Good Friday, April 18, 2025

“Only a suffering God can save,” so wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That is the heart of Good
Friday. God suffers on our behalf and Divine suffering is the path of salvation. Again, in the
spirit of Bonhoeffer, the way of the cross is the way of life. We can’t avoid suffering and
sacrifice is essential to a good life and the well-being of our communities. But the theology of
sacrifice portrayed by many Christian theologians and preachers has always been problematic.
Sacrifice must be chosen – a part of our vocation – and not demanded. Sacrifice must reflect
freedom and not oppression, power and not weakness, agency and not cultural mores.
Many of us struggle with Jesus’ death on the cross because it is described in ways that reflect
divine brutality but also demand sacrifice from those who are unable to claim their full humanity
in the church and world. We must challenge any view of Jesus’ death as appeasing God’s wrath.
The cross reveals God’s love and Jesus’ love for us, not the need for God’s requirement of death
to save our souls. The cross liberates, rather than burdens, the vulnerable and suffering. While
we may sacrifice for a greater good, Jesus went to the cross so we – and the poor and
marginalized – don’t have to!
Isaiah 52:13-53:12 speaks of the suffering servant and is foundational for the later doctrine of
substitutionary atonement. God’s servant is exalted because he is crushed by God and bears our
sins. God’s servant does for us what we can’t do for ourselves. He provides the healing and
reconciliation with God that we can’t do on our own. Yet, such sacrifice must be reinterpreted to
be an act of love not coercion, and a choice not to appease an angry God who requires his Child’s
death, but a loving act to provide a pathway to wholeness and restore the moral order of the
universe.
We can’t let our challenge of literalist transactional, legalistic, or substitutionary understandings
of the cross hide their deeper meaning. The suffering servant chooses their fate and reflects the
actions of a loving servant of God not an act of violence by a vindictive God. In the Christian
interpretation of the suffering servant, God sacrifices Godself: the suffering servant takes the
burden we have and carries it for us.
Sacrifice is at the heart of reality. The heart of marriage, parenting, grandparenting, friendship,
and citizenship involves sacrifice, that is, going beyond self-interest to larger circles of family,
friendship, national, and world loyalty. There are causes greater than individual well-being and
the suffering servant provides a sacrificial path to heal the people of Israel, and ourselves.
There is a peace that is born from losing ourselves for a greater cause. This sacrifice is not
demanded and not built into our gender or class but freely chosen to heal and liberate others.
There is the sacrifice of Jesus for the realm of God and also the sacrifice of Martin Luther King
and Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis and Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero for
the healing of the world. This is the sacrificial stature to let go of one’s own well-being for the

greater good, the sacrifice of every loving friend or parent. The sacrifice of a loving God, who is
the Great Empath, the fellow sufferer who understands.
Psalm 22 speaks of divine forsakenness. Again, taken literally, this is a problematic passage –
and yet it expresses the experience of divine absence. The experience of being marginalized,
abandoned, defeated, excluded, and left to suffer without any divine or human support. “Do not
be far away,” the sufferer cries. God will deliver us, the sufferer hopes. The world we live in is
far from safe and on the macro level, in the area of US democracy, many of us feel forsaken,
barred from the table of decision-making, and see no hope ahead for our nation. No one is here to
rescue us from national self-destruction enacted by those who are heedless of the suffering they
are causing and, in the guise of faith, destroying God’s children and God’s world with chaotic
intentionality. Has God abandoned our nation? Are we forsaken and the planet with us?
In such moments, the Psalmist remembers a larger vision and the times in which God and
humankind aligned to heal the world. God, the Psalmist believes, hoping against hope, is still at
work even when we can’t experience God. God can’t control everything and seems to be
defeated by our foes, whether that foe is abuse, poverty, cancer or a cancer on the soul of the
nation. Psalm 22 is an existential statement of lostness and powerlessness and yet God seeks
within the dark nights our growth and the growth of the moral order. In the bulb there is a
flower, in suffering healing, in death eternity. We must not give up even when our backs are
against the wall. God’s truth is marching on. Glory Hallelujah!
Hebrews 10:16-25 proclaims that the hope we have in Christ’s suffering love compels us to live
lovingly and do justice. The suffering love of Jesus our high priest begets love among us. God’s
sacrifice inspires our own sacrificial living, the choice to respond with love in challenging
situations – of community and family life. Hebrews 10 provides a primer on relational and
social discipleship often missing from Christian catechesis. We don’t just accept God’s suffering
love, we embody it. We look beyond self-interest to care for others not just at home and church
but in the wider world of politics and foreign policy. Ubuntu, we are all in this together. We are
bound together by God’s suffering love and called to love one another in word, deed, and public
policy.
John 18:1-19:42 overwhelms the sensitive reader. The full gamut of suffering is portrayed –
suffering that nations inflict on dissidents and innocent victims, suffering that our nation inflicts
without any remorse from our leaders. It is easy to tune out as the passage flow relentlessly in
brutality, betrayal, denial and abandonment, violence, death, and hopelessness. This isn’t just
Jesus’ fate. The scene is enacted daily and, at times, executed by our own government, whether
Democrat or Republican. The demonic policies of the current administration are nothing new:
they are simply blatant in their celebration of psychological, physical, and political abuse, and
attack on human rights.
Jesus suffers, and so will we. Jesus takes his suffering to the cross, and does so with stature and
spiritual centeredness. Like Martin Luther King on the eve of his death, Jesus embraces mortality

and suffering for a greater good. As the account in the Garden portrays, Jesus doesn’t want to
suffer and die, but he must follow his vocation and destiny. “Not my will but thine” is a
statement of choice and not determinism or predestination. Jesus chooses the way of the cross as
the way of creative transformation. Pilate and Caiaphas may seem powerful – the powers and
principalities may seem to defeat Jesus – but Jesus contains the only power that matters: the
power of a great cause, the power of love, the power of embrace God’s vision of Shalom which
outlasts potentates and demagogues then and now. In the words of the spiritual, we can affirm,
“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows but Jesus.” And, in our fear and struggle,
and hope, we can also embrace the spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” In
what appears to be weakness, God’s strength is revealed. Jesus, the suffering one, lives on, while
Pilate, Caesar, and the first century Jerusalem religious leaders are footnotes in history, known
only because of Jesus’ suffering love.
God is the fellow sufferer who understands. The Good Friday story is left open ended, no happy
ending, just uncertainty, which is the nature of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the forces of evil
whether in our US government or Jerusalem appear to be winning, burying our hopes in a tomb,
no way forward…and yet the story is not finished…what will happen next?
We cannot evade Good Friday. In all its tragic beauty, there is much Good Friday in our world,
and yet in the darkest night, the light emerges; the seed that dies grows into a great tree; and
beyond the grave, there is an open future. Glory Hallelujah! Thanks be to God!

Bruce Epperly is Theologian in Residence at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of
Christ, Bethesda, MD (https://www.westmorelanducc.org/) and a professor in theology and
spirituality at Wesley Theological Seminary. He is the author of over 80 books including:
“Homegrown Mystics: Restoring the Soul of Our Nation through the Healing Wisdom of
America’s Mystics” (Amazon.com: Homegrown Mystics: Restoring Our Nation with the Healing
Wisdom of America's Visionaries: 9781625249142: Epperly, Bruce: Books) “Jesus: Mystic,
Healer, and Prophet “(Jesus: Mystic, Healer, and Prophet: Epperly, Bruce: 9781625248732:
Amazon.com: Books), Saving Progressive Christianity to Save the Planet”( Saving Progressive
Christianity to Save the Planet: Epperly, Bruce G: 9781631999215: Amazon.com: Books), and
his most recent book, “God of the Growing Edge: Whitehead and Thurman on Theology,
Spirituality and Social Change.” (The God of the Growing Edge: Whitehead and Thurman on
Theology, Spirituality, and Social Change: Epperly, Bruce G: 9781631999291: Amazon.com:
Books The God of the Growing Edge: Whitehead and Thurman on Theology, Spirituality, and
Social Change: Epperly, Bruce G: 9781631999291: Amazon.com: Books