Good Friday 2024

Scripture reference: the Death and Burial of Jesus.

Today is Good Friday 2024. This is the day the Church commemorates the crucifixion, death and burial of Jesus Christ. It’s a solemn day marked with services and reenactments of Jesus’s carrying his cross to Calvary. It’s a painful day for many in the Christian faith as they remember the price Jesus had to pay for our sins via his sacrifice on the cross.

The Church teaches about how Jesus died by crucifixion as God poured out Their wrath upon him. This act of Jesus’s crucifixion was the only way to assuage God’s wrath against humanity. This doctrine is known as Penal Substitutionary Atonement (or PSA). I believed in PSA for most of my Christian roadtrip. I believed that Jesus died on my behalf-taking the bullet for me from God so I can be saved. And for a number of years if you told me otherwise, I would have denounced you as a heretic worthy of God’s judgement.

However, as I began to re-review the Passion story and began to hear about God’s love through Their Christ, things began to change. The crucifixion didn’t make sense to me anymore; despite my Pastor (and others’s attempts) to preach this to me.

Today, I see Jesus’s death not due to our sins, rather because of our sins. You have to remember, Jesus was ushering the Divine Realm at a time when Rome ruled Judea (and most of the Western world) with an iron fist. Jesus spoke truth to power which was the unpardonable sin as Rome was concerned. Plus, the high priests and religious elites of the Jewish community were in bed with Pilate-the Roman governor in Judea and wanted to curry favor with him. When Jesus preached against the religious elites and gained popularity with the common folk, the elites had to cook up a scheme to have him tried and killed.

You see, the sins of absolute power, religious institutionalism, and related sins put Jesus on the cross. I don’t believe that Jesus was a sacrifice for our sins to appease an angry god. The PSA schtick was invented later, partly by Paul, and later by Calvin and Luther (who were both attorneys as well as theologians). Plus, why would a God who said that They desired mercy, not sacrifice would turn around and sacrifice Jesus? And why would a God-who forbade human sacrifice-would turn around and sacrifice a human being? Doesn’t make sense.

I know there are many who will disagree with me, and at one time I would have been in the choir with you. However, I grew in my beliefs and realized that PSA didn’t make sense-especially with a God who Jesus preached repeatedly as a God of love and mercy.

Those are my thoughts on Good Friday 2024. You may disagree, or you may agree. I pray that we begin to look at the crucifixion in a new and God-centered light, instead of what the institutional church fed us.

Peace.

Image: Cross at Victory Baptist Church in Bristol, VA. December 24, 2021.