Holy Week: Walking Out of Darkness Toward the Light

There is no question that Holy Week can feel like a downer. It seems to go deeper and deeper into darkness so that the glory of Easter might shine the brighter. The intentions are good. Sometimes we need to be shaken out of our complacency, but it has its limitations, especially in a season like the one we’re in now.

Let’s try for another way to approach it starting with this from Friday’s Morning Prayer: “Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace…” The way of the cross is the way of life and peace. It’s the way of deliverance from death to life. Walking in the way of the cross is to have a rich foretaste of the life and peace that lies yet ahead. Holy Week is not about walking into darkness; it is about walking out of darkness toward the light; it is about deliverance; God’s promises fulfilled, not for a few but for the whole world.

Walking in the way of the cross seems counterintuitive, but it works. At my dad’s funeral, a local minister said that he was the rare man who had always walked on the sunny side of the street. It wasn’t true. He’d survived the Depression, survived the South Pacific in WWII, had emotionally wrenching disappointments on the way to business success, had to retire early, and died from complications related to debilitating disease. But, his life was spent walking in the way of the cross, and in it he found and radiated life and peace to those around him.

Holy Week often raises questions about atonement. What does it mean to say Jesus died for our sins? In a recent note to my congregations, I cited Karie Hines Shah who wrote in Christian Century that “Jesus suffers not because it is horribly rare but because it is horribly common.” Popular among many Christians is the “doctrine of substitutionary atonement” that says we are such miserable sinners, undeserving of God’s love, that we need to be punished for it. But God, in his mercy, heaped all of that punishment on Jesus in our place. Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie, “The Passion of the Christ” was a hit sensationalization of the doctrine, but really gross and really bad theology.

Jesus suffered as thousands of others had, and would for centuries to come. He joined with the suffering of both the guilty and unjustly convicted right through the very end, but it wasn’t God’s punishment for our sins, and it wasn’t unique. It was the final and most profound instance of the fullness to which our Lord would share in the reality of our lives, and a sign that we would share in the fullness of his. Can an omnipotent God really, truly know what you and I go through as mere human beings? Yes, God does because God has.

Substitutionary atonement is but one of many doctrines of atonement that have come into and gone out of favor over the centuries. The Anglican tradition, as expressed in the Episcopal Church, doesn’t dogmatically teach any of them. All of them have something worthwhile to say, and provide endless opportunities for academic theologians to write books. But for us it is enough to say that in Christ and through Christ our sins are forgiven. “In him, you have delivered us from evil, and made us worthy to stand before you. In him, you have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” We accept this in faith as a holy mystery to be lived into, not explained.