We are drawing close to Holy Week, and I would like to share some reflections on how to enter more fully and freely into its observance. It is the most important time of the Christian year. It is also the most challenging time of the Christian year. To experience this time meaningfully, we need to avoid its pitfalls and embrace its promise.
Two Big Pitfalls
It is important to acknowledge up front that Holy Week lends itself to the worst kind of anti-Judaism. While the Church has acknowledged that “the Jews” did not kill Jesus, our sacred texts and liturgies can still reinforce this idea if we do not handle them with care. As one of my parishioners pointedly (and rightly) reminded me: “We have to do better than just throwing the other team under the bus.” If we come away from Holy Week believing that Judaism is the bad guy in this story, then we have missed the whole point.
So, let’s be clear: Jesus is a Jew, and his ministry was very much a reform movement within Judaism. The texts of the New Testament are written primarily (perhaps entirely) by Jews, and they express 1st Century conflicts among competing interpretations of Jewish faith. Some Jews came to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. Others disagreed. This was very much an intra-Jewish debate. Context matters and it is important to keep this context in mind.
Jesus was crucified by the Roman Empire for sedition at the behest of some local Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. John’s Gospel, properly translated, refers to them as “the Judaeans,” not “the Jews.” Scholars like John Dominic Crossan have worked assiduously to separate out the historical kernel from the theological husk of the Gospel accounts.
Theologically, Jesus’ death reveals the duplicity and cruelty of all human regimes of domination, and the veneer of religious piety within which it is hidden. The Passion narratives rip away the political and religious justifications to reveal the violence at the heart of human civilization and the innocence of its victims. Who killed Jesus? We all did. Human civilization did. That is the theological significance of the Passion that the Gospels seek to convey. The Passion is not a story about what Jews did to Jesus, much less to Christians, but rather about what humans do to each other. Sadly, the history of what Christians have done to Jews only serves to underscore the truth of the violent human dynamic that the Passion story reveals. Using this story to reinscribe the very “us” vs. “them” binary that Jesus seeks to overcome indicates just how seriously Christianity too often has misinterpreted it.
This leads to a related pitfall during Holy Week: the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. It is the idea that Jesus’ died for our sins, bearing the punishment that we deserve to satisfy God’s demand for retributive justice. Jesus did not die for our sins. He died because of our sins, because of our collective enslavement to order based on sacrificial violence. His death is liberating, not because it placates an angry God; but because it confronts us with the truth about ourselves, and makes it possible for us to consciously choose sacrificial love instead of sacrificial violence as the basis for human and ecological community.
The theological meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the evolutionary leap in human consciousness that it inaugurates, unleashing an unlimited potential for growth in wisdom and compassion. The Eastern Church understood rightly that salvation is deification, recovering the image of God within us. Jesus died, not to liberate us from divine wrath, but from human wrath, so that we might reclaim our identity and our unity in divine love.
One Big Promise
This is the big promise of Holy Week: that by dying to the way of violence we can be reborn in the way of love. We can partake of the divine nature by realizing the potential of our human nature. There is another way to live.
Holy Week is a dramatic rehearsal of the way of love. Its practice is familiar to any good community organizer. It begins with intentionally raising the tension in the system to make visible its violence and inhumanity. It does so creatively: a march on Jerusalem from Galilee with a symbolic entrance into the city that recalls prophetic hope for justice, a symbolic cleansing of the Temple in protest against exploitation, and a teach-in calling the authorities to account for their complicity with oppression.
It continues with a kind of political ju-jitsu, confronting civilizational violence with a willingness to sacrifice oneself in solidarity with its victims. Jesus refuses to deny either the reality of oppression or the humanity of everyone involved. Conflict is heightened, not through reciprocal violence (sacrificing other people), but by raising consciousness through a willingness to make sacrifices in the service of truth and reconciliation (risking vilification, arrest, punishment and even death). Sacrificial violence is opposed by sacrificial love, so that that the binary of “us” vs. “them” is overcome. There is only “us.”
Sacrificial love escalates the confrontation by expanding the circle of community embracing the path of love. The “them” keeps getting smaller and the “us” keeps getting larger as we realize and manifest the flow of mercy in tune with the beating heart of God at the center of reality. The promise is resurrection: life lived from this center.
May we honestly and carefully navigate the pitfalls of Holy Week as we journey together to claim its astonishing promise. May it become the pattern of our collective life until the promise is fulfilled.
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