Good Friday
"All the Jewish festivals are packed full of meaning, and Passover is the most meaningful of all. The festival involves a dramatic retelling of the exodus story, reminding everybody of the time when the tyrant was overthrown, when Israel was free, when God acted powerfully to save his people. Celebrating Passover always carries, to this day, the hope that God will do so again. Jesus’s fresh understanding of Passover, given in interpreted action rather than abstract theory, spoke of that future arriving immediately in the present. God was about to act to bring in the kingdom, but in a way that none of Jesus’s followers (despite his attempts to tell them) had anticipated. He would fight the messianic battle–by losing it. The real enemy, after all, was not Rome, but the powers of evil that stood behind human arrogance and violence, powers of evil with which Israel’s leaders had fatally colluded.[...]
So he spoke of the Passover bread as his own body that would be given on behalf of his friends, as he went out to toke on himself the weight of evil so that they wouldn’t have to bear it themselves. He spoke of the Passover cup as containing his own blood. Like the sacrificial blood in the Temple, it would be poured out to establish the covenant–but this time the new covenant spoken of by the prophet Jeremiah. The time had now come when, at last, God would rescue his people, and the whole world, not from mere political enemies, but from evil itself, from the sin which had enslaved them. His death would do what the Temple, with its sacrificial system, had pointed toward but had never actually accomplished."
"The next few hours were tragic and brutal. Jesus wrestled in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, with the darkness which he felt caving in upon him while he waited for arrest. The chief priests did what one might have expected: carried out a quick, quasi-legal procedure–enough to frame a charge of seditious talk agains the Temple and ultimately blasphemy. [...] The Roman governor was weak and indecisive; the priests manipulative. Jesus went to his death on a charge of which he was innocent–actual rebellion against Rome–but of which most of his contemporaries were guilty, at least in intention. Barabbas, a rebel leader, went free in his stead. A centurion, looking up at his thousandth victim, saw and heard something he hadn’t expected and muttered that maybe this man was God’s Son after all.
The meaning of the story is found in every detail, as well as in the broad narrative. The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary. The sorrow of heaven joined with the anguish of earth; the forgiving love stored up in God’s future was poured out into the present; the voices that echo in a million human hearts, crying for justice, longing for spirituality, eager for relationship, yearning for beauty, drew themselves together into a final scream of desolation.
Nothing in all history of paganism comes anywhere near this combination of event, intention, and meaning. Nothing in Judaism had prepared for it, except in puzzling, shadowy prophecy.
The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the king of the Jews, the bearer of Isreal’s destiny, the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns.
Christianity is based on the belief that it was and is the latter."
N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, 2007, 109–111.
Marc Chagall, Exodus, 1952-66
Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion, 1938
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