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Good Friday C

The question: Why did this happen?

Its a commonplace: ‘Jesus died for your sins.’  Yes, but what does at mean, really?

There are all sorts of theological explanations, but can this event truly be intellectualized? Can it really be described in these cold terms, and truly understood?

Any doctrine, any theory which attempts this will fall short. But what really speaks to us, I think, is the truth of experience, the experience found in the story, the experience of pain, suffering, and loneliness. Jesus suffered. Physically, emotionally, in every sense that we do, Jesus suffered. Not in some pretend sense: it was not playacting, it was not transitory. It was not made less, or unimportant because he was just ‘brought back to life’ later. He suffered in every way that a human being can, as fully and actually as any human being can. “My God, my God,” he says “Why have you forsaken me?” Even this, he experienced: the experience of separation from God, the fear of being totally alone, which is often one of the hallmarks of human suffering. Even Jesus felt this.

I don’t fully know and can’t fully explain how Jesus died for us, but I know that the truth lies somewhere in this: That Jesus was born into the human family, lived as one of us, experienced what we experience, knew both pain and joy as we know pain and joy, He embodied the best of what we might ever hope to be, and he experienced the human capability for cruelty and injustice in a terrible way. And he died. He died, just as all of us die. He really and truly died.

Salvation through Jesus, then, didn’t just come with Jesus’ death on the cross. It comes from his whole life, beginning with the Incarnation. In Jesus, and with Jesus we know something: that God is with us, and that God know, understands and experiences with us, every aspect of our humanity. God has not just offered us a magical formula, or an intellectual concept. God has become one of us, even suffered and died, as we suffer and die. God knows; God understands.

God is not far. God is near. We are not left with the question of why a distant God might let us suffer; we are left instead with the mystery that God walked among us, and suffered with us. And there’s salvation in that. The power that is in Jesus to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life, comes through the knowledge that he was with us, and reaches out to us still. God is not far. God is near. God knows. God understands.