possess some troubling elements, particularly the gospel of Matthew, it is John’s gospel and our tradition of translating Judean as Jew in it, that is well beyond the point of deniability.

Does this change erase history? Of course not. But neither does our not changing at all. The history remains history, but in our present we may choose to take the blatant anti-semitism baked into our tradition and relegate that to history.

Making annual statements

Every year, during Holy Week, I feel obligated to speak to this, to the history of anti-semitism in our tradition, to the impact of our liturgy and our scripture, particularly on Good Friday. I am always compelled to include a caveat: to say what is said and what isn’t, that we are not to blame Jewish people, and that we must reject the historical patterns which do.

We need to make these statements each year because this is who we were as a people. And it is who we are aching to not be. And because many Christians today still behave poorly, cruelly, inhumanely, we have to keep speaking to this with intention and grace.

And finally, we need to excise antisemitism from a tradition that is actually intending to say something different! Our tradition intends to speak of the glory of God, not the human failings we will focus on.

Our place in persecution

As I invite us to reflect on our place in this, can we see that it reveals a kind of generational complicity — a complicity that Christians throughout history have placed on Jewish people so as to persecute them while conveniently ignoring their own! That we inherit traditions and practices and beliefs that have been passed down for thousands of years which still lead to human suffering. We’ve inherited it like an heirloom, like a racist house decoration, like a blackface lawn jockey. Do we put it on display? Keep it in the garage? Donate it to a museum? Throw it away?

How we handle complicity: of a past injustice and a present action: is central to our faith. It is what we’re left with. In our ethical and spiritual lives —and determines whether we can sleep at night.

And what do we have in the Passion of Jesus Christ, but the story of pain and torture of an innocent man? Of one swept up by broken and cruel politics of oppression. Feared and hated for the audacity of preaching repentance and forgiveness, teaching solidarity with the outcast and compassion for the refugee. Religious leaders schemed to assassinate him because of the threat he posed. They sought to assassinate Lazarus because of his symbolic place in the story.

This isn’t human failing. Don’t you dare chalk this up to people being people or original sin or just how things are. And please do not dismiss this as the behavior of evil people who are inherently bad and bound to do this. These are like Hitler’s willing executioners: otherwise good people caught up in a deadly ideology and moment. They think they are protecting their country, their people, their faith.

We are taught by Jesus to reject these actions and desires, not these people.

Jesus rejects empire

We gather this way to remember what brutality brings: death and inhumanity. This is why we still read the Passion and why we remember Jesus’s crucifixion today. And because of our world’s priorities (protection, war, oppression) we need to remember what God desires for us instead.

And it is this remembering, this reorienting, that means we have to face the Passion directly and why I, as a priest, refuse to pretend that the Passion can speak for itself. Maybe it can, but there’s no guarantee we’re able to listen. To listen without that empire lens — without the world’s priorities — without our own selfish desires. 

We need reminding that it is the Romans that killed Jesus. Roman soldiers who mocked and abused and tortured Jesus; who whipped him and cut him and humiliated him. And it was Rome who thrust a cross onto his back and made him carry his own torture device to the outskirts of the city, with Simon’s help. And then it was Rome that put him up on a cross as a domestic terrorist, as an example alongside other terrorists. They put him there, a couple feet off the ground; high enough to raise him up and low enough that dogs could eat his dying flesh. That is what Rome did. That is how Rome exercised power and built an empire. Inhuman, evil, disgusting things.

Remember

And we tell the story each year so we all can remember. To remember this happened to Jesus and that this is what Rome did. To remember that this is what empires do. And ultimately, so that we recognize in the midst of this remembering, what it is that God does. How different God is from this. How utterly incompatible this evil is with the goodness of God.

And because remembering and reminding is the name of the game, we must bring to mind all the ways Christians have failed to remember and recognize God’s love in the midst of human hate. The marriage of empire with church under Constantine. The marriage of Roman oppression with Roman Catholicism in the centuries that followed. The Crusades and the Reformation. The colonial age and the slaughter of native populations. The breaking of treaties and the stealing of land. The slave trade and the rise of the KKK, born in Indiana, to defeat Reconstruction, the country’s most effective policy of diversifying leadership, building political and economic equity, and ensuring racial inclusion. And the Holocausts: from the genocide of Jews in Germany 80 years ago to Palestinians today.

I’d love to ask that familiar question: how can we read about Jesus’s crucifixion and then do this? But we all know how. Ignoring the grace of God is easier than ignoring the performative power of empire. Even as Jesus preaches consistently against it. As our scripture reveals God’s rejection of it.

We need reminding. Over and over.

Consider this. 

In the Passion it says:

“Since it was the day of Preparation, the Judeans did not want the bodies left on the cross during the sabbath, especially because that sabbath was a day of great solemnity. So they asked Pilate to have the legs of the crucified men broken and the bodies removed.”

Out of respect to God and tradition, break the legs of the men being tortured to death and remove them before sundown because we don’t want to profane God. It reminds me of the federal law that prohibits the execution of prisoners on Sundays. You know, because it’s a holy day.

I imagine Jesus saying something to us like, You have heard it said that we shall not kill a prisoner on Sunday, but I say to you we shall not kill a prisoner at all! For just as I was murdered by the state, nor shall you allow the state to murder anyone.

This is why we remember. And why we need reminding. Because we have responsibility today for our own behavior, our collective behavior, and even our global behavior. And the way of the world right now is taking its cues from Rome rather than Jesus — from empire rather than the Way of Love. And we must see how different Christ’s way is from the way of power and death. Ours is a way of intimacy and life.

Today we face the darkness — in our world, in our tradition, in our history, in ourselves. We face it and remember the Way of Christ brightens our vision, reduces our fear, and lightens our burdens. So that we might sit with hope into these coming days.