Good Friday: Retroactive Grace

Looking from Golgotha at Genesis

The First Word — Retroactive Grace

Richard Price’s acclaimed crime novel Freedomland is based loosely on the disquieting and heartbreaking story of Susan Smith, who falsely claimed that her two children had been abducted by a black carjacker. In truth, Smith drove to the edge of a lake, put the car in neutral, and exited as the car rolled into the water with her young boys strapped into the backseat. The main character in Freedomland is a black police detective, Lorenzo. He is assigned to the case of a young woman, Brenda. Lorenzo is suspicious of the story but has no proof. He befriends Brenda and spends countless hours with her visiting the site, canvassing the neighborhood, and just chatting with the guilty woman. As the story unfolds, we discover that this likable detective is a recovering alcoholic, and one of his sons is doing time in prison. Lorenzo’s other son, a good citizen and schoolteacher, won’t have anything to do with him. So we can see that Lorenzo is talking about himself as well as Brenda when he says, “Let me tell you something…With kids? No matter what you did, how badly you messed up, God will find some way of letting you get up to bat again. You see, Brenda, God’s grace? It’s, like, retroactive.”

God’s grace— it’s like, retroactive.

That is, it reaches backwards in time.

In two days time, fresh from his new hewn grave, the resurrected but incognito Jesus will make a similar point to two Passover pilgrims on the road to Emmaus. As Cleopas and his unnamed companion journey beyond Jerusalem they gossip about how the Kingdom campaign of the mighty prophet from Galilee ended in murder— an accursed, godforsaken murder.

Or so they believed.

Jesus responds to their shock at the news of an empty tomb guarded by angels by preaching. The Risen Christ cracks open Cleopas’s Bible and goes all the way back to the Book of Genesis. “All of scripture is about me,” Jesus informs them, “I’m, like, retroactive.” And ever since the first Easter afternoon, the Church calls Mary’s boy the Second Adam. We identify Christ as the ram in the bush that stills the blade in Abraham’s hand, the Father’s only Son not spared. He’s, like retroactive. His body is the ark that bears us through the wrath and judgment God promised never to exact on anyone else again. His cross closes Jacob’s ladder; on it, God comes down the up staircase.

“All of scripture augurs about me,” Jesus reveals to us on the road to Emmaus, “They’re all Christophanies.” The prophetic portents might seem inescapably obvious to us now. Of course, Jesus is the Father’s favored son whose brothers leave him for dead only to meet their own end in his absolving word. But the point Jesus makes on the road from Jerusalem— a road, mind you, whose entire distance was dotted with crucifixes and carcasses picked at by carrion— is a lesson we could not possibly have grasped until after God had contradicted every last one of us by raising Jesus from the dead. To see Christ in all the scriptures we need to look through an empty tomb. Without resurrection, there is no more reason to look for Jesus in Genesis than there was to find God in Jesus. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” John’s Gospel tells us.

Not in him it wasn’t, we reply with a tree.

In the Garden, as soon as Adam and Eve sin, they discover their nakedness and respond by running to hide from God. On Golgotha, suffering the sins we sin against him, God is nailed to a cross, naked before us yet still hidden from us. We call the first Adam’s sin original, but, truthfully, it’s only by what we do to Jesus that we begin to understand what it means for us to be in Adam. It’s only by what we do to God in Jesus that we learn what we mean by the term original sin.

No one saw God in Jesus. Even Mary, who had born God in her womb, did not see God in her boy. She thought he was crazy. Prior to Easter, no one had discovered Christ in Genesis because no one saw God in Jesus. When Caiaphas, the chief priest, hears the handcuffed Jesus identify himself as the Christ, the Son of Man, he tears his own robes in outrage and sorrow and shouts, “Blasphemy!” It’s no phony gesture. Caiaphas and King Herod, Peter and Judas— each of them has their own reasons, but every one of us insisted that Jesus had nothing whatsoever to do with the true and living God. Jesus offended our moral sensibilities. Jesus confuted our religious convictions. He absolutely negated our image of the Almighty.

This is why we murder him and then, after the fact— retroactively, we look to pin the blame on someone other than ourselves. Christ died so a payment could be made, we offer as our favorite alibi. We didn’t kill him. He sacrificed himself. He dies not by our hand but by divine necessity. He’s tortured and mocked and spit upon and asphyxiated. His head is crowned with thorns. His hands and feet are pierced with hammer and nails. His side is speared. His legs are broken. He’s crucified, we say; so that, God can forgive us.

But like Detective Lorenzo, it shouldn’t take us long before we grow suspicious of this alibi. It’s all right there in the evidence. Jesus doesn’t meet this end so that God can forgive us. Jesus comes to us preaching the pardon of God. His first word from the cross is the same tired old sermon he’s been preaching from the very beginning, “I forgive you, for you know not what you do.” Who the hell are you to forgive sins, Jesus? Only God can forgive sins. And her sins? Do you know what she did to her kids? God would never forgive…

Jesus is the one in whom God did God to us. He did God’s mercy and forgiveness to us. He bore relentless witness to it. He offered it gratuitously to people who did not deserve it. We want no such God; therefore, Jesus had to die.

And not just die, we thought, his reckless message had to be hammered into oblivion. The explanation for the death of the incarnate God by the most ungodly of means is simple. The explanation is not eternal but it is every bit as mysterious. The reason for the death of Jesus is that, in him, God came preaching the unconditional forgiveness of sins for sinners who do not deserve it, and we killed him for it. He bears our sins in his body— actually.

Medieval paintings always depict Adam leaving the Garden of Eden, naked and in tears, but that’s not what happens in the story. No sooner has Adam failed to trust God’s word, usurped God’s role for himself, and hidden from God and God clothes Adam in animal skins. Like bread and wine, like an empty tomb, God gives Adam a tangible, visible sign of the forgiveness of sins. In other words, it’s not simply that Christ is the Second Adam. By receiving the pardon of God, Adam is the first Christian. It works the other way too. Whatever is in your past, his word of forgiveness from the cross can reach backwards in time. God’s grace— it’s, like, retroactive. God’s grace— it’s, like, retroactive.

The Second Word — Slain from the Foundation of the World

Last week, looking at the godawful images from Bachu of children piled upon the corpses of other children and the bodies of civilians with their hands tied behind them and their heads shot through, I thought of Christopher Browning’s 1992 book Ordinary Men. It’s an account of a police battalion of German men— middle-class, church-going, educated, ordinary men. They could be you or me. Almost none of those who comprised Police Battalion 101 had previous military experience. Once dispatched on a “Jew hunt” to Poland in 1942, however, with shocking and galling rapidity, they devolved into an efficient, evil machine. The battalion consisted of fewer than five hundred men, yet they packaged nearly fifty thousand Jews onto cattle cars bound for the death camp in Treblinka. Those they did not load onto trains they shot at point blank range— almost forty thousand, including children and babies— as they roamed from village to village, farm to farm, tree to tree, in order to render the Polish district “Jew free.”

In his review of the book, the conservative columnist George Will quotes the philosopher Eric Vogelin: “The simple man …is a decent man as long as the society as a whole is in order, but he then goes wild, without knowing what he is doing, when disorder arises somewhere and the society is no longer holding together.” George Will then concludes: “Why [did the ordinary men of Police Battalion 101] murder their neighbors? Because it was permitted. Because they could.”

Because—

Our civilization is not nearly as good and well-ordered as those of us well-served by it kid ourselves.

In 2011, Steven Pinker, a psychologist at MIT, wrote a bestselling book in which he argued that civilization has made great strides. We’ve evolved, Pinker argued, to build not only better societies but to produce less violent, more virtuous human beings. We’re different than those ordinary men in Police Battalion 101. To such assertions about the better angels of our nature, the Church points in the present day to places like Bachu and Mariupol and backwards in time to Cain, the first child of Adam, whose name means humanity. According to the Bible, the “foundation of the world” is not when God spoke the stars into the sky or worded the beasts of the field into existence. The founding of the world is the beginning of human civilization. And in scripture, Cain is more than the first murderer. He’s the world’s first urban planner. The first city is built on top of the blood of Abel. The stone that the builder rejected became the cornerstone.

For the foundation of the world.

And for the preservation of that world, in the name of law and order, to keep the pax in the Romana, we litter the ground around Golgotha with the blood of another brother, who, with his second taut, suffocated word, manages to utter the promise of paradise to the two thieves bleeding beside him.

“Today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Luke admits that one of the thieves, the first bold enough to speak, does not have the promise of paradise at the top of his list of wishes. The thief thinks the crowd’s taunts and jeers are the more attractive option. If you are what the sign above your crown of thorns says you are, then why don’t you hop down off your cross and get us off of ours too. “Thieves” is likely a euphemism chosen by translators in the service of a simpler tale. Like Barabbas, the insurrectionist spared by the crowd instead of Jesus, the two thieves are zealots. They’re revolutionaries or terrorists, depending on your perspective.

And the man in the middle is Jesus.

Never forget—

Jesus could have been stoned to death. The Jewish leaders had the authority to stone transgressors of the Law. They’d already attempted twice during the course of Jesus’s ministry to stone him to death. Stoning is what they do to Stephen after Pentecost. If Jesus died for religious reasons, to satisfy God’s wrath or pay the wages of sin, then Jesus’s thorn-crowned head would’ve been crushed with rocks rather than his chest stretched across a tree. The question to ask on Good Friday is not “Why did Jesus die?” The question for every Christian always to ponder is “Why was Jesus crucified?”

Crucifixion was a punishment reserved for insurrectionists, revolutionaries, and political agitators. Jesus dies a manner of death designed to keep the status of the city of Cain quo. To those at the top of civilization, Christ’s Kingdom is a threat to quell with a cross. To those at the bottom of civilization, Barabbas appears the better option. To those of us somewhere in the soft middle of civilization, in the end, we have no more use for him than the “thief” has for his promise of Paradise. 

He dies alone.

Just six days ago, the followers of Jesus had hurled songs of enthronement upon him. “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” they’d shouted, “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” When the Pharisees bristled at the acclaim and demanded he rebuke his disciples, Jesus replied, “If they shut up, the stones themselves would cry out.” But he was wrong. Even his followers are silent now. They’ve all vanished. He’s the lone voice crying out, not in glory but in defeat and despair.

His dies with his Kingdom teaching handed down to no one. Scholars and skeptics like to distinguish between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith, but  just look around Calvary. The historical Jesus has no disciples. His Kingdom teaching is passed down to no one precisely because Jesus refused the fundamental building block of every kingdom going all the way back to the city of Nod, East of Eden. Jesus refuses to kill his brother in the name of constructing a better world. Jesus our Brother, though he’s strong, he’s good. For him, the end will never justify violent means so, in the end, we have no use for him. Our cities, marked by mourning and crying and pain, may be less spectacular than his Kingdom, but in the cities of Cain at least some of us get to play God.

John calls Jesus the logos— the logic, the blueprints— of the universe. Paul calls Jesus the eikon— the archetype— of creation. We call him useless. We reject him. We don’t stone him. We crucify him.

Yet!

Nevertheless!

This stone we spit upon and shame, mock and torture and nail to a tree in a garbage dump called Golgotha, this brother we murder for the sake of the city, God  reclaims him from the blood-soaked earth and makes him the cornerstone of a New Jerusalem, a City of God whose welcome is so wide we’d kill him all over again just shut its gates, for it is a Kingdom that, like him, ignores the fundamental distinctions the righteous and sinners, between good and bad, victims and victimizers, the hunted and the hunters. The stone we reject God makes the cornerstone for a City whose gates swing wide by grace, which means it’s doors are always open to every ordinary man and every Russian soldier and all of us who ignore what our own chosen leaders do for the sake of keeping the pax in our own Romana.

It’s outrageous. It’s offensive. It’s shocking that God takes the Jesus for whom we have no use and use him to build a City open to the very worst sinners, open not just to the Abels but to the Cains. Shocking but not surprising. It’s, like, retroactive. If you go back to the Book of Genesis, before the first murderer founds the world, God marks Cain. To protect Abel’s brother. Cain lives in the city of Nod bearing on his body a mercy he does not deserve. For all of us who make our lives east of Eden, this is good news. 

The Third Word — Ghastly to Behold

On the Monday before Palm Sunday, at the United Nations Security Council meeting, representatives from the Ukrainian Security Service presented text messages they’d captured from the smartphones of Russian soldiers killed in action. In one thread, a soldier had written to his mother, describing how Putin’s invading army is “hitting everyone, even civilians.” The soldier continues, informing his mother that he is no longer in Crimea doing training exercises, as she’d been told. When his mother responded in the thread by asking if she can send her boy a package, he replied, “Mother, the only thing I want now is to hang myself...this is real war, mom. I’m scared, we’re hitting everyone, even civilians. We had been told that people would welcome us here but they jump under our vehicles, not letting us pass. They call us fascists. Mom, it’s so hard.”

Adam in the Garden shows us that the fundamental nature of sin is a failure to trust God’s words, “Did God say you will die if you eat of the fruit? Not only will you not die, you will become like God.” If sin is refusing to take God at his word, then surely we repeat that sin by insisting that Jesus really means something more noble and serene— something less than human— when he cries out to his mother from his cross, “Woman, behold your son.” Why do we suppose that utterance is anything but awful for both of them?

In a New Yorker article entitled “The Woman Behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib, Errol Morris probes the atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq. “Of course,” he writes, “the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man, tortured to death — or, more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of the savage death of Jesus are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, he must have been ghastly to behold.”

“Woman, behold your son.”

The essay continues, “Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?”

I think not— certainly not his mother.

“He must have been ghastly to behold.”

Errol Morris writes better than Jesus can manage to compose from his cross. He saves the most important verb for the end of his sentence, “He must have been ghastly to behold.” In Hebrew and in Greek the word “Behold!” means far more than simply “See!” or “Look!” You don’t have to speak antiquated English to recognize that the word “behold” means something special. In both Testaments, the word translated “behold” conveys a sense of extraordinary disclosure, a pulling back of the curtain. In other words, something is being revealed to the beholder on Golgotha. What exactly? What does Jesus think is being revealed to his mother? An act of his Heavenly Father? A payment for sin? An appeasement of divine wrath? The solving of some eternal equation that equals atonement? 1 cross + 3 nails = 4giveness?

Perhaps we can skirt any squeamishness we might feel over the idea of a loving God meting out such a ghastly punishment on anyone— perhaps we can skirt that unpleasant thought by reminding ourselves that the crucified one is also the incarnate one, the pre-existent Son, true God from true God, as much God as the Father and the Spirit. The crucifixion, at least of the man in the middle, is the willing, cooperative work of the three-personn’d God. There, you see, we can let the doctrine of the Trinity settle our stomachs and quiet our consciences.

Except—

The Father’s eternal Son is also Mary’s quite real and very human boy.

Surely Mary loves Jesus as much as that Russian mother loves her son. It’s one thing to say that the one on whom God metes out such a ghastly punishment is also God, but it’s another matter altogether to say that God would apportion such a horror upon Mary. You need not be a parent to know that to see her child suffer so would be as great a suffering. Is God’s wrath towards the wickedness of men so great that he would torture this woman?

No.

God’s decision is retroactive.

If Mary could sing Hannah’s song from memory, then she certainly knew the story from the Book of Genesis. After the flood, after Noah offers a sacrifice and the aroma is pleasing to the Lord, God sets in the clouds a rainbow. Literally, God hangs up his anger. He retires his wrath. He locks his guns in the cabinet and throws away the key. The rainbow is a sign, God declares, of God’s promise never again to destroy his creatures because of their sins. He would never again flood the earth out of his wrath nor would he flood Mary’s heart with sorrow.

So, back to that word: “Woman, behold your son!”

What’s the extraordinary disclosure that warrants a word like “behold.” What’s being revealed on Calvary in the son of Mary? We are. The cross is pulling the curtain back on us. Woman, look what they’ve done to your son! See what they’ve done to God. The cross is not what God inflicts upon Mary in order to forgive; the cross is what God in Christ endures even as he forgives! The death of Jesus Christ discloses not the work of God but the nature of his creatures. We are, like that Russian mother’s son, capable of unspeakable acts— Abu Ghraib, even silencing the Word made flesh.

That’s why twenty centuries of believers have hung the cross over our altars and in our homes. As if to say, Behold! Discover! See— don’t forget— the ghastly truth! The God who hung the rainbow in the sky is a God who wills only to be gracious to us, and we will his murder. As the Confession in the Book of Common Prayer once put it, “There is no health in us.”

Behold!

Peer behind the curtain on Calvary.

The only person who can heal whatever evil afflicts us we will leave dead, forsaken and shut up in a tomb, another civilian casualty killed by an authoritarian’s cruel tool.

The boy of yet another mother.

Our only hope is that God wonʼt leave him there.

The Fourth Word — The Binding of Jesus

Every year at Passover, to intimidate any pilgrims with insurrectionist aspirations, Pontius Pilate would travel with his Roman triumph from his seaside home at Caesarea Maritima into Jerusalem. There Pilate would spend the week in the palace of Caiphas, whose title was Chief Priest but whose role was more like Mayor. So it’s not surprising that Caiphas’s spacious palace came equipped with a prison in the dungeon.

In the dark hours after Passover, Caiphas’s municipal guard bring the bound and bleeding Jesus from Gethsemane on the Mt of Olives to the jail cell in Caiphas’s basement. I visited it last month. The guardroom contains wall fixtures to attach prisoners’s chains. There are holes in the stone pillars to fasten a prisoner’s hands and feet when he was flogged. Bowls carved in the floor to hold salt and vinegar in order to aggravate the pain of the prisoner’s the wounds. The prison cell itself is a pit carved out of bedrock, about twenty-five feet deep. The only access to the bottle-necked cell is through a shaft cut in the bedrock above. Having been beaten and flogged, on the morning of Good Friday Jesus was bound and then lowered through the hole in the rock by means of a rope harness. Once down there, there is no way out. There is no hope. There is no one. Just outside the palace is where Peter stands by a charcoal fire and says, “Jesus? Jesus of Nazareth, you say? Never heard of him.” For all Peter knew, Jesus may as well have been dead already, hidden like diamond deep in the dirt.

Jesus prays Psalm 22 from the cross.

It’s hard not to wonder if he prayed Psalm 88 in the dark stone hole of Caiphas’s basement,

“O lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am as a man that hath no strength: Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more: and they are cut off from thy hand. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves.”

If not earlier, there in the pit, that’s surely where Jesus began to cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

In Mark’s Gospel, the fourth word from the cross is Christ’s only word from the cross. As if, in the end, all that Jesus has to say from the cross is all we can say about the crucified Jesus. He’s been forsaken. No angel of the Lord will appear to stay the blade in hand. This time the Father will not spare his only beloved Son.

Only—

As often as the Church has looked backwards in time and drawn analogies between the Virgin Mary’s child and the elderly Sarah’s unlikely son Isaac, the parallel is one that requires similitude between Father Abraham and the Almighty Father. But Father Abraham does not resemble the one of whom Jesus said, “Thus, says the Lord: I desire mercy not sacrifice.” Father Abraham resembles not our Heavenly Father; Father Abraham resembles us. Isn’t that what we teach our children to sing, “Father Abraham had seven sons and seven sons had Father Abraham?” We’re the children of Abraham; he is us. We’re the ones who think God desires sacrifice instead of mercy. We’re the ones with so many false images of God that God must take flesh and dwell among us. We’re the ones who will not spare even the Father’s only beloved Son.

Abraham is us.

Why wouldn’t Abraham be us— Caiphas surely is us. So too Herod and Pilate and Peter who denies him and Judas who betrays him.

Abraham is us.

And today, a short walk from Mt. Moriah, where Abraham took his son Isaac to murder him to honor the Lord, we push our Lord up a hill called Golgotha, carrying not a blade and wood for a fire but a cross and a hammer and nails.

Golgotha is Mt. Moriah without the ram in the bush or the angel to the rescue. Calvary is where the children of Abraham provide the innocent lamb for slaughter, another Father’s Son. Good Friday is Abraham going through with it.

My God, my God, why do we forsake him?

Why do we cast him into the pit and then crush him on a cross?

The misguided madness that nearly leads Abraham to murder his child is an affliction that yet ails us.

Here’s a better analogy. It’s, like, retroactive:

Imagine that Abraham went through with the deed on Mt. Moriah. Imagine he did it. Imagine Abraham closing his eyes and raising his arm and plunging the knife. Imagine Isaac’s scream and the silence that would follow it, save for the bleating of a lost and forgotten ram amid the bushes. Imagine Abraham making his three day trek back down the mountain path to Isaac’s mother. And imagine a stranger approaching Abraham’s campfire that first night and, in the comfort of the darkness, Abraham confesses to this stranger his story about what he had believed god required, how it led him to violence and murder, how in his grief he knew now that heaven wept with him, how he had been blind and deaf, his faith had been unfaith, how as he plunged the knife he realized he had mistaken the gods for the true God. Imagine Abraham spilling out his shame, and then realizing he’d not even asked for the stranger’s name.

“Tell me your name,” Abraham asks. And the stranger lifts up his bowed head and pulls back his hood and replies, “Isaac.”

And then imagine Isaac showing Abraham his hands and his side.

The Fifth Word — Stairway from Heaven

Before Elon Musk was leading an army of amateur Game Stop investors or driving up the share price of Twitter, Ted Turner’s off-color, rail-grabbing rants about religion made the cable news CEO a household name. One Ash Wednesday in Atlanta, Ted Turner referred to his CNN employees who came to work that day with a soot-colored cross on their foreheads as Jesus Freaks. “Why the @#$% are they working here?” he asked a corporate vice-president, “They should be working at FOX.” Despite his many marriages and mistresses, Ted Turner blamed the unraveling of his relationship with Jane Fonda on the actress’s conversion to Christianity. Famously, he chided his fellow Georgian, Jimmy Carter, that “Christianity is a religion for losers.” Like a stopped clock, Turner was right. It is. Christianity is a religion for losers. Which is to say, Christ— Jesus— is a loser.

How else do you describe him as he is today, nothing but “a suspended carcass, dripping with his own blood and other people’s spit.” Despite all the titles the texts confidently ascribe to him after the fact (King, Son of Man, Logos), today he’s naked and shamed and forsaken and parched. As he dies, the lips of the Word are dry. Between noon and three, the firstborn of creation, the eternal Son whose inheritance is literally everything, hangs hammered into the most shameful of deaths. Turns out, “the first will be last” was a kind prophetic lament about his own particular, pathetic end. No CEO of any Fortune 500 company would choose this path. And all of Jesus’s initial investors have pulled out. His Kingdom movement, which began with the waving of palm fronds in the street and the cracking of a whip at the Temple, ends with no buying. There’s no filter available on Instagram to put a lie to this picture. Ted Turner was right. He’s a loser.

“I’m thirsty,” he begs on a spot along the road called the “Skull.” Rome pins him up along a highway as a cautionary tale— the true purpose of Caesar’s grisly practice:  “Watch out or you’ll end up like this loser.” Tradition tells us, triumphantly, that Jesus’s fifth word from the cross fulfills the psalms. Regardless, his dying thirst is no less human. Nor is he the only one to leave this life with such a banal muttering, “God, I’m so thirsty.” I’ve been at the bedsides. I know— nearly all the dying feel like losers for coming up short on the meaningful last words they’d always imagined speaking to their loved ones. The primary reason we fear and deny death is because life almost always ends in all too human a fashion; death is rarely experienced as the sort of holy moment that meets Isaac’s son in the Book of Genesis.

On the run from the brother whose inheritance he’s stolen, Jacob stops for the night on his way out of Beersheba. He rests his head against a smooth stone and falls into a dream. “Behold,” Genesis reports, “there was a ladder set up on the earth, and top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, ‘I am the Lord your God.” When Jacob wakes from the dream, he’s afraid. He takes the stone on which he’d slept and erects an altar with it and anoints it with oil. To mark the spot. As if to warn others, “Watch out!” Why would he not? You wouldn’t want to stumble across such a place unawares. It’s not difficult to misinterpret a dream. Jacob wakes up, afraid, because he thinks the God at the end of the ladder is Almighty and Powerful, Jealous and and Fearsome— a Winner, a God for winners.

Esau’s lying, grifting brother is nothing but a loser so he marks the spot to steer clear of it next time. But ever since Jacob named that place Bethel, just the second generation of humanity, we have told ourselves that the journey of faith is a climb up that ladder, working our way up to God one rung of spiritual achievement, religious ascent, and moral advancement at a time. In the middle ages Jacob’s Ladder was popular, especially among mystics, as a symbol of the struggle the Christian must undertake to achieve sanctification. Led Zeppelin didn’t invent the idea of a stairway to heaven; they inherited it. The Jesus at the top of the medieval mystics’s ladder is no different from the Jesus whose cross the crusaders painted on shields and mail. It’s the same Jesus we drape in the red, white, and blue. It’s the same Jesus athletes credit with home runs and touchdowns. It’s the Jesus who endorses our candidate or backs our cause. “Stand for the flag. Kneel for Jesus,” a Jeep’s spare tire cover exhorted me yesterday in traffic.

The Jesus at the top of Jacob’s Ladder is a Winner.

• Jesus the Vicarious Substitute who pays our debt of sin.

• Jesus the Great Moral Teacher who gives us the greatest example of love. 

• Jesus the Victor who defeats the Devil.

These are all ways we take this parched and naked loser and try to turn him into a winner. Again and again, we misinterpret the dream. He’s come into this world where we are all bent on winning at all costs, where we all go the way of the First Adam, heeding the tempter’s voice to become like god and fighting and scratching our way to climb to the top, no matter whom we hurt, what line we cross, or how many convictions we compromise. He stubbornly, steadfastly refuses to go the way of the First Adam, to be like God. He’s determined to be human, truly human, and he has stuck with it until the end. He’s been obedient to it, even to the point of death— even death on a cross— as though he aims for his death to be the death of all those who would storm heaven one rung at a time.

The lips that are now dry and thirsty will soon turn a blueish gray. The chest that constricts against the cross will move no more. And while every other winner and would-be prepares to practice their Passover piety, Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and, like Jacob at Bethel, marks the spot with a stone.

At the very beginning of his ministry, when Nathanael wondered aloud “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Jesus had promised that those who followed him to the end would, in the end, see the God of Jacob’s ladder. But he didn’t specify which end of the ladder. Up in glory? Or down in the muck and mire, below even the bottom rung, like the prodigal son yet to come to his senses? We should’ve suspected the answer earlier, back when he upended everything by drinking with prostitutes and partying with tax collectors and forgiving everyone’s sins without their expending the slightest effort or earning an ounce of it.

Now, as his nightmare nears its end, we know the answer. Or rather, we can see his wager. Only by looking back on today— like, retroactively— will we know if the loser wins.

The Sixth Word — It’s Done

Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men opens with theologizing by Sheriff Tom Bell, a character portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones in the Coen Brothers’s film of the novel, “Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him.  I know he’s real.  I have seen his work.” No Country for Old Men reads like a chase story but it’s really an eschatological allegory; that is, it’s about a creation that has been turned upside down, where truth is lost and life is worthless. Reading the horrific stories in the newspaper and seeing the senseless violence on his police beat, Sheriff Bell— the old man of the story’s title— no longer recognizes the country in which he was raised.

The fact frightens him.

The Oscar-wining screenplay omits the scene which closes the novel— and makes it intelligible. Sheriff Bell is at the supper table with his wife and observes, “ she told me she’d been readin St. John.  The Revelations.  Any time I get to talkin about how things are she’ll find somethin in the bible so I asked her if Revelations had anything to say about the shape things was takin and she said she’d let me know.” But before she comes back to him, Sheriff Bell reasons his way from the depraved, hopeless condition of humanity to his own biblical judgment. He says, ““I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train.”

Sheriff Bell’s wife need not turn to the end of the Bible to address her husband’s question. Just as easily, she could consult the first book of the Bible, chapter thirty-four. Jacob has reconciled with the brother he cheated and now he and his family are living in Canaan. In another world, Jacob’s story would end there, happily ever after. But in this world that’s gone mad since the times of Genesis, Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, goes out “to visit the women of the land.” What follows next happens in a single verse but surely is suffered over a lifetime and has been the story of the world ever thus. Shechem, the prince of the land, saw Dinah and…Well, let’s agree that the phrase translated into English as “seized her and lay with her” is far worse than a euphemism. Jacob and his sons react with the patient, slow boil revenge of an rated R thriller.

It’s done, Jacob says to Dinah’s mother when he returns home.

Jacob and his two sons— they do away with Shechem and his gang.

But they cannot undo what was done to Dinah.

It was already accomplished.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus gets up from his knees in the Garden of Gethsemane and makes his way to Calvary almost like a fighter emerging from the locker room and climbing into the ring. Jesus in John’s Gospel appears nonplussed,  unbothered by his fate, already victorious. If his dying is the supreme example of how to die then today this new Moses hands down from on high his most strenuous law of all. Even the Latin, the language in which the liturgy often renders Christ’s sixth word, has the ring of triumph to it, “Consummatum est.” Nonetheless, it’s also true that, like a hit man in a gangster movie who calls the boss after his dirty deed is done, this is the same word the centurion carries back from Golgotha to Pontius Pilate, “It’s finished.”

Many modern theologians interpret the crucifixion in terms of identification. The death of Jesus Christ upon the cross is a death he dies in solidarity with all the innocent victims of injustice and brutality, from Dinah to Bucha. In his suffering, other victims of the wickedness of the world can know their pain is a pain born by God. The cross is a sacrament that signals to the world’s sufferers that, like Bill Clinton, God feels your pain. But a God whose only power is empathy and whose only promise is solidarity is a God of cold comfort not good news. Take Dinah, for example, or, for that matter, the mother of Jesus. I’m sure that rather than a God who feels their pain, they’d prefer a God who promised to rectify the world, a God who possessed the power to consummate that promise. Moreover, those who interpret the cross in terms of identification forget (or ignore) the embarrassing fact that today Jesus is one with whom no one identifies in the end. The hosannas turned to cries of “Crucify him!” His disciples— the ones who didn’t deny him outright or betray him for blood money— forsook him and fled. Even the women who weep for him are told to weep instead for themselves and their children. Conspicuously missing from most interpretations of the crucifixion of Jesus is the brute fact that we murdered him in a relatively quick if terrible miscarriage of justice. To attach a more mysterious, divinely necessary explanation to the cross of Mary’s son is on par with the euphemism that elides the crime against Dinah, “Shechem seized her and lay with her.”

Rome crucified hundreds of thousands of dissidents across the empire. The odds are good that Jesus is not even the only innocent man crucified today. And they have it even worse. No rich man like Joseph of Arimathea is coming to take down their bodies and bury them with dignity. Christ’s suffering is neither unique nor for the sake of solidarity.

Jesus doesn’t die with other sufferers like Dinah.

Jesus dies as other sufferers like Dinah.

He’s another victim in a long line of victims in a world that feels stalked by a prophet of destruction. The one who is now nearly finished by a cross is another statistic. And his weeping mother is a reminder that people, as Francis Spufford says, don’t die statistically, they die in ones, and for each person and for those who loved them, the loss is complete and incomparable. It is the erasure of the entire sum of things. At least, almost always— like, 99.999999% of the time— it ends in erasure.

If Jesus is fully human, as human as you or me or a Ukrainian child, then we should avoid saying anything about him on the cross that we would not dare say to Dinah. Only a moral monster would attempt to salve her wounds by attempting an explanation behind it or positing a reason for it or offering theory of it. There’s nothing we can learn that can retroactively justify the harm that was done Dinah. All we can say to her is what he’s just said. It’s done. An unrectified world has finished him. And the only promise worthy of her pain is the truth that rouses Sheriff Bell from his sleep. As certain as death, nothing short of God coming back can slow this train.

The Seventh Word — Ex Nihilo

The Bible’s first book ends with Joseph offering absolution to the brothers who had betrayed him in the most absolute manner. Like Jesus earlier this morning, Joseph had been cast into a pit and left for dead. “Come now,” they’d conspired, “let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.” As Joseph sits with his dying father, Jacob issues his favorite son a final wish. “Please forgive the sin of your brothers because they did evil to you.” And so the last scene in the first book of the Bible is an assurance of pardon. The pardon has been a long time coming. Joseph reunited with his father and brothers as far back as chapter forty-five. The family their sin had torn asunder has been joined back together for seventeen years. For nearly two decades, his brothers have feared their brother’s retribution. Year after year, they’ve been carrying a burden of shame and guilt across. For seventeen years, their past has determined their present and threatened their future. All this time, they’ve been waiting for the forgiveness of their sins. Well, probably they weren’t even waiting for it. They likely didn’t believe it was a possibility. Odds are, it never occurred to them that an absolving word could retroactively rectify their transgressions.

After we’re finished with Jesus, we leave him, like Joseph’s brothers, waiting. He’s waiting not on his brothers but on his Father to receive the only part of that’s left. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Just as his agonized cry of dereliction is a question only God can answer (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) Jesus dies waiting on God. If sin is the refusal to let God be God, if the First Adam sinned by grasping after God, then the true human can only wait on God here.

Hearing his last word in life, we discover finally what it means for the Son to have emptied himself in Jesus. His self-emptying doesn’t mean that he divests himself of certain divine attributes. It doesn’t mean he’s poured out his Almightiness or shaken all the Omniscience out of his pockets. It means he pours himself out into that last, lonely cry on the cross, “Why have you forsaken me?” Beyond the “Why?” there is only God. And therefore, there is no more human way to die than to die asking the question to which only God can reply.

He dies, in other words, like the rest of us.

There is no way for him to transcend the fate to which we’ve dispatched him. It’s not a bad dream like the ones Joseph has unpacked for Pharaoh. The truly human will soon be really dead. And by his death he puts us all to death. In the end, the one who turned the other cheek all the way to the cross, who forgave the ones who nailed him there, who preached peace to point we did him violence, the one in whom God has done God to us does death to us all.

We finish him off.

And by it, he does us all in.

Easter is a shock, sure. But we should’ve seen it coming. It’s, like, retroactive. We should’ve suspected that the way God has chosen to kill us in order to make us new and newly alive is by an absolving word that cuts even as it frees, a promise of pardon from a brother we cast in the pit and left for dead, a word that tonight we can only wait on.

“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” With this final word Jesus breathes his last. The Second Adam is dead. Soon the Old Adam will die. The Old Adam in us is slain when our brother Jesus returns to us, saying what Joseph said to his brothers, “Do not fear…As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about it that many people should be saved.” And just like that, like in the very beginning, God begins creating out of nothing.