NC Pastor: We’ve taken exactly the wrong lesson from Good Friday - especially today | Opinion
Christians call the day Jesus was crucified Good Friday. It’s mystifying. Why would people who claim Jesus is their Lord and Savior call the day he was brutally murdered by the State a good day?
Many Christians have been told that Friday is good because on that day Jesus paid the price for our sins, that God needed someone innocent and righteous to suffer so that He could show mercy to guilty and unrighteous people like us. The takeaway has been, now that Jesus has been unjustly punished for our wrongdoing, Christians are righteous by default, no matter what. It’s a good day when Jesus pre-pays the tab on your sin.
This is the worst kind of plantation religion.
We have taken exactly the wrong lesson from Good Friday when we see Jesus hanging on the cross and think, well, sometimes innocent people have to suffer unjustly for the common good and it’s not my problem or responsibility. The death of Jesus does not justify evil, but exposes it. The cross forces us to see that the end never justifies the means.
We can not fight violence with violence. We cannot create peace through destruction. Before we call Friday good, we have to recognize crucifixion as horrible. Then, we have to see that crucifixion didn’t just happen only one time, only to Jesus. They still happen all the time.
Crucifixion is an execution by asphyxiation. In spite of all the blood in Mel Gibson’s version, crucifixion victims don’t die from blood loss from nails piercing flesh. Those wounds cause unspeakable agony, but don’t kill you. Death occurs from suffocation because eventually the body loses the strength to hold up the chest cavity enough to breathe. Crucifixion is painful slow forced self-strangulation. Theologian James Cone wasn’t being metaphorical when called the cross a lynching tree. It literally was. It’s a crime of stolen breath.
In the seventh verse of the second chapter of Genesis we see God shape the first human form from dust and then breathe into his nostrils. This is the breath of life. It is only after that gift that the man becomes a living being. Scripture testifies that breath is life and its sole source is God. When humans take breath and reduce a living being back into a lifeless body it is a desecration and an act of de-creation. But that’s not all it is. When we conspire to remove the breath from someone’s body, that’s not just a crime against the victim but also against God, because it’s God’s own breath that has been stolen.
Christians believe Jesus is God. Seeing him struggling to breathe on the cross is supposed to finally force us to see that all violence is violence against God. To take anybody’s breath is to take God’s. To lynch is to crucify. To kneel on someone’s neck until they suffocate is to crucify. To launch terrorist attacks against civilians, as on Oct. 7, shedding the blood that carries the breath, is to crucify. To bomb a home or hospital or refugee camp so that the breath is crushed out of bodies is also to crucify. To withhold food or medical supplies from a population until breath is collectively extinguished from bodies is mass crucifixion.
Friday isn’t good because crucifixion is good or because God made something good come from crucifixion. God didn’t crucify Jesus; humans did. God is not the crucifier, even indirectly. God is the crucified. Jesus’ death exposes the lie that violence could ever be good, justified or holy. Good Friday is good because it is the day that Jesus shows us there is another way, a way of absorbing and transforming violence without perpetuating it.
The tragedy is most Christians aren’t interested in following Jesus on that way. Many of us still believe that only force powerful enough to end violence is greater violence. More than 2,000 years later, we still live in a world where the powerful find ways to crucify those they fear and despise. We uphold and participate in unjust and destructive systems that sanitize and sanctify brutality and exploitation all the while claiming to provide justice and peace and prosperity. The sin isn’t that we failed to transform our systems, but that we have failed even to try.
Kate Murphy is pastor at The Grove Presbyterian Church in Charlotte.
