Dear Rick

I think Jesus sacrificed for the same causes or values as did other prophets over the centuries.  For what MLK Jr. died for; or Mahatma Gandhi; or Abraham Lincoln; or Sojourner Truth; or other victims of war defending one’s family or community:  For the cause of justice; for the cause of compassion.

Jesus was killed by the Roman Empire (as were thousands who opposed its values) and with the help of some people in his religious tribe who were in cahoots with the Empire.  He was inviting people and especially the poor to their own dignity and nobility and Empires do not invest as a rule in reminding the subjugated how noble they are and how to love themselves deeply and others as well.

Jesus was aligning himself with the prophets of old who talked about justice flowing like a river and the coming together of all peoples, rich and poor alike.  He sacrificed for the sake of awakening us all to our powers of compassion, a divine attribute and the “secret name for God” in Judaism.  Thus, “Be you compassionate as your Father in heaven is compassionate” (Lk 6:36).  He was calling us to our divinity therefore and looking ahead to a time when humans would choose to be god-like, to be lovers, to practice forgiveness and moving beyond hatred and vengeance and war and power-over into a realm (a “kingdom”) of power-with, of caring and of creativity, another god-like attribute that humans share as “images of God.”

He obviously resisted his premature death, his prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane prove that.  So he did not choose to make himself a sacrifice but he was committed to bringing about a new realm, a new vision, a new “kingdom/queendom” of the divine and he was not naïve enough to think it would be welcomed by all, least of all by the powers that be in politics (the Roman empire) or in religion insofar as they sided with the empire.

The Last Supper demonstrates how he linked his coming death to the great stories of his ancestors around Passover and Exodus and liberation which come at a price.  His (or the gospel writers or both) invoking Psalm 22 on the cross testify to this.     

As Gustavo Gutierrez puts it in the Conclusion of his book On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent: “The final words of Jesus—‘My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?’ (Matt.27:46; Mark 15:34)—speak of the suffering and loneliness of one who feels abandoned by the hand of God.”  He “makes the rest of the psalm his own and one can search the whole psalm to understand the meaning of his lament.”  The psalm “expresses the cruel loneliness experienced by a man of deep faith....an innocent man  who has been treated unjustly.  ...Jesus did not compose this psalm, he inherited it....The important thing is that Jesus made it his own and, while nailed to the cross, offered to the Father the suffering and abandonment of all humankind.  This radical communion with the suffering of human beings brought him down to the deepest level of history at the very moment when his life was ending.” (pp. 97-101) 

The promise of Resurrection puts him and us on the side of hope overcoming despair and on the side of Resurrection, not death, having the last word.        

~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox