GOOD FRIDAY & THE TWO WOLVES [F, 4-7-23]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—GOOD FRIDAY & THE TWO WOLVES [F, 4-7-23]

 

On Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, I told you about how then grad school daughter Katie was asked if she were saved. When she replied “Yes,” her interlocutor was surprised and said, “When?” She replied, “On Good Friday.” That, of course, is the correct answer. It is God’s work in Christ that saves us…saves us from original sin, that built-in desire to get what we want regardless of what happens to other people. But is such salvation really necessary?

After all, there is a counter weight to original sin: prevenient grace. That’s what John Wesley called it. “Preventing” grace, that tries to prevent us from doing evil, and is built into us just as original sin is. In common practice, it’s called “conscience.” The apostle, Paul, talks about it in Romans 2:15.

In life, original sin [“original” meaning there from the beginning] and prevenient grace are the two wolves in the shaman story: Two wolves fight within the shaman. ‘Which is winning?” he is asked. “Whichever one I feed,” he answers.

So, is the conquering of sin--that saves us from brokenness and makes us whole—our work, by feeding the grace wolf instead of the selfishness wolf, or the work of God in Jesus Christ?

I’ve read just about every smart person who has tried to answer that and never gotten a satisfactory answer. It’s usually along the lines of “God saves us through the atonement and sacrifice of Jesus, and then we respond to that by doing good stuff.”

Well, can’t you just do good stuff anyway? And there is plenty of evidence that people who are “saved” don’t do better stuff than the unsaved. In fact, they often do worse stuff!

There were three early interpretations of Good Friday: the Hebrew, the Greek, and the Roman.

Hebrew: The earliest Christians were Jews, of course, so they saw Good Friday as a sacrifice. Jews went to the temple on the high holy days and made a sacrifice to God, preferably an unblemished lamb. So Jesus, who was crucified on the Temple mount during the holy days, became the “lamb of God,” and we are “saved by the blood of the lamb.” A life, a sacrifice had to be given to satisfy the Almighty, and even though “He” was the one doing it, in Christ, there was no salvation—getting right with God—without a sacrifice.

Greek: The Greek influence was both philosophical and artistic. Philosophy gave us Gnosticism, the idea that Good Friday is understood only by the intuition of the elite, who know things that nobody else does. [gnosis in Greek is knowledge] The Greek [and Roman] plays gave us the Trinity. In those plays, actors played many roles by coming on stage wearing different masks. The masks were called personae. In the Trinity, God is an actor who wears three different masks, three personae. That’s how God manages to sacrifice to Himself.

The Romans were legalists. They were as fixated on Law as the Hebrews, but theirs was secular. Nonetheless, this gave us the “substitutionary atonement” theory. The legal case: People, in Adam, sinned against God, by trying to take the place of God, and the righteousness of God requires that someone must be punished, just as someone had to be punished if you committed a crime against the Roman Empire. God, in the person of Christ, takes the necessary punishment, substituting himself for us.

These days, it’s hard to believe in salvation through esoteric knowledge shared by only a few, or that God has to be placated through blood sacrifice, or that every misdemeanor requires capital punishment. Where does that leave us?

I never liked Good Friday much, because I can’t get the two wolves to settle down long enough to figure out what’s going on. I think, though, that we come closer to the meaning of the cross by singing about it than philosophizing about it.

That cross is old and rugged, yes

but also stainless steel

timeless

meaning everything

meaning nothing

In frustration I throw up my hands

and cry in confusion

But I also throw up my hands

and cry in affirmation

He lives! He lives! Salvation to impart…

 

If nothing else, and maybe this is the totality, the cross says that God loves us to the max, and the empty tomb says that love isn’t a one-and-done but continues every day, forever…

John Robert McFarland