Recently, a fellow parishioner in her late ‘60s shared with me that she’s not sure how to feel about Good Friday as it evokes troubling spiritual questions that feel out of bounds to ask: “Was Jesus punished in our place?” “Did my sins sentence Jesus to death? Should I feel guilty?” and “Why couldn’t God forgive our sins without Jesus having to suffer?” I’ve witnessed many people across generations wrestle with these questions, questions that are an act of faith seeking understanding.
My experience as a teacher, pastoral minister, and spiritual director has led me to believe that a significant number of Catholics understand the cross through the thinking of Protestant reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin. These 16th-century theologians argued that sin deserves punishment, and Jesus undergoes punishment in our place, absorbing God’s wrath like a lightning rod. Theologians call this the penal substitution theory. The notion that Jesus is a penal substitute for us is, however, foreign to both Scripture and our Catholic tradition. How then might we interpret the cross in a way that doesn’t present God as an angry father who needs to be placated?
READ: ‘I Thirst’: A Good Friday Reflection
First, we reconnect Jesus’ death with history. He was executed because the powerful religious authorities and Roman government saw Jesus as a threat to the status quo, not because God demanded or desired it. The Gospel of John, for example, reports that after the raising of Lazarus, the Jerusalem authorities put out a warrant for Jesus’ arrest — “Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that anyone who knew where Jesus was should let them know, so that they might arrest him” (John 11:57). Coupled with Jesus’ message about the imminent arrival of a new kingdom (Mark 1:15), the Temple being destroyed (Mark 13:2), and the designs of some to make him king (John 6:15), Jesus knew that in a volatile world with political and religious violence, his end was coming. Though he realized and accepted that it might cost him his life, Jesus trusted that the benevolent power he called “Father” would transform this tragic fate.
Second, we are invited to contemplate Jesus as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). When he was pelted in hate, anger, violence, and death, when he was made the scapegoat, when a frightened people projected all their fear onto him, Jesus absorbed their sins and gave them pure love and forgiveness. The impulse to return hate for hate lurks deep in the human psyche as a programmed, gut response. Yet, Jesus did not say to his disciples, “Get revenge for what they did to me.” Rather, he broke the cycle, showing that the world’s way of dealing with darkness is not God’s way, that the “good guys” don’t defeat the “bad guys” with violence but with compassion and love. Does Jesus need our admiration and thanks for this heroic act of loving the enemy, or does he challenge us to do likewise?
LISTEN: Why Do We Kiss the Cross on Good Friday?
Third, just as Jesus’ death brings liberation from the addictive cycle of violence and revenge, we are invited to embrace the resurrection as empowerment for a new way of living, a new mode of being human characterized by what St. Paul called the “fruits of the Spirit” — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). According to Paul, Baptism enables us to participate in this freedom and power that comes through the cross and resurrection: “Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4). Early Christian baptism rituals dramatized Paul’s vision — the initiate stepped down into a pool, removed their old clothes, were “buried” in water, then rose to be clothed in a white garment, a symbol of new life in the community.
Good Friday didn’t change God’s attitude toward us from anger to forgiveness, for God has always looked upon us with mercy and compassion. Rather, Jesus brings us with him from death through resurrection to a new way of living, free from the self-centered values of the world to a Christ — and other — centered life. With a renewed perspective on this pivotal day, we are invited to shift our emphasis from passivity to action, from guilt to healing, from despair to hope. Empowered by Jesus, we are called to say “yes,” to claim and live the liberating love of the cross.
