Receiving a Gift

Good Friday is a day where Christians emphasize the gift of salvation won through the Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection on the Cross. There are many focal points a reflection on Good Friday can take, but I want to emphasize the importance of receiving a gift. Holy Thursday emphasizes both giving and receiving a gift, and Good Friday is a day where all stop and realize that there is nothing they can give to improve or heal the situation at hand.

The idea of receiving a gift comes from the idea that "Jesus died for me, and you." This is a difficult notion for me to think about. It seems we have a tension in thinking about salvation. First, sacrifice is an awkward notion to think about a loving God. Sacrifice gives an image of a God who needs appeasing for an awful humanity who can never please God. However, if humanity is in the image of God, then God creates humanity as a good, and therefore, must be pleasing in some way. Humans have grace, and humans sin. God has every right to judge humanity for its sin, yet God also sends God's son into the world to proclaim a kingdom of love. Therefore, if we have a notion of sacrifice, it must include this nuance. God's will does not necessarily include the Cross as sacrifice. This idea would mean that God cooperates with sin in order to proclaim salvation, it also assumes a overly negative anthropology. However, Jesus could not choose anything other than the Cross as is necessary for giving the Holy Spirit, or to be consistent with His own life and mission of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.

Another tension is thinking about the notion of adding weight to Jesus' cross by our own sins. Personally, this seems at least somewhat neurotic. Yes, people sin and need redemption, but it is also true that the fall introduced more than sin into the human condition. While one may argue, that the after effects of sin need sin to actually be introduced, this witness is inconsistent with the testimony in Genesis. Adam and Eve do not commit any sin with each other, but yet still feel the need to cover themselves up after Eve eats the apple from the tree. Therefore, there is some guilt (Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith) that exists in the human condition as well. This reflection is simply to say that adding weight to the cross by our own sins depends on a negative anthropology and a Pelagian view that our work adds more to a suffering which has already happened. Also, if we add weight to Jesus' cross by our sins we ignore the historical circumstances of Jesus' actual crucifixion, and it becomes an overly spiritual experience.

I now want to take the rest of this reflection and emphasize a different part of humanity then what is normally emphasized during the Passion. Much of the Passion story emphasizes the community's negative role and affect on the crucifixion. However, there are several positive influences in the crucifixion narratives that get some prominence, but not in most theological emphases. Simon, Mary, Mary, Mary, and John are all figures presented in Scripture, and Veronica (through the tradition of Stations of the Cross) are positive examples of human compassion in a trying situation. Except for Simon, all of these people received the gift of Jesus' life through His witness and example. Jesus treated women as equals, spoke on behalf of the poor and marginalized in His time and place, and suffered the consequences for His actions. Jesus' witness of God's love is the gift He gives to us, in addition to salvation. The actions of the people listed above are another sign of how humanity can act. Humans can act with the crowd and wish death to Jesus, or people can respond in their own community and show acts of love. All people receive the gift of God's presence, and with any gift, people can be inspired to respond.

A word must be said about reception in itself. Receiving God's gift can happen in a variety of settings, as people see salvation in many various ways. On Good Friday, we want to emphasize the heavenly reality of salvation, that people can enter heaven. However, in receiving gifts, we must note the symbolic hope of salvation we receive from the gifts others give to us. Receiving gifts is hard as there is sin and guilt in human nature, and our own fears of what a gift means to someone else. The gift of salvation we all receive can be viewed in a similar light. We receive a gift, even though we don't know what it looks like, it is a gift given through faith and hope; however, it is a gift for all people, not just individuals. There is a similar fear in receiving a gift of salvation. A gift ties people to a relationship and being in relationship is scary, as our selves become slightly more visible to others. Deep down, it is hard to see God as someone with whom we have a relationship as God seems so different from humanity. However, part of the gift of salvation is that Jesus was a human, and lived a human life, therefore, Jesus knows human experience.

Now a last word needs to be said about salvation. The readings for the Good Friday service emphasize Jesus saving the community. In any theology, there must be the potential for all people to receive salvation, and maybe even all people receiving salvation. Jesus doesn't save individual people, as such. To be fair, communities are made of individuals, and thus de facto individuals must be saved. As listed above, there are dangers of neurosis and judgment with a salvation theology that only emphasizes the individual being saved. So we need a balance discussing the individual experience that God speaks to individual people, yet there is an essential need for the community to experience God and receive salvation, otherwise we ignore our inherent nature to interact with others. So Jesus doesn't die for me, or get more weight added to His cross because of my sins, rather, the sin of human nature as symbolized by the crowd, makes the Cross a reality. Remember Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God, and that led to the consequence of the Cross, because of how dangerous His message was. This death leads to salvation as a remembrance of Jesus' life and as part of the promise of Jesus, that He would be raised to new life, as another symbol of the Kingdom of God.

Aristocrates