Wednesday: study, contemplate
Yes, Wednesday is Bible Study or theological musing or other such a blogpost, but first!
There's good news and bad. We are sheltering in place and making something good out of it in the sense of When life gives you Lemons make Lemonade. Beautiful yellow bananas delivered from both Publix and Sam's looked so fine. Upon peeling they were disgusting slippery mush, but made banana bread that's more delicious than any banana ever thought of being. Two loaves. My reserve about having bananas around the house is that YouTube video showing an enormous spider breaking out of the banana in which it had evidently been sheltering. Jeepers.
Anyway ... . We had light rain yesterday. Rain again last night, going by water on the balcony rail, Bay side. Came from southerly: there's no water on the sidewalk rail outside looking north over Beck Avenue. All of life is welcome and Life is Good, though a gray world seems to know there's plague stalking.
Something a friend said to me in an email yesterday circled my thoughts back to the Good Friday question: Why? Why Good Friday? In a Sunday School class thirty or so years ago, or maybe it was a Tuesday morning EfM seminar I don't recall for sure, a Distressed member of the group raised a moral objection to a God and Father who would be so low as to send his beloved Son down to Earth to be crucified, much less to bother dying for creatures of our ilk and, with our histories of inhumanity, hardly worth saving anyway.
We are Episcopalians and there are no questions that cannot be asked, and what the Distressed person raised is not an unreasonable observation in a group with modern world views of common decency, who have read and heard that "God is Love", who are struggling to make sense of Christian theology and understand the God of Israel whom Christians have taken up with and perceived in ways foreign to the Heilsgeschichte of Judaism. That is, outside of monotheistic Judaism in adding persons, even a human person, to the Godhead. The notion of a God of Love sending his beloved Son, be he man or god, to suffer the nightmare of Good Friday.
One thing is that, seeing Good Friday as singularly done to Jesus, we don't take into account that crucifixion was historically a common Roman and earlier and later means of executing a capital sentence. Not only Jesus, but thousands of people were crucified.
Still, anyone with a modern sense of right and wrong who stands back and tries to take an objective look might have to be astounded at the theologies we have developed to explain the stories that have been passed down to us in the New Testament. For example, our medieval Eucharistic Prayer with its theology that goes back to Cranmer, 1549, and the Latin liturgy from whence he translated it:
All glory be to thee, Almighty God, our heavenly Father, for
that thou, of thy tender mercy, didst give thine only Son Jesus
Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption; who
made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full,
perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for
the sins of the whole world ...
that thou, of thy tender mercy, didst give thine only Son Jesus
Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption; who
made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full,
perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for
the sins of the whole world ...
For in the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread;
and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and gave it to his
disciples, saying, "Take, eat, this is my Body, which is given
for you. ... ."
Likewise, after supper, he took the cup; and when he had
given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, "Drink ye all of this;
for this is my Blood ... , which is shed for you, and for many, for the remission of sins. ... ."
given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, "Drink ye all of this;
for this is my Blood ... , which is shed for you, and for many, for the remission of sins. ... ."
... his blessed passion and precious death, his mighty resurrection and glorious ascension; rendering unto thee most hearty thanks for the innumerable benefits procured unto us by the same.
... in remembrance of his death and passion, may be partakers
of his most blessed Body and Blood.
of his most blessed Body and Blood.
... by the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ, and through faith in his blood, we, and all thy whole Church, may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion.
It's transactional atonement, blood for sin to purchase forgiveness. Yes, there's the Last Supper account in the synoptic gospels, and Paul's entire theology and his 1 Corinthians 11. There's also the Italian philosopher and cleric Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury 1093-1109, his doctrine of substitutionary atonement. And Fanny Crosby:
To God be the glory! Great things He has done!
So loved He the world that He gave us His Son;
Who yielded His life an atonement for sin,
And opened the life-gate that all may go in.
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Let the earth hear His voice!
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Let the people rejoice!
Come to the Father, through Jesus the Son:
Give Him the glory! Great things He has done!
O perfect redemption, the purchase of blood!
Quite early, indeed from Easter afternoon and evening, there's rationalization of what first century Judaism expected to happen, versus what did happen, versus what must have been either divinely meant to happen or went terribly wrong, after messianic hopes for a triumphant Jesus of Nazareth turned into Good Friday: to explain a humiliated and murdered king instead of dismissing him and continuing to expect the One Who Is to Come.
From Easter, Christianity was a messianic sect or cult of Judaism, in time spreading into the community of gentile pagans. In spreading, certainly from Paul to the gentiles, it becomes no longer the Jewish expected secular restoration of the throne of David - - and being perceived and interpreted apocalyptically as something of God and the kingdom of heaven, it had to be theologized. People did just that. Including the gospel evangelists, and Paul, and later writers, and the developing Christian movement. Also Anselm with his idea of atonement that, being the Lord's own blood, reasonably satisfied the feudal system and understanding of his age.
Responding to the Distressed member of our group, I had in mind a sermon I'd heard at Holy Nativity, Panama City one Trinity Sunday years earlier when we were home on Navy leave or vacation. Father Bob Battin saying that the Trinity is not a description of God (who is indescribable), but a metaphor for our experience of God. I liked that at the time, and may still like it, I'd have to think about it. My response to the Distressed person was that God did not "send his beloved Son" in the horrifying sense of a human parent sending his innocent child, but that God Himself Came as Jesus of Nazareth. That God's own self came.
That seemed to get us past the moral obstacle of the Father sending someone else to do the bloody work that had to be done.
Why did bloody work have to be done? is part of the theological issue.
There are more factors to be theologized, which the Church has variously done well or problematically. Thoughts for discussion, which is the way we do theology and Bible study. Contemplate the following. You may either apply your existing theological understanding, perhaps what you have always been taught - - or apply your own new thinking - - to arrive at your responses:
- Was there a human sin debt that had to be paid so as to satisfy a just God?
- Was Good Friday & Easter the main thing about Jesus coming (i.e., to Save us from our sins), OR was Christmas the main thing, God's incarnation and the life and ministry of Jesus (i.e., to Show us how to live in the image of God in which we were created)?
- Was Good Friday & Easter God's plan from the beginning, OR God's bringing divine good out of human evil, OR human interpretation, by Jesus' disciples and others, of the disappointing situation that unfolded after Palm Sunday?
- Again, was Good Friday God's plan all along, OR was God surprised and enraged (Matthew 27:45,51, darkened sky, curtain rips, earthquake, rocks split) at Good Friday, and therefore God responded with Easter?
- Is Good Friday better understood per Anselm, as a necessary divine/human blood sacrifice to settle the otherwise unpayable human sin debt to the just God; OR as the climax of God coming willingly to live a hard life and brutal death as God's offering of sacrificial love?
- Or was Good Friday simply a tragic miscarriage that begged theologizing?
- Do you believe that God has a Plan for your life, OR rather that God has Hopes for your Free Will life, OR perhaps neither?
- If Jesus came as God's Plan of Salvation, who was more key to carrying out God's Plan of Salvation, Simon Peter or Judas Iscariot?
- Finally, do you enjoy theological discourse, OR are you reluctant to challenge standing settled doctrines, OR would you rather leave the subject to Christian tradition, orthodoxy, creeds, doctrines, and church authorities?
- No, I'll add one more. What do you think about the words and assertions you're saying when you say the Nicene Creed on Sunday mornings?
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