Some time ago, a Jewish friend told me about her discomfort at being taken to watch The Passion of the Christ. She said, “It’s just too painful to watch God being killed.” I replied, “As Christians, we are so familiar with the story that it doesn’t shock us.” If we observe Good Friday at all, it is a quiet service with somber, reverent music. Because we know the ending, we do not experience the terror or the soul-sucking despair felt by the disciples. More importantly, because we know that Good Friday will be followed shortly by chocolate bunnies and Easter dresses and shouts of “He is risen indeed,” we do not dwell overly much on the meaning of Good Friday: it is a passing inconvenience.
If, like my Jewish friend, we approach the story with fresh eyes, the story is truly shocking. Man kills God. Of course, we have a ready answer to this. Man kills God because God allows it to happen. The more disturbing question is why. We don’t like to dwell on why because there are two different why stories, both disturbing in their own way.
On the one hand, you have the Mel Gibson version of Good Friday. In the Passion of the Christ, the God man Jesus doesn’t just die, he is tortured beyond our ability to watch. It is the story of a raging, out of control God who must have satisfaction. Jesus is like the older sibling who takes a beating from the alcoholic father in order to protect the younger, vulnerable one. As Christians, we are grateful that Jesus took the beating instead of us. When He returns like a conquering superhero, we know that we will never have to fear God the Father again.
Admittedly, my analogy is exaggerated. God the Father is not an out of control monster who must be satisfied. Instead, God the Father is just. The penalty for sin is death and that price must be paid. The fact that His Son pays the price for us does not change the fact that God the Father demands that the price be paid. In the world of Mel Gibson, God the Father is very much of an eye for an eye, a life for a life kind of God.
C.S. Lewis excellently captures another answer to why in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When Aslan, the Jesus analogue, returns from being killed by the White Witch, Susan asks what it means. Aslan replies:
It means that although the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.
In this version, Jesus is not a pathetic victim, but a brave and loving friend, who sacrifices Himself so that we might be saved. While God the Father cedes some of his power to Death, he also provides the means to conquer Death.
In the Bible, “for God so loved the world” and “greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends” support the Jesus as Aslan view of God. What is disturbing here is that God limits Himself. He establishes rules which even He must abide. However, as a loving God, He provides an override to those rules, a “deeper magic” in the words of C.S. Lewis. This really begs the question of why God couldn’t have just invoked the deeper magic to begin with and spared us the pain of sin. If God will grant us a blissful afterlife, why couldn’t He have just skipped to the good part? I don’t know. However, I would much rather prefer a limited but loving God to one who is angry and omnipotent.
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