The first time I served as a chalice bearer in my local parish, it was a First Communion service.  I raised the chalice towards the lips of a six-year old, and said, as reverently as I knew how, “The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.”  “Yuck,” she sputtered, pushing the cup away, “I don’t want that !” 

And who could blame her?  Unless you have a theological education, who would willingly drink a cup full of anyone’s blood?  Her repulsion was natural and sensible… the same repulsion Jesus had in the garden… the same repulsion many of us feel, listening to Matthew’s Passion, a gospel that has blood spattered all over it, from its opening with Herod’s slaughter of innocent babies, to the bitter end we just heard. 

Listening to these two gospel passages, back to back, feels like whiplash.  One minute, we’re waving our palms in the air, exulting in Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and shouting “Hosanna!” And the next, we’re hearing every gory detail of Jesus’ death – and participating in it.  And we can’t escape just by going home – unless we decide we’re not coming back. 

Because today is the first day of Holy Week – when we walk with Jesus and his apostles every step of the way – through the Last Supper, through Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, through his passion and death on Good Friday.  And until the Great Vigil on Saturday night, we try to do this like the apostles did, with no knowledge of empty tombs and resurrections, but only of gathering doom, and threatening weather, and the smell of death all around. 

Legend has it that Marco Polo was taken before the great conqueror, Genghis Khan; and he found himself telling the story of Jesus.  When he came to the passion, Khan became tense.  And at the words, “Jesus cried out with a loud voice and breathed his last”, Khan blurted out:  “What did the Christian’s God do then?  Did he send his thousands of legions from heaven to smite and destroy those who had so mistreated his Son?” 

It’s no wonder we want to turn away.  Even though we’re taught from childhood that Jesus died for our sins, history is filled with competing arguments about just what this means – and so, many Christians are as baffled as Genghis Khan was.  They approach Jesus’ passion and death as either a source of guilt, or as simply irrelevant to their current circumstance.   Maybe that’s because we still rely so heavily on the traditional view, developed in the Middle Ages, that Jesus atoned for our sins by substituting his own suffering for ours on the cross.  This idea has roots as far back as the ancient celebration of the highest of the Jewish Holy Days, the Day of Atonement. 

On this day, temple priests would bring forward two identical male goats.  One they would send away, never to be heard from again.  The other they slaughtered, and sprinkled its blood all around.  According to Leviticus, it’s the blood of this “scapegoat” that atones for the sins and uncleanness of the people. 
But contemporary theologians have re-opened the question.  They argue that throughout history, our first human impulse, whenever anything goes wrong – whether in our families or between nations – is to find someone to blame.  This “scapegoating,” they believe, is the same human impulse that crucified Jesus, and the same impulse that continues to crucify millions of God’s beloved children around the globe today.

We know that Jesus in Hebrew is ‘Yeshua,’ which means “salvation” – but salvation from what?  Was Jesus the scapegoat who died on the cross, when it was really supposed to be us sinners hanging there?  Or did he die on the cross to declare an end to scapegoating for all time?  Did he die so that humanity could embrace the possibility of a new order, one in which we understand that God loves each and every human being unconditionally; so that we could finally understand that the only path that makes sense is to evolve beyond scapegoating, beyond violence as a means of resolving our animosities, beyond blaming other people for our own pain, beyond asking God to step in and solve the messes we keep making of our lives and of God’s world? 

Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of God most of us want.  We wish God would cure cancer, not to mention the common cold; clean up the environment; rid our schools of drugs and violence; bring peace, justice, tolerance, and good will to our world; straighten out our parents or our spouses or our children; take away our feeling disposable, un-rooted or uprooted; give us meaning and happiness in our lives… and all without our having to change.  We want God to decide our decisions, choose our choices, solve our problems, feel our pain, do our growing, and work our work.  Like an all-knowing, all-powerful 24-7 personal assistant.

Maybe that’s why the characters I identify most with in this story are the twelve apostles.  They’re a sorry lot.  Not one of them comes off well.  They’re afraid for their lives, they scatter and hide.  But their fear doesn’t faze the risen Christ.  He goes right to their hiding place, and helps them become, just like us, “Easter people living in a Good Friday world.” He helps them discover the courage to live their lives facing into the meaning of the cross, the courage to become leaders who are willing to pay the price, the courage to choose a life that has a price.

Repulsed by the cross?  While it might be natural or sensible, as Christians we choose not to turn away.  We choose to face into the cross – on that fateful day 2000 years ago, and down through history – forcing ourselves to look at all the ways in which God’s beloved children are being scapegoated and crucified today – and then, like the apostles, rolling up our sleeves and getting to work, ushering in the new world Jesus died to create.