What’s Good About Good Friday?

First, a little history. According to the New Testament, Good Friday honors the crucifixion of Jesus. Most scholars accept Friday as the day of his death yet point out various problems in the stories as told by the four Gospels.

For example, The narration in the book of Mark says that Jesus was betrayed at the darkest point of the night, namely around midnight. When Jesus was arrested he was dragged before the Chief priests for a trial that presumably lasted until 3:00 a. m. Bible scholars struggle with this fact because no pious Jewish priest would have done such a thing because Jewish authorities were forbidden by the Torah to sit in judgment at night.

Since Mark tells us that "all of his disciples forsook him and fled," there would have been nobody around to tell anyone the details of Jesus’ final hours. So where did Mark get his information? How then did Mark know what happened after the disciples ran away?

Many Bible scholars suggest that Mark created these events from passages in the Old Testament (which would have been known as the Hebrew Scriptures). Perhaps, it is suggested, Mark used a phrase from Psalm 22 to put on the lips of the dying Jesus: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." He gets other ideas from this same Psalm. When he relates the story of Jesus being thirsty, he uses verses fourteen and fifteen. Mark tells us the Roman soldiers divided up his garments by using information from Psalm 22:18.

Then he uses ideas from the 53rd chapter of the book of Isaiah. Mark noticed that Isaiah wrote aboaut a Suffering Servant who "was numbered with the transgressors" (v. 12). This gave him the idea to write about two thieves being crucified with Jesus. The section about the rich man, Joseph of Arimathea, may have been inspired by Isaiah, in verse 9, which said the Suffering Servant was "with a rich man in his death."

And so it goes. The other three Gospels were written decades after Mark’s gospel and, except for John, copied a lot from Mark. Luke also takes material from Isaiah. He noted that in Isaiah 53:12 the Servant made a petition to God regarding the transgressors. Luke then has Jesus speaking from the cross to God about the cruelty of the soldiers, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).

So what does this have to do with psychology? Psychologists learned long ago that when people tell their story in therapy, the literal words are often a screen for deeper truths. For example, if a client were to relate the horror of reading about the terrible abuse of someone when they were a child, the client might be (but not always) trying to talk about her own abuse as a child. Deep truths are sometimes not on the surface of communication.

Many contemporary Christians and Biblical scholars believe that the Gospels are not about literal and historical truth. Rather, they believe that the stories point to something deeper and more meaningful than mere history. Unfortunately, other Christians are appalled at the idea that the Bible is not literally true.

Psychologists (also novelists and poets) would say that literal truth has severe restrictions. That is why great literature is not merely about the story that is being told. If any of you have taken literature classes in school, you know that you were encouraged to dig deeply into a story to find out what the author was trying to say through metaphor and other literary devices.

You were also taught that literary devices within a story are the most effective methods an author can use to get her point across to the reader. Some of these devices include figurative language, irony, allusion, simile. You may have discovered this took a lot of work. It would have been easier to just be satisfied with the literal story. For some of you, the light began to dawn and you found that literary and philosophical treasures could be found underneath the literal words.

The writers of the gospel stories were intelligent people who knew how to use literary devices to tell a powerful story. They were not literal historians whose only purpose was to record dry facts about Jesus. Their mission was much more profound than that. Jesus was not expected to die like a common criminal. When this happened, his followers were stunned and confused. It took years to figure out what his death meant. Each writer tried to express in mere words the seemingly inexpressible. Their words made use of literary devices to convey what simple facts were incapable of doing.

We still do this today. When we have had a profound, life-changing experience, we must resort to literary devices to convey to other people what really happened to us. We may struggle with finding the right words or phrases. This is why therapy can often be hard work. It can be an attempt to pass on to another person what is wholly subjective and personal to the person trying to tell their story.

Bible scholars realized these stories were more than just stories because the truths they were trying to explain were often beyond human understanding. To illustrate this point, look at all the different ways Christians disagree on what the Bible means. If it were as simple as an historical story, everyone could agree and Christians would be one big happy family.

As people, we are continually trying to figure out what life is all about. We are born with a brain that has no prior knowledge of how things are. We spend our entire lives learning, understanding, questioning. This is what gives life such richness. The more we probe beneath the surface of everyday existence, the more we discover the awesomeness (to borrow a currently over-used word) and depth of existence.

Oh yes, what about the title? Today is Good Friday 2009. As I thought about the day, I was reminded of what someone told me many years ago. He asked, "Why do they call it Good Friday? Shouldn’t it be called Bad Friday? After all, that’s when Jesus was killed. Doesn’t sound so good to me."

It all depends on your perspective. If you are a devout Christian, then I suppose Good Friday is all about Jesus dying for your sins. If you are a nonbeliever, then Good Friday gives you a three-day weekend.

Anonymity and Faith

I have received several comments regarding the January 20 post about the inauguration of our new president. Sadly, after the first post, I have decided to not accept the rest of the comments because they have all been anonymous. I gladly accept dissenting views but am disheartened when people try to hide their opinions behind a screen of invisibility. One person accused me of breaking down communication by the opinions I was expressing. Communication is only broken two ways. The first is when individuals believe that their perception of the world is the only acceptable one, the other is when they fail to identify who they are. We can only communicate with real human beings who are ready to listen and exchange viewpoints without the agenda that "I am right and you are wrong."

Some of the more acerbic feedback was the assumption that Christians are not allowed to disagree with one another — especially about homosexuality. In fact, there are many devout Christians who do not believe the Bible rejects homosexuality even though, on the surface, it appears that the Bible denigrates homosexuality. Many pious Christians believe that a more rigorous Biblical study of this issue can lead to the opposite conclusion.

To say that Christians who support homosexuality are not truly Christian is to get trapped into simplistic theology. After all, Jesus never addressed the issue. Even the Apostle Paul in all his letters said that the only criterion for being a Christian is to believe in Jesus and his resurrection. He attached no strings to this message. Historically, Christian power brokers began adding other tests for being a "true Christian." Eventually, one had to believe in the Trinity, then in the Virgin Mary, transubstantiation, Papal infallibility, etc. In more modern times a Christian had to believe in the Biblical support for slavery and the subjugation of women. I remember as a child that real Christians did not drink alcohol, smoke, play cards, dance, or go to movies. How times have changed. All these former ideas were vigorously and often violently defended as proof of Christian citizenship.

Is it possible many Christians are basically Biblically illiterate? It is a fact that few Christians even read the entire Bible any more, let alone study it rigorously. Recent studies have shown that only 33% of conservative Christians actually read the Bible and only 12% read it daily. Evangelical scholar Mark Noll in his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, is saddened that conservative Christians have become so anti-intellectual. This is ironic because Evangelicalism began during the Great Awakening as a way of combining reason and faith to better understand the Bible. Regrettably, many Christians are ignorant of Church history and how Christianity continues to change and evolve over time. By rejecting the very notion that they might be wrong in how they interpret the Bible, some Christians read the Bible in order to support their own biases and prejudices. Then they turn around and try to convince people that this is not the case.

So where are the majority of Christians getting their understanding of what the Bible says? My experience is they get their beliefs from other people most of whom are authority figures such as pastors, writers, media celebrities and web sites. I’ve observed that most Christians accept much of what they hear from these sources without hesitation. I suspect this also occurred a hundred years ago when so many Christians truly believed the Bible was absolute in its support of demeaning the humanity of certain people by making them slaves. Jesus never would have tolerated enslaving other people for our own benefit and neither would many Christians today. Slavery is unthinkable to Christians today, yet it was supported by preachers who quoted the Bible in support of slavery.

Back to homosexuality. I don’t understand on what basis Christians get to pick and choose what they want to believe. If the Bible must be treated literally, then the game must be played as all or nothing. Those who use the Bible to condemn homosexuality like to use passages from Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. This section of the Bible contains what is called the Holiness Code, namely a collection of laws telling the people of the Old Testament how to maintain their relationship with God.

So here is my question? If this one command, homosexuality, is accepted as a standard of living, why not all the others? It seems arrogant to assume that any human being has the right to tell God that they will only obey certain parts of the Holiness Code and not others. Okay, so we condemn homosexuality. Why then don't Christians believe they should only marry Jewish people; insist that farmers cannot plant two different kinds of grain in the same field; never wear a garment made of two different materials; demand male gender superiority (like the Taliban); put to death any child who curses their parents. There is more. In the long list of hundreds of commands, some Christians decide that the homosexuality prohibition is the only one they want to accept.

Let’s continue. Many Christians put more priority on the New Testament over the Old Testament. They will say the reason they pick out this Old Testament prohibition regarding homosexuality is because 1 Corinthians (6:9-17) and 1 Timothy (1:3-13) back up the Old Testament. Remember that our English Bibles are translations of a language from long ago. It is not easy translating from Koiné Greek to English (or any other language, for that matter). The two words often translated that supposedly refer to homosexuality is in dispute among Bible scholars. I don’t have the time nor the space to even summarize these scholarly debates here but the information is available to anyone who cares to seek it out.

There is no question that homosexuals are marginalized people in today’s society. Ironically, marginalized people are the very people Jesus chose to hang out with. This behavior shocked the more devout religious people of his day just as people who follow Jesus today and accept homosexual people shock some religious people. Jesus was all about tolerance, acceptance and loving our enemies. Why are these qualities so absent in our dialogue with one another? Paul tried to deal with differences by simply saying that in God’s eyes there were no differences. The tide is beginning to turn, by the way. Surveys are showing that more young Evangelical Christians are accepting homosexuals as fully equal with all other people.

Christianity is not monolithic — namely not all people who call themselves Christian are going to agree even on the "basics." If the Bible were that clear about what to believe, there would not be so many different types of churches some of whom think they are the "true" church.

We advance our knowledge and beliefs by continuing to dialogue with one another — which is basically listening nonjudgmentally to those who disagree with us. So, please keep your comments coming but don’t hide behind anonymity. Let us know who you are so that together we can improve all our lives as we continue together on our life journey.

If you prefer to contact me directly instead of leaving a public comment, please feel free to do so.

Inauguration Day

We are so fortunate to be able to personally witness this day that will end up in history books centuries from now. This day is momentous on so many dimensions. We are finally being told by our new President that we are one nation with one purpose for one people. Divisions have divided our country for too long. We have had a decade of bickering and polarized ideology undergirded with fear.

If our nation were a family, psychologists would look upon us as a highly dysfunctional family. We have been encouraged to take sides and demonize those who disagree with us. We tryed to expel family members whose opinions differ from ours. We have believed that we are so weak that we need the strong hand of government to tell us what to think and believe. We were supposed to accept with reservation any outrageous policy or idea put before us. Fighting and quarreling among us has reduced us, as a nation family, to our lowest common human denominator.

Highly effective families have problems and tensions just because all people are different — even those who are genetically similar. Families who do well listen to one another and encourage disagreement and different points of view. However, underneath all the emotional maneuvering is an underlying sense that inclusiveness trumps fear and judgment.

Becoming a healthy national family will not be easy. From eons of development, the human brain has learned that fear can be a powerful survival mechanism. The attack on 9/11 instilled a fear in the nation that few had yet experienced. Our survival mechanism began to determine who we were and we began to splinter as a nation.

Harnessing fear by knowing the difference between rational and irrational fear is one of the hallmarks of emotional stability. Dysfunctional families and nations begin to fall apart when they let fear be the guiding principle for action.

Our nation has had many fears from our very beginning. One of the rational fears that exploded into the drive for independence was our fear of being a world empire vassal. The Enlightenment, more than any other concept, drove our founders to respect the dignity of each individual and the importance of freedom from tyranny by others.

As we became a nation, irrational fears began to be added to our original rational fear of dominance by a nation that did not have our best interests at heart. The early colonies began to experience and display fear of anyone who had a different religious viewpoint. Some Christians think that only one religion (conservative Christianity) settled on our shores. Actually, many different religions came here in order to be free to practice their religion: Quakers, Dutch reformers, Puritans, Anglicans, Catholics, German reformers to name a few.

The irony of this drive for religious freedom was that each religion only wanted freedom for themselves and were highly intolerant of anyone else's religion. Religious freedom had a different meaning to the colonists than it does to us today. Our nation now believes all religions (including atheists) are free to hold and express these beliefs without interference from others. The original settlers only wanted freedom for themselves and no one else.

This can be illustrated by the Maryland Act of Religious Toleration of 1649. This "enlightened" policy offered religious toleration, but only to those whose religion subscribed to a dogma called Christian Trinitarianism. The Act was tolerant of any religion that subscribed to this ideology. Nevertheless, it also excluded many religions such Jews and other non-European religions. The reasonable consequence for violating this act (reasonable only to the signers of the MART) was death to everyone who was not a Trinitarian. This makes us cringe today. Even though this would be highly unconstitutional today, there are those on the ideological fringes of our current society who would not mind reinstating this kind of prohibition.

As we struggled with the principle of religious inclusiveness, we added another irrational fear to our collective psyche, slavery. Many people in our country were afraid of anyone with skin coloration including Native Americans. As early as 1619 we believed that people of color were to be used and treated as animals.

Our first irrational fear, religious toleration, spilled over into this fear of skin color. People who condoned slavery used religion to justify its existence. A Reverend Alexander Campbell, with a straight face and absolute conviction said, "There is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting slavery, but many regulating it. It is not then, we conclude, immoral."

Supporting this religious bigotry were many politicians. James Henry Hammond, US Senator in the middle of the 19th century, also used the Bible to declare that "The doom of Ham has been branded on the form and features of his African descendants. The hand of fate has united his color and destiny. Man cannot separate what God hath joined." Everyone who supported slavery believed that the Bible sanctioned it. The Bible taught, we were told, that slave owners were permitted to severely beat their slaves even if doing so killed them. In other words, the holy book condoned all aspects of slavery and the treatment of "Negroes" as property.

As if this were not bad enough. Women were also seen as male property. Gender inequality was strongly supported by, you guessed it, the Bible. Those who came to this country supposedly for religious freedom used their religious beliefs to dehumanize over half the population. The Bible continued to be used to promote personal irrational fears. The underlying fear was that the "other" would somehow undermine the convenient lifestyle of society's barons.

Today we not only have our first African-American president. He is supported by female politicians at every level of society. Women permeate professions that were off limits to them only a few decades ago. Women make up the majority of students in many graduate schools. The message of hope that Barack Obama used for his campaign is meant to help us all dispel remnants of those remaining fears that inhibit our national family from becoming healthy and functional. We have been told that the barriers dividing us are coming down. Divisions based on irrational fear can no longer be tolerated.

In his short speech in Baltimore prior to his final stop in Washington, D.C., Mr. Obama named some of the barriers that must be broken including those between heterosexuals and homosexuals. Sexuality has been our slavery/gender issue far too long.

Some religious people (fortunately a minority) have continued to use the Bible to justify their own homophobic fears. The vision that President Obama has given to we ordinary Americans is that we must do our best to be a productive and stable family. We need to learn out to communicate more effectively, live with our differences, support one another who cause us pain, and become a nation that shows the rest of the world what possibilities exist for everyone.