“I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.” Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.” (Hebrews 10:17-18)

Occasionally there is one sentence I’d love for you all to take away and remember from a sermon. Tonight I have one of those: There is no such thing as redemptive violence. We are addicted to violence, we fallen and sinful humans. Especially now, in this country—but throughout history in everywhere—we are addicted to violence. Violence is the answer to everything. We see resources someone else has that we want—we take them. We have always used violence, and especially death, as our framework for our lives. And our addiction to violence has allowed us to fool ourselves into believing in redemptive violence. There is no such thing as redemptive violence. Forgiveness is redemptive…Love is redemptive…Violence is not redemptive.

Unfortunately, in many places the primary way we have come to talk about Jesus death on the cross is the way of redemptive violence. God punished him for our sins, right? We just heard that, didn’t we, in Isaiah: “He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” Our debt of sin was so great that God killed Jesus to balance out the scales of divine justice, right? But truly, how can that be? From the most ancient days of the Hebrew people, from the days at the end of the stone age and the beginning of the bronze age when what would eventually be written down as the oldest part of the Old Testament was stories told around campfires, God had forbidden human sacrifice. Truly, how can that be when in our Trinitarian understanding Jesus is God, and God is Jesus? John 3:16 doesn’t say “For God so loved the world God killed his only Son,” it says “For God so loved the world God gave his only Son.” In all our Gospel readings since Epiphany we’ve heard that Jesus “turned his face toward Jerusalem” and went there, telling his disciples many times along the way that he was going there to die…Going there to die, not because God demanded it, but because we would demand it.

All along the way, as he healed the broken and cast out demons and fed the hungry, this is what Jesus said: Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the peacemakers. The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near. Your sins are forgiven. Compassionate action—like healing on the Sabbath—supersedes empty rule-following. The Kingdom of God is like a tiny seed, a bit of yeast, a little child—not an empire like Rome. There is nothing outside a person that can make them unclean—only what is inside, in their hearts. Those who wish to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all. Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. The greatest commandment is this: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength, and the second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.

This is what Jesus did and what Jesus said, and this is what got him killed. God didn’t kill Jesus—we did. His message was too threatening to our ways of selfish greed and lust for power and reliance on violence. Listen to John chapter 11:

So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council and said, “What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed…” So from that day on they planned to put him to death.

God didn’t demand Jesus’ death…God didn’t kill Jesus…we did. In the minds of those rulers, the ends justified the means, right? “It is better for one person to die”…We need someone to blame…We need a scapegoat. The ends justifies the means…We always say that, don’t we?

But the surprising message of Good Friday is that, for God, the means and the ends are both the same. God’s end, God’s purpose, was to forgive us and be with us and love us. And the means God chose to accomplish that end…was…to be with us, and to love us, and to forgive us. Jesus took the worst we had to offer—the most cruel and painful way to kill someone we ever invented—and Jesus bore that death, for us, showing us that God’s means and God’s ends are the same. Jesus—God—could, of course, have called down the armies of heaven to smite the Pharisees and the Scribes and the Romans, and everyone standing there and jeering. Jesus—God—could have used an infinite amount of violence to counter our violence. But, instead, God used an infinite amount of love and forgiveness to counter our violence.

Jesus turned his face toward Jerusalem, knowing he would be put to death there, because he knew his purpose was not to be an itinerant healer, and he knew it was not to be an armed revolutionary. Jesus knew that his purpose was to give his life to show us the depth of God’s love and forgiveness. His purpose was to show us that our addiction to violence and death is, like all addictions, a soul-killing, dehumanizing, demonic possession. His purpose was to give himself, and suffer, and die at our hands, and then, on Easter, show us once for all that our ways of violence and death are a weak, powerless sham against the power of God’s love and forgiveness. Then, finally, we would be able to turn away from our fears and our addiction to violence, and then, finally, we would be able to find freedom and joy living in God’s kingdom. Our evil and sin are no match for God’s love and forgiveness, and God will win. This is what it means to be both all-powerful and all-loving. Both are demonstrated on the Cross and at Easter—I hope you remember this: There is no such thing as redemptive violence—only forgiveness and love can redeem.