Good Friday & Bad Religion

“In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves. ‘He saved others,’ they said, ‘but he can’t save himself! Let this Messiah, this king of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.’ Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him.”
Mark 15:31-32

This week, Christians begin the celebration of Holy Week. We retrace the footsteps of Jesus from his peculiar parade among the subjugated and disinherited masses, to his final gasping breaths on the cross, as the religious leaders heap insults upon him.

It’s also a time when toxic theology runs wild. Some speak of a vengeful God punishing the hell out of his son for the sins of the world. A God who demands blood to make things right.

What’s up with Christian’s fixation on all the cross and bloodshed stuff? What’s so good about “Good Friday”?

The answer to this question requires us to return to the beginning of our story. The first word that God speaks over us there is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Belovedness, “very goodness” is at the core of our identity.

However, we don’t have to look far either in the world or in ourselves to see that there is also something wrong.

The world is filled with violence, division, racism, poverty, sickness, inequality, and death. The outward expressions of these visible signs also stir in our own souls. Every person is capable of great good, and equally capable of great evil. So, in every human being there is a dialectical tension, or seemingly these two opposing forces. We are all in some sense wounded and in need of God’s healing grace.

How did we get here? The Bible tells us that shortly after receiving God’s pronouncement over us—“very good”—something goes wrong. I like to think of this as our original trauma. Imagine that we are innocent children, and a trusted family friend shows up, manipulates, and abuses us in some way. Our innocence is stolen. Our relationships are fragmented. In our pain, we might act out and cause harm to others. This is the universal human condition.

The trauma that we carry from this abuse is like a virus. We can think of it as “inbeing sin.” Every person and every living thing is born infected with it. It’s literally embedded in our cells in a latent way. We need healing from this infection.

Fortunately, in the very next scene we find God coming to the garden with the gentle call “Where are you?” (Genesis 3: 9). The good news is from the very beginning God is trying to put that relationship back together. God does that through liberation from bondage in the Exodus, graceful boundaries for life in the Covenant, and prophets who offer course corrections along the journey to wholeness as we fail forward.

Ultimately, God heals this breach of relationship by coming to us in the person of Jesus Christ. He refuses to be God without us, so he becomes Immanuel “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). Jesus is the embodiment of God’s garden call, “Where are you?” He’s the God who comes to find us and rescue us from the fragmentation. He heals us of the disease, restoring us fully to our “very good” state.

While all of Jesus’s life, incarnation, and presence with us now make this healing available to us, it is through the cross that the virus is dealt with.

The “rulers and authorities” gather collectively at the cross and are “disarmed” and triumphed over in a public spectacle (Colossians 2:15). All the forces of moral and natural evil—imperial evil, religious evil, demonic evil—converge literally in an earthquake in one place, in one moment in time (Matthew 27:51). Creation itself glitches, grieving in darkness. There, concentrated in the pain-wracked body of Jesus himself, with the virus of sin isolated in his own flesh (2 Corinthians 5:21), he takes on “our shame” in himself (Hebrews 12:2), and destroys its power through his own sacrificial death (1 Corinthians 15:55-56).

Historically, models of atonement (think at-one-ment) seek to explain how Jesus’s sacrifice reconciles us our relationship with God. Each of these models has strengths and weaknesses, yet with unintended consequences contribute to an ideology of violence.

But God is not the bloodthirsty one, we are. Jesus is the fullness of God’s beauty, truth, and goodness—enfleshed. The life of heaven comes to earth, not simply as a satisfaction or substitution but as God’s pure, nonviolent, unbounded love—and we give him hell.

If we understand the cross in terms of God as Trinity (three distinct persons, One God), we are reminded that Jesus the Son is also God. The crucified Christ is the “crucified God,” not simply a moment of transaction between the two.

Don’t get hung up on toxic theology that views the cross in terms of “divine child abuse.” It’s actually bad religion that killed Jesus. A system that believed in marginalizing and even executing people that were perceived as a threat to the hierarchical status quo.

Bad religion hangs people on crosses.

The cross is about the remarkable depth of God’s love, to enter into the living hell we can inflict upon each other, to end the animal and grain sacrificial system and the need for violence once and for all. God descends into the deepest recesses of our human brokenness to show us who we really are.

The unbounded mercy of God manifests in Jesus’ ministry of compassion and finds ultimate expression in the cross. The quality of God’s being is expressed through immersion in human vulnerability and suffering, expressed most fully in the passion of Christ. Thus, in Jesus, we encounter the traumatized God.

Passio Dei (Latin for “passion of God”) is grounded primarily in the incarnation, suffering, crucifixion, and death (passion) of Jesus.

God’s nature is the self-emptying (kenotic), other-oriented, and sacrificial love fully displayed in the crucifixion—passional. The passion of Christ expresses God’s inhabitation of human pain and loss. The cross is the way of Jesus.

Union with and formation “in Christ” requires a passional way of living.

“Good Friday” is partly good, because the cross exposes and defeats bad religion.

Unfortunately, bad theology really does kill, then and now.

Sociologists have long distinguished between intrinsic religiosity and extrinsic religiosity (Allport and Ross, 1967). Extrinsic religiosity is motivated by how religion can be used to satisfy one’s own needs. People in this space see religious participation as a means to achieve security, social status, social connectedness, and so on. These extrinsic types turn to God without turning away from the self and use religion toward their own ends. Intrinsic religiosity, in contrast, is motivated by guiding principles for how to live with integrity and a meaning endowed framework.

Allport and Ross define the distinction as simply, “the extrinsically motivated person uses their religion, whereas the intrinsically motivated lives their religion” (Allport and Ross, 1967, 434). Perhaps we can see this contrast in the story of Holy Week?

Further studies with the ageing (Ardelt & Koenig, 2006, 2009) demonstrate that intrinsic religiosity leads to better health outcomes, deeper meaning and purpose, and peaceful death acceptance in older adults. Whereas extrinsic religiosity leads to decline in health, and greater death anxiety.

Bad theology kills because it leads to negative religious coping which flows from distorted beliefs. These studies showed that people’s perceptions of God: punishing, judgmental, absent, or dishing out suffering for some greater purpose, led to poorer health outcomes and self-defeating behaviors. Our theology, how we think about God, suffering, and death, effects every dimension of our humanity and greater wellbeing. It also impacts our compassion response, our ability to empathize and care for others.

What kind of religiosity dominates in the United States?

Let bad religion die on that cross. So, we can experience true union with the Crucified God we encounter there.