What Did the Death of Jesus Mean?

I still don’t know. But I have a thought about it which I haven’t read elsewhere.

My idea comes from decades of experiencing Holy Week. For most of those decades I’ve been a parish priest; and for most of those, I haven’t preached sermons for any of the weekday liturgies, but let those experiences speak for themselves. I didn’t stop preaching out of cowardice, but humility. It came to feel boorish, intruding on such holy ground with my petty explanations. So I’ve gotten out of the way of the immensities of Holy Week.

Which has led me to wonder if the experiences, for us as followers, are the point of it all, more than Jesus’ death having some transactional effect on Gd. No, I’m not the first to point to our response as key; but all the ‘sympathy’ theories are nonetheless still atonement theories, which means that they’re still transactional, still about eliciting Gd’s forgiveness — they just bring the believer’s repentance into the mix. But just experiment with me for a minute: If you take the forgiveness of sin entirely out of the matrix of Holy Week’s meanings, and focus solely on believers’ experiences, where does that take you?

Thursday: The warmth and fear at the Last Meal — the last, not the first — highlights the risk factor inherent in Jesus’ shared meals of healing and social restoration, which the disciples are to ‘keep doing’ after Jesus’ death. His arrest in Gethsemane, where he gives himself up to save his followers — it's an act of love, yes; but more importantly it’s so that there will be people left who can carry forward the movement without him.

Friday: Gathered at the foot of the cross, weeping  in grief for and solidarity with Jesus’ suffering and death. Then lovingly bearing his beaten, tortured body to its tomb. Going home with his blood on their clothes.

Saturday: The Sabbath of waiting; the dark night of the absence of Gd.

Sunday: Returning to the tomb to anoint his body properly, only to be greeted by him, raised from death, outside the tomb.

Easter Season: Often overlooked as the proper end bracket of Holy Week, the other resurrection appearances almost all take place in the context of shared meals — the disciples continuing and being recommissioned to continue to ‘feed my sheep’ with sacred meals, where grace is offered for free, outside the Temple system of sacrifices.

Taken altogether, from the perspective of our experience as witnesses and would-be disciples, Holy Week is a moment-by-moment stare into the face of the terrible risk and cost of truly following Jesus; and it begins and ends with his call to follow him anyway, as the only way to bring about true and abundant life for all.

So I guess what I’m asking, with all this, is: What if the meaning of Jesus’ death is the exact opposite of what we’ve said for the last millennium? What if it’s not about “what he did for us” but about “what those who love him are to keep doing, in his place, for others” — despite knowing full well the terrible risk and likely cost of doing so? What if the meaning of Jesus’ cross means really to take up our own crosses?

I’m not at all sure that I’m brave enough to do that — to bear bread and fish, water and wine into AIDS hospitals and prisons and psych wards and homeless encampments and abortion clinics and detention centers at the border — but I’m pretty sure that doing so, all of us doing so, is Jesus’ intended meaning of Holy Week.

I’m pretty sure he turned himself in and died so that the rest of us could keep doing those things, now that (physically anyway) he’s gone.

And I am convicted by this; not just by my fear of dying in order to follow Jesus, but by my resistance even to getting off my couch and a little outside my comfort zone to do so. 

This too is what Holy Week does. It asks us whether we who say we love him are true followers of Jesus — or not.