Repairing The Breach

The reading from Isaiah 50 tells us what Jesus is doing. To quote theologian James Alison, he is ‘walking deliberately into a place of shame and violence and chaos, where he will be mocked, spat upon, buffeted by everybody, including even by the other criminals who were crucified alongside him’. God isn’t standing up for his rights here. His right to be appeased, to be apologized to, to be paid in blood for the crimes committed against him. He is doing the absolute opposite. We are the punishers. Our human anger and pride and institutional greed and power, that’s the terrifying deity being worshipped by the mob here. That’s who Jesus is being sacrificed to. He is being violently punished by humanity, not by some still-in-heaven version of himself. Yes, this is the mythical image of a terrifying Godlike power utterly crushing and ripping apart a human being in punishment. But that terrifying power isn’t Him—it’s us. And He lets us do it. That’s what it was like when God came to us: we responded with fear, and violence, and He didn’t retaliate. He let us kill Him. So where’s the triumph? Because so far this seems just horrible. “Hosanna, Hosanna!” the people sang. ‘Hosanna’ means ‘save’ or ‘here comes the Saviour!’ To yell it out in triumph is to yell, ‘Yeah! Hurrah! Salvation!” What are we saved from? Isaiah tell us in the prophetic verses of today’s reading: ‘Behold, the Lord God helps me; who will declare me guilty?’ The Lord God, who could have declared us guilty, did the opposite. He let us condemn him . He let all our horrible, awful sacrificial logic about punishment and death be carried out upon himself. And not for a moment did he blame us, or shame us, or retaliate against us. We are saved from all that because He came to show us that He just doesn’t do that sort of thing. Baggage - Carol Aust 97