Good Friday April 3, 2026 with Eli Wanner

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/HolyWk/GoodFri_RCL.html

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Word of God, we have broken your body. Now we hunger. Please feed us with it. Amen. In nineteen seventy-six, a woman and her husband were kidnapped. They were kidnapped from their home by soldiers. They were taken to a naval academy. It was also a detention facility. The woman and her husband were tortured. After a few days, the woman, her name was Liliana, was released. One of her torturers gave her a gift. He gave her, oddly, a medal of Our Lady Mary, and he gave her a prayer. This was the torturer's prayer. May I be faithful in war as in peace. May the sharp scream of bullets gladden my heart. O Lord, make my soul ready at all times for sacrifice and pain. Give skill to my hand so that my shot hits the target. And let me be charitable, so that it may be fired without hatred. A similar prayer was prayed recently. Liliana's husband Daniel was not given back to her with the medal and the prayer, and Liliana never saw Daniel again. Liliana and Daniel were caught up in that demonic and all too common blend of state power, spiritual corruption, and bodily violence. They lived in Argentina during the military junta of the 1970s, but these forces of state power, spiritual corruption, and bodily violence have coalesced into torturous form in many nations, in many times. Cambodia, Chile, Russia, the United States, and the Roman Empire, of course. On Good Friday, we remember a tortured God. The scriptures we read today drip with blood and pain. The servant's appearance is marred beyond human semblance. He is crushed and bruised and cut off and killed. The psalmist is humiliated, restless, distressed, alone, and forsaken. Jesus is hit, mocked, stripped, pierced, questioned, tortured on the cross. He dies of his wounds. He dies in a maelstrom of state power, spiritual corruption, and bodily violence. Today, Good Friday, we remember a tortured God. To understand the significance of Good Friday, then, we must understand that tangle of state power, spiritual corruption, and bodily violence that Jesus was willingly caught up in. For Jesus, he preached a revolutionary message, liberation for the poor and the prisoner, humility and self-sacrifice, a strange but beautiful blend of moral exactitude and radical forgiveness. His was a message of an alternative kingdom, not one of powers and principalities, but a kingdom of God, of God with us. God's kingdom is one of peace over warfare, belonging over exclusion, service over comfort, piety over profit. It is a kingdom, in other words, utterly opposed to all that which the Roman Empire stood for, and all that which upheld the Roman Empire's might. Thus, Jesus was not a militaristic or an economic threat to the Romans or to the Jewish officials, but he was a grave moral threat. He cast into doubt what they claimed to be truth, that is, steel and power and control. So Jesus was arrested by the police. He was arrested because of citizen informers. Judas, the betrayer, who is more like us than we would care to admit, the religious authorities, the clergy, who had bowed under the pressure of Roman might. Jesus was taken, like so many victims of torture, under cover of night, and yet at the same time in full view of a bystander public. And Jesus was tortured, a tortured God. Why? Because torture is a tool. It's a tool of the state, a tool of power and of authority. And it's done with particular aims in mind. It's not mindless. It's not done simply out of a sadistic desire to inflict pain, although, despite what many torturers themselves might protest to the contrary, a sadistic desire to inflict pain is certainly an aspect of it. But what really makes torture so insidious is that it is easily wrapped up in a shroud of justification. A torturer's manual from Cambodia, from the time of the Khmer Rouge, another militaristic authoritarian regime, advises this to government employees. Torture is not something we do for fun. It's not something that's done out of individual anger or for self-satisfaction. So we beat them to make them afraid, but absolutely not to kill them. When torturing, it is necessary to examine their state of health first, and then whip. Don't be so bloodthirsty that you cause their death quickly. Torture thus carries a shroud of justification. The goal is fear, not death. But the implications are clear. Note the manual didn't say, Don't be bloodthirsty so that you do not cause death. It said, don't be so bloodthirsty that you cause their death quickly. And this agony is precisely what Jesus goes through. The Roman authority, Pilate, he wants Jesus and the Jewish faithful, even those Jewish faithful who have cried out, crucify him, to be afraid. He is more than willing to have his soldiers strike Jesus in the face. He is more than willing to have Jesus whipped. He is more than willing to have Jesus humiliated, a crown of thorns stabbed into his scalp, and his clothing stripped from his body. And like a torturer in an interrogation chamber, Pilate barrages Jesus with question after question after question. Are you the king of the Jews? So you are a king? What is truth? I imagine that the answer Pilate is looking for, as are all who share his authoritarian bent, is that truth is whatever Pilate says truth is. Because that's what torture does. The death of the victim is inconsequential. What torture is for is not killing, although it doesn't matter much to the state if that happens. But rather torture is for constructing a fraudulent truth. Torture and the pain it causes, the crown of thorns, the nails through the nerve endings, the rough wood on the flogged back, the humiliation of dice thrown. Torture and the pain it causes are for narrowing down a victim's field of vision, narrowing it to the self. When one is in pain, their world, their experienced truth, shrinks down to the contours of their body and their flesh, so that all that the victim can focus on is the moment of anguish. Which is why torture is so effective at extracting confessions, but so abysmally ineffective at extracting any actual truth. Its victims will say or admit anything to end the pain, because oftentimes the pain is all that their world has become. It's the ultimate example of isolation. They're disappeared, they're hidden, they're imprisoned, detained. And they are warnings. Torture, state violence, these are self-justifying, a shroud of justification. They rarely respond to any actual threats. Victims of torture, like Jesus or Liliana or Daniel, they were simply human rights lawyers. They rarely make up the threat that their torturers claim they do. But when violence is imposed and violent circumstances created, the state can say whatever it wants to say. Truth is whatever is behind the torturer's blade. And it goes further. Catholic theologian William Kavanaugh puts the state's reasoning better than I ever could. He says, wherever two or three are gathered, there is subversion in their midst. Torture is meant to separate the two or the three or the hundred. It's meant to demolish solidarity. It's meant to tear apart the body, both physically and figuratively, individually and collectively. But on Good Friday, something different happens. When Jesus' body is torn apart, paradoxically, it brings things together. His flesh, torn asunder, becomes a new and living way. Jesus refuses to let his world shrink down to only the self. Somehow. And despite his instruments of pain, Pilate ultimately finds that he cannot construct a truth, because truth is the very one who stands before him at trial, and truth is the very one who is crucified. Jesus, in being tortured on the cross, subverts the very purposes of the torture he goes through. The indignities inflicted on him, the attempt to turn him into something no better than a violent bandit, the mocking sign that he is King of the Jews, none of this hinders what Jesus does on the cross. In Christ's torture and death, somehow, miraculously, community is built. Woman, here is your son. Disciple, here is your mother. So clearly something has gone very wrong for the empire, and very wrong for the religious officials who are pandering to it, and afraid of it. The torturer's blasphemous prayer, you remember that prayer for gladdening bullets, sacrifice and pain, killing without hatred. Ironically enough, it's been answered. Just not in the way that the torturer may have been expecting. His heretical faith has been shown to be false, and his wicked tactics twisted around on themselves and made to mean something new and life-giving. One night, Daniel, Liliana's husband, who was again tortured and disappeared by the U.S.-backed military dictatorship of 1970s Argentina, was with his sister, reading a newspaper. He turned to her and asked, Do you realize? The lines in this newspaper are saying one thing, but I am reading what is blank, what is in the middle, and cannot be read at first glance. And that is precisely what we do during Holy Week. The lines in the newspaper say one thing: Jesus, that rebel, that blasphemer, that threat, Jesus has been executed by the state. But like Daniel, we read what is blank, what is in the middle, that Jesus is the Lamb led to the slaughter, the one who bears our infirmities, who out of anguish shall see light, who bore our sin. And although he hangs tonight on the hard wood of the cross this afternoon, sorry, we can't help but think that there's something we aren't reading. Something we're not reading at first glance, at least. That no matter what Pilate says, no matter what the chief priests say, something more is going on.