Short Easter Reflection 2024

(based on Herbert McCabe’s Good Friday sermon)

For our reflection this morning I am going to begin by reading an extract from famous Good Friday sermon by someone I regard as one of the 20^th century’s greatest Christian thinkers – Herbert McCabe.

It’s a longish quote but worth it.

Why did Christ die? This tries to answer the question: What had the death of Christ to do with us; why is it important to us? One such answer which has been very influential in the past is that by his death Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of the world. The idea, I’m sure you will remember, was that sin had offended God and since God is himself infinite such an offence has a kind of infinity about it. It was within the power of the human creature to offend by disobedience to God but it was not within our power to restore the balance of justice by any recompense we could pay to God. So God the Son became man so that by his suffering and death he could pay the price of sin. This seems to be based on an idea of punishment as a kind of payment, a repayment; the criminal undergoing punishment ‘pays his debt to society’, as we say. It takes a divine man, however, to pay our debt to divine justice.

Now, I can make no literal sense of this idea, whether you apply it to criminals or to Christ. I cannot see how a man in prison is paying a debt to society or paying anything else at all to society. On the contrary, it is rather expensive to keep him there. I can see the point in the criminal being bound to make restitution to anyone he has injured when that is possible; but that is not the same as punishment. I can see the point in punishment as something painful that people will want to avoid and so (we may reasonably hope) something to encourage them to avoid committing crimes; but this is not paying a debt. It is impossible to see Christ on the cross as literally engaged either in making restitution or in serving as a warning to others. If God will not forgive us until his Son has been tortured to death for us then God is a lot less forgiving than even we are sometimes. If a society feels itself somehow compensated for its loss by the satisfaction of watching the sufferings of a criminal, then society is being vengeful in a pretty infantile way. And if God is satisfied and compensated for sin by the suffering of mankind in Christ, he must be even more infantile…

Well, then, did the Father want Jesus to be crucified? And, if so, why? The answer as I see it is again: No. The mission of Jesus from the Father is not the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be human. Any minimally intelligent people who are proposing to become parents know that their children will have lives of suffering and disappointment and perhaps tragedy, but this is not what they wish for them; what they want is that they should be alive, be human. And this is what Jesus sees as a command laid on him by his Father in heaven; the obedience of Jesus to his Father is to be totally, completely human…

Jesus had no fear of being human because he saw his humanity simply as gift from him whom he called ‘the Father’. You might say that as he lived and gradually explored into himself, asking not just the question ‘Who do men say that I am?’ but ‘Who do I say that I am?’, he found nothing but the Father’s love. This is what gave all the meaning to his life—the love which is the ultimate basis and meaning of the universe. However he would have put it to himself (and of this we know nothing), he saw himself as simply an expression of the love which is the Father and in which the Father delights. His whole life and death was a response in love and obedience to the gift of being human, an act of gratitude and appreciation of the gift of being human…

So my thesis is that Jesus died of being human. His very humanity meant that he put up no barriers, no defences against those he loved who hated him. He refused to evade the consequences of being human in our inhuman world. So the cross shows up our world for what it really is, what we have made it. It is a world in which it is dangerous, even fatal, to be human; a world structured by violence and fear. The cross shows that whatever else may be wrong with this or that society, whatever may be remedied by this or that political or economic change, there is a basic wrong, persistent through history and through all progress: the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist.

The fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist… think Israel-Palestine, think Ukraine, think NZ. McCabe captures what I preached about 6 weeks ago. The crucifixion of Jesus is the judgement of God that exposes the world – the judgement we have already undergone.

So what is today, resurrection Sunday? McCabe helps us interpret resurrection. Jesus lived to be fully human. To live out the gift of being human that he received from his Father. The Father did not want the Son to be crucified, nevertheless, the only way to be fully human in our world is to suffer like this. So in a secondary sense, in a collateral sense we might say it is the will of God, it is unavoidable. If you love those who hate you… your political enemies, your national enemies, your cultural enemies… you are creating in your own life and your own body a new world, a new society, a new humanity.

What then is the resurrection?

How to we interpret this life that is given to Jesus beyond death? How is it different from modern near-death experiences, or the raising of Lazarus in the bible? What does it mean?

Jesus final prayer, Father forgive them. Not make them pay for their sins, not ‘make me the payment for their sins’. Jesus final prayer, ‘Father forgive them’ is answered on resurrection day. The resurrection of Jesus is first of all an act of forgiveness. God’s act of forgiveness. God our creator refuses to take No for an answer. The gift of a truly human life, lived by Jesus, is the future that God has prepared for us all. So God gives us Jesus again. God gives Jesus again and thus for-gives. We are again given (post-crucifixion, post judgement, we have been judged and exposed) we are again given the opportunity to live a fully human life.

Christ is risen. Death has been defeated, drained of its power to rule us through fear. In the light of divine judgement we can be fully human.

Thanks be to God