Thoughts on Holy Saturday

Most of us Church members are nominally Christians. We often worship something else. To be a Christian is to worship Jesus the person, to adhere to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

Instead we believe in other things. When we say we believe in something we are saying, “I give my heart to...” The general run of the population of America gives its heart to wealth, beauty, popularity, power, accumulation of goods, security and happiness. Most people are thus functional polytheists.

Church members too are functional polytheists, but our gods, often in addition to the ones mentioned above, include a special set of deities to whom we give our hearts.

They are an Intellectual God, the God of Goodness and the God of Religion.

For many church members belief is not about the heart but about the mind, the understanding. To be a faithful God follower is to be convinced by arguments both rational and irrational that something is true. The history of Christian theology is replete with arguments for the existence of God. Much of Christian theology since 1700 has been about proving that events in the Bible actually happened. Both conservatives and liberals are prone to worship their own convictions. Conservatives argue for literal interpretations of scripture and strict adherence to a defined set of moral standards. Liberals worship reason and reject anything they cannot figure out.

The most common god we church members worship is Goodness. Being a Christians we say is about doing good things rather than bad things and being nice to everyone. This idea takes the form of soup kitchens, clothing give aways, shelters and sometimes lobbying for good causes. In its most frequent form the worship of goodness is about being congenial. Being pleasant to everyone all the time. “We are a friendly church,” most congregations say when looking for a new pastor. Of course, it is not possible to be nice and good all the time. So on those many occasions when someone in the church offends us, especially if it is the priest, we face a dilemma. Since we have to be nice we cannot tell the person whose behavior we don’t like to his face. We talk to other people about it; we engage in passive-aggressive action. Or we just leave the church without explanation.

Our desire to tell the truth, to act out our unhappiness, is pushed into a corner until it explodes in aggressive behavior. Clergy see this all the time. We also are guilty of it.

Church members also worship religion. We venerate our buildings, prayer books, hymns, liturgies, our moments of religious ecstasy and sometimes even the clergy.

We clergy are especially prone to give our hearts to the church in one of its many forms.

Most of us church members worship, give our hearts, to one or more of these divinities. All of these ideals are quite good. It is good to think carefully about scripture and morals. It is good to care for the needy and be kind to other people. It is good to be involved in causes which will make our lives better. It is good to preserve the outward forms of of our faith. Prayer, Justice and Mercy, says the prophet, are the outward signs of our inward faith. But they are not the objects Christian should be worshipping.

It is good to know where we mistakenly leave our hearts for it might just call us back to Jesus.

Maundy Thursday. Blood Theology

Maundy Thursday
Blood Theology John 13: 1-15
Would Jesus be any deader if he had not been crucified? If the gore of Good Friday had not been so gory? What if Jesus had been beheaded? Killed with a lethal injection? Would it make any difference to the value of our salvation? I mean is it the blood that is important?

Would our salvation be any better, more complete if Jesus had died in a more horrific way? Eviscerated and drawn and quartered?

How does the horror of Jesus death effect our salvation? If there is more horror are we saved sooner, better or more of us?

How much blood does it take to save us.

Crucifixion is not a terribly bloody death; the victim dies of asphyxiation.

The beating of Jesus is limited is a single verse at Matt 26:67, Mark14:65 and Luke 22:63

Then again at Matt 27:26, Mark 15 15 and John 19:1 but not in Luke!

Blood theology has at least two forms: one the resurrected Jesus soaked up all the blood shed in his death and deposited it in heaven where it is used to cleanse those who need it. Hence blood theology.

two God’s anger over the sinfulness of man can only be assuaged by death. Jesus’ pain and death substitutes for us. Hence substitutionary atonement theology. In this way of thinking, God is overpoweringly angry at all human beings and his anger must be appeased. He decided to appease his own anger by sending his son to be killed in our place.

The moral danger of blood theology is that it baptizes violence and bloodshed in God’s name. It is the source in our culture of the desire for retribution, punishment and war all in the name of God. For capital executions, for carrying weapons on the streets of our cities, and for the attacks we are making on the people in Iraq, Afghanistan etc.

Here is what I think of as orthodox soteriology: [soteriology is the study of how people are saved] God sent the Son, God came as a human into our lives to make us one with him, to draw us back into relationship. God became in every way like us. In our hunger, in our temptations, in our pains and anguish. This is called in theological terms: the Incarnation. God did not intend for Jesus to be executed, but SURPRISE he let it happen. Jesus did not have to let himself die. And SURPRISE Jesus was willing. And the big surprise is that God took this horrible human action and turned it one its head: SURPRISE resurrection!

Were are we in this? We are the ones who crucify Jesus. whenever we do it to one of the least of God’s creatures we do it to Jesus. We are also the benificiaries of the cross. The whole of Christ’s passion is for us. Pain and Blood included.

Being a Christian is not an escape from sin, pain or death. Being a Christian is about being like Jesus in this world.

William Porcher DuBose, 19th Century Anglican theologian, wrote in The Soteriology of the New Testament p. 239-40, “...our Salvation consists not in some one’s performing a vicarious act or enduring a vicarious penalty which has the effect of a formal and objective satisfaction to the nature, the justice, or the divine government of God for their moral or abstract guilt; but it consists in some one’s doing, or having done, for us and in us that which will break the power over us of the inherited nature, of the accumulated and consolidated consequences in our nature, which those sins have entailed upon us.”