Years ago, in my student days, I had a work-study job at the Newman Center, the Roman Catholic Campus Ministry, at Berkeley. I was a Roman Catholic then, and I loved working there. My job was mostly to answer phones, and mostly those calls were about what time Mass would be held and who was celebrating.
But one day as I sat at the receptionist’s desk, someone called and asked “What does it mean that Jesus died for our sins?”
Now the Newman Center in Berkeley was a bastion of liberal Catholicism. It was feminist and gay-friendly even then, in the middle of the culture wars of the 1980’s. We were located about a block away from People’s Park. We had liturgical dance. There was something in the tone of the caller that suggested to me that his was no friendly inquiry, much less a genuine question. It felt like a test. It felt like some kind of challenge.
And I gave an answer that has stayed with me all these decades later. I remember it so well. In fact I tell this story often, so pardon me if you have heard it before. “What does it mean that Jesus died for our sins?” the caller asked. And I said, “Please hold while I find a priest to take your call.”
Now it’s true that my job was funded by a work-study grant and I was not allowed to do actual religious work in that position. Still, I think about that encounter from time to time and I wish that I had been a better witness to the love of Jesus. If the caller’s question really was a test designed to demonstrate that liberal Catholics were not serious Christians, I’m pretty sure I gave that caller exactly the answer he thought he was going to get.
And thus the awkward irony of my standing before you today. I know some terrific priests now, as I did then, but this isn’t a good time to put you on hold and ask one of them to speak for me.
How would I answer that caller now? Would I remind him that there is not one single answer to the question? Would I point out that each of the four gospels gives us a slightly different answer and that Christian tradition has never really settled on one approach? Maybe.
I might also tell that caller that the answer is not given in the abstract, in a brief exchange over the phone. It isn’t good material for a quiz or a survey. If we want to know what it means that Jesus died for our sins, we need flesh and blood specifics.
The specific flesh and blood reality before us this Good Friday is the story of the passion of Christ in the Gospel of John, the gospel we just heard. John’s gospel is not quick, it’s not easy, it’s not transparent. But in John’s gospel Jesus shines out. Jesus transforms the darkness. Jesus transforms us. The world is sinister and clouded in this version of the crucifixion but Jesus is as clear as day.
It’s the feast of the Passover in Jerusalem. That’s a celebration of deliverance from tyranny and oppression. But the oppressor is also present. Pontius Pilate is doing what he can to consolidate his authority, to keep the heavy hand of Rome in place over the people of Israel. The religious authorities, and in some ways the people themselves—including the disciples, including Peter--are all casting about to figure out how to hold onto whatever power they have. They are trying to find a way to neutralize Jesus without drawing down the brute force that Pilate has at his disposal. They are all figuring out who they are in relation to who Jesus is and what Rome requires.
The situation here is so murky, in fact, that we have learned to turn the whole story into a condemnation of Jews. We have followed Rome in isolating and oppressing Israel. Every time we hear the expression “the Jews” in this story, we should remind ourselves that Jesus is a Jew, this gospel is written for Jews, and the Jewish people are in no way being dismissed as “Christ-killers.” Mostly the term “the Jews” in John seems to refer to religious authority figures, not to the Jewish people. But let’s go a step further: the message of this crucifixion story is that we all participate together in shutting God out. There is no superior stance possible. Nobody in this story can really face who Jesus is, the presence of God among us.
And it’s precisely in that murky situation, where everyone is implicated and nobody lives up to the challenge of witnessing to Christ, that Jesus’s death on the cross makes all the difference.
Let me share something with you. For a long time I thought that John’s gospel painted Jesus as some kind of unfeeling superhero. When Jesus says things like “I can lay my life down and I can pick it up” I feel like he is far from me, far from my humanity. I can empathize more with the Jesus of the other gospels who say they are afraid, who ask that the cup pass from them.
But this year, this Good Friday—how I wish I had that caller on the phone this morning!—this year the clarity and direction of Jesus in the midst of all the sham, complicity, and self-dealing of this world means everything to me. It means life.
It means Jesus has a special connection to us in moments like the one we are in, when senseless death is all around, and when we don’t know where or how to stand. It means that he willingly. Whatever he may mean to us, we mean everything to him.
John’s Jesus specifically wants to enter into just the kind of world we inhabit. John’s Jesus has a special desire to save those of us who are lost in complicity and fear and hypocrisy and double-dealing. He came for this, for us, for the world in which George Floyd is killed on the street while onlookers plead with the authorities to show human compassion. For the powerlessness and grief those onlookers feel. For the complicity in which I am trapped.
John’s Jesus, that word of God made flesh, came for us not only to die as the least among us, but to be raised from the dead, to lift us up to him and with him, to ascend to heaven, to strengthen us. To give us power to become the children of God. We who have had to watch friends and family die from a virus without being able to trust that we could pull together and do our best to prevent those deaths. We behold him, full of grace and truth, determined to dwell among us. To show us that in him death is not the victor.
And maybe the greatest news of all is this. In the middle of a world in which everyone—everyone!—is jockeying to hold onto some kind of power, Jesus who is all power, without whom nothing was made that is made, Jesus the Word of God made flesh, simply lets all of it go. Jesus refuses to hold on to anything the world can give him. He slips through the world’s fingers. Rome is nothing to him and he is content to be nothing to Rome. But we are everything to him.
What does it mean that Jesus died for our sins? It means--this morning, in this location and time--it means that nothing the world wants to give us can entrap us. It means that “meaning” in the world’s terms, significance in the world’s terms, is never going to lift us up or tie us down. It means that we are free to be the children of God. We are free. The knee on the neck, the sorrow of the powerless onlooker, the frustration and despair of quarantine and death: we are free from all of them. We are strong in him. He is strong in us.
I may not have all the words yet, and you may not either. I pray more words will be given to us. But together, in him, nothing can stop us from living into his truth. As boldly as may be.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
Good Friday, 2021
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia