I grew up in the Episcopal church, I grew up with the pageantry and drama of Holy Week. And I’m Gen X, so I grew up long before anyone would consider “shielding” a child from the ugliness of any of it. And I grew up with an experience of God that was as close as my own skin, and that flew in the face of Christian teaching that no one around me questioned.
God you see met me when I was very young, in wild birds pecking seed out of my mittened hands as I sat stock still in the snow, in the spill of the Milky Way and the green ribbons of the Northern Lights that made me feel as if I were about to fall straight off the world and into infinite beauty, and curled up beneath my covers wrapped in unseen arms that I could name as only a Grandmother older and wiser and more loving than even my Grandmothers (who were both deeply loving, and wise each in their own way).
And every year, serving as an acolyte, or singing in the choir I listened as Good Friday told me that God demanded his (always his) son to die, so that I wouldn’t have to. And I am infinitely grateful for the theological inoculation of my early life, because it did not matter what any biblical author, or clergy person said: I knew it was not true. Deep down in the cells of the bones that let me carry that heavy cross down the aisle.
Especially as I grew older and could read for myself I found myself over and over again meeting in the stories a God who turned the rules of the universe upside down to rescue a bunch of people who seemed no more worthy than me. And of course as I came to learn more about how those sacred stories came to be, and how they were transmitted and translated I also gained a healthy dose of suspicion about just how much of the blood and judgement wasn’t human beings writing our own worst instincts onto God (please note the authors of Christian scripture are just as often doing this as the authors of Jewish scripture, Christians just read the New Testament as loving and gentle because of bias).
Every Good Friday, no matter how progressive a Christian you are, you are confronted with a Church that whole heartedly proclaims that God committed child murder as the good alternative to the eternal punishment of a the very limited mortal beings that same God created and endowed with free choice. And frankly it’s the story of an abusive relationship. “Do you see what you made me do?” the God of Good Friday says each and every year.
Today I came across this recent sermon from Diana Butler Bass and it resonated deeply. She posits that our focus has been on the wrong thing all along. That the Table (Eucharist) was always the point, not the cross. And that sermon neatly slotted in for me to the instinctual theology of my youth. Years ago I began to ask people “what if the cross wasn’t something God needed or wanted at all? What if it was just the logical response by Empire to someone proposing we all sit down together, share what we have, heal the sick, lift up the downtrodden, give away our possessions and power?” Some people get really uncomfortable in the face of that question. And some feel liberated by it.
Now, I realize it will be heretical to many. That’s OK, I don’t mind being a heretic. I’m on the side of a God who doesn’t need to beat and kill her children, and on the side of those children trying to build a more just and gentle world. And I have serious doubts that we get there through an instrument of torture, execution, and terror. It seems far more likley that the God who fed the Israelites in the wilderness on divine food would spread a table for Gentiles, than need a human (divine) blood sacrifice to balance some kind of cosmic scale. This is the same God after all who multiple times in Hebrew scripture rejects sacrifice and asks instead for the sacrifice of a contrite heart, of a just society.
What if the resurrection wasn’t the original plan, what if it was God’s gentle response to the worst that human ideas of power and privilege could cook up. What if the resurrection tells us that the God that Jews have known for thousands of years, that Gentiles were invited to meet through the followers of Jesus is not (despite our blood soaked imaginations) marching into anywhere with a heavenly army armed to the teeth? What if the resurrection is the gentle exhale of the parent tired beyond words but who refuses to lash out at their melting down toddler?
And as Diana points out, Jesus goes back to the table (or the breakfast on the beach). After the resurrection Jesus’ followers most often meet him in the breaking of the bread. They continue to do so to this day. What would it change if we were brave enough to imagine a God who is better (even a little bit) than a mediocre human parent? Who could never, ever imagine condemning their beloved child, no matter how hurt and disappointed they became. This Holy Week my meditation is on the hope that we could become other than we are. That we might raise our eyes and our imaginations to the horizon and wonder if we can follow God out of our fear and vindictiveness and into the hope of a world awash in wide open tables, in laughter, and friendship. If we put down the cross for good and followed Jesus into something different.