Thoughts on Good Friday and Violence

Georges Rouault, Head of Christ, c. 1937

The Cleveland Museum of Art

 Why have Christians through the ages used the word Good for the terrible events of Good Friday? Perhaps because the meaning of the day is revelatory because it shatters all old conceptions of God, of God as angry or vengeful, by showing a vulnerable, and therefore compassionate God.

This day is Good, and here I would argue with some Christians in love in order to say that Jesus did not come into the world only to die. If we believe as some Christians, including the great theologian Anselm and many other have believed and still do believe, that God demanded blood sacrifice through Christ in order to come again into a right relationship with humans (because God enforces strict justice, and humans have sinned, and God demands a retributive payment) we then believe in a wrathful, angry God. That is not the God revealed by Jesus on the cross; if we worship that God, this Friday would not be good. That God would be made in our image, because in the world we know, we are asked to acquiesce to the lie that violence is necessary to conquer violence, where supposedly good violence is used to try to redeem from bad violence; but that is the world of calculation and suffering, repeated time and again, an endless cycle of destruction.

This Friday is good not because of violence but despite violence. Jesus was betrayed into a terrible violent death by a system of domination that feared the attractive goodness of his preaching and teaching of peace and goodness and healing, his passionate preaching and living from a foundation of love and justice. He succumbed to the violence of domination and control; Jesus only responded with suffering love. Which makes that possible for all of us. That makes this Friday Good, even though still it would seem that all was lost, that God’s self was defeated by human evil.

This Friday is Good finally because of the Resurrection. In resurrecting Jesus, God’s self, we know that God’s power of love and justice, seemingly vulnerable, is stronger than any power on earth.

(I've benefitted from reading Rene Gerard's The Scapegoat and, building on Gerard, Mark S. Heim's Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross.