Good Friday: A Sermon

the Rev. Emily Hansen Curran preached a version of this sermon on Good Friday at St. Lucy’s on April 3, 2026.

Tonight we sit with one of the toughest stories in the bible, one of the toughest stories in all of literature. It’s tough because we’re sitting with a story of torture, and a public state-sponsored execution. But it’s also tough because all of us, to one degree or another have been taught this story as the story of a God who sent his son to die for the sins of all of humanity. 

And that is a tough story. That story is cruel, terrible, vicious.

One of the things I’ve come to believe about what it means for me to believe in God—a condition of my belief, one might say—is that God has to be bigger than anything I can imagine or think so that nothing I can imagine or think can threaten who God might be. I’m obviously biased, but I think this is a reasonable approach to belief in God.

That said, in this story, I feel the need to lean into my skepticism for the kind of God classically portrayed in this story—the one who would send their own son to be tortured and die so that I might be saved. 

It doesn’t check out. 

First, it’s a bit of a head trip to understand—arguably there’s some psychological manipulation going on there. Second, the kind of theological world that is created when God—a kind of figure with the most power and all the power—kills their own son as a sacrifice, to atone, to satisfy the sins of others is (as we all know very well) messed up. This kind of belief is what has sanctioned and justified unbelievable abuses—from slavery, to lynching, to sexual abuse of children and women, to spiritual abuse in churches. As the saying goes, and the sweatshirt says, “bad theology kills.”

Because when you are a person with less power, and you believe that God will take everything from you and that this is good, and when you believe and are taught that the more you suffer the more holy like Jesus you become, there becomes no end to the violence and suffering you will accept. And, there will be and have always been people who have the power who will demand everything and there will be others who don’t, who will be forced to give everything, and all in God’s name. 

Additionally, what has become particularly dangerous about this idea is that it has come to define what it means to follow Jesus. 

To be a living sacrifice. 

I think of a song like Maverick City Music’s “Refiner” to name just one—which I only name because it’s modern and extremely catchy—but I could name one million others like “Nothing But the Blood,” “In Christ Alone,” “All Hail King Jesus,” “Amazing Grace” even. The Maverick City song is a great example because it also shows how this idea of Jesus as a sacrifice ends up defining what it means to be a Christian. Here are some of the lyrics: 

“I wanna be tried by fire
Purifed
You take whatever you desire
Lord here's my life”

When you teach little girls that last line, or when you teach children this idea, or those who come into this world without the prospect of power that last line: the results are deadly. 

And so, I don’t care how many hymns, traditions of the church, or famous and ancient theologians have believed and carried on this idea of Jesus dying for our sins—it is a dangerous idea and needs to be reconsidered. 

If you disagree, I would ask you to reflect on what side of power you reside.

To be fair, it is certainly a way to read the story of Jesus’ death. And I think, for a variety of reasons, some of the writers of these gospels believed this about his death. But I don’t think it’s the only way to read this story. 

So what if we didn’t have to believe this about God, about Jesus and his death? What if there were other ways? What if our skepticism and our wonderings, our theological imaginations didn’t scare God? What might we wonder about this story? How else can we think about Jesus’ death?

Back in 2019, on Good Friday, I heard a sermon given by Dr. Scott MacDougall who introduced to me a different kind of understanding. Up to that point, I hadn’t heard anyone offer something other than an atonement understanding of Jesus’ death and it sort of blew the lid off this whole thing for me. 

MacDougall’s not the first to offer an alternative, obviously. There is a history of theologians (starting back as far as the 12th century) who have questioned atonement as the central feature of Christianity and wondered about the problems it might create. But Dr. MacDougall, building off this long line of history, suggested something that seemed slight but very clear: he offered that instead of Jesus dying for our sins, what if Jesus died because of our sins.

In his sermon he zoomed out to a cosmic level (I find it no small irony that I wrote this line while watching the Artemis II launch) and retold the story of God sending Jesus to take on human form.

He said this:

In the beginning god created something that was not god. God gave freedom to that creation… to develop… and find its way….eventually a form of life emerged with the capability of knowing God and loving God in return, but it did so imperfectly––captive to its own fears and anxieties––so that it was unable to love itself, others of its kind, the rest of creation, or above all, God... God attempted to show these creatures how to know God better and to live better again and again…but they failed to learn what God had to teach.

So eventually God…took on the form of one of these creatures…in human form God disclosed most clearly who God is, in a form that most humans could most easily comprehend. And yet even so, the message seemed too difficult and the way of life too hard, and the vision too threatening to what seemed most comfortable, certain, and secure.

And so as this vision gained more traction, it also gained more resistance. Eventually the system of brokenness––the sad tangle of misplaced priorities and deep anxieties revolted against the offer of God’s own self. God’s own creation rose up and put god to death…

There was nothing more the world could do, and it was over. God came to God’s own creation in love and God’s creation rejected God and the offer of full and abundant life, totally. And even then, the God who creates out of nothing brought life out of death. 

If we tell this story, as Dr. MacDougall suggest, “we can see that Jesus was not born to die”but instead that “Jesus was born to reveal in the shape of a human life, the sort of relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the rest of creation, and above all with god that we were created for.”

In this version of the story, Jesus dies because he was loyal to the vision of God’s kingdom because he was loyal to the will of God, which was to reveal God’s self to God’s creation and to show, in human form, what it meant to be in relationship with God. It maintains the power of the cross and Jesus’ public execution, but it puts it in light of his life—his priorities for the poor, the sick, the marginalized, which were the true threat to the powers that were, and so to his own life. 

In this version of the story, Jesus doesn’t come to die, but Jesus comes and dies. And here’s where the power of this story continues on for us today: because we, who are personified in the “Jews” in this story, we kill Jesus everyday—when we don’t care for the least of these, when we side with those in power, and when we side for stasis, certainty, what is comfortable and secure. 

And so it is by our sins that we continue to put Jesus to death. 

This makes sense. I mean, it’s still grueling and intense, but it takes into account the cross and the actual lived life of Jesus in equal measure. And because it grounds me more deeply to my neighbors, which is also what Jesus did. He stripped away the theorizing, took on human flesh, and became a neighbor. 

So as we sit with this story, let’s not be satisfied with a version of it that enables abuse and those with power to abuse. Let’s lean into our skepticism (by the way some of the biggest modern advocates against the atonement theory have come from the margins, which is telling, I think). Instead let’s understand the toughness of story in the way that it calls us closer to each other and to our neighbors in need—to the poor, the marginalized, the sick—to give our attention, our energy, our money even to restoring the lost and repairing what has been broken. 

The empty cross of Good Friday is cause to turn and face death in all its forms, but also to turn and face ourselves and the ways in which we betray and put to death the figure of Jesus every day. My prayer for myself and for us is that this cross, upon which Jesus was crucified for political rebellion, would instigate in us a clarity of relationship with God and for the will of God in the world. That we would be drawn—in humility—closer to those on the margins, to our neighbors, and to ourselves, and that this would be the defining feature, for us, of what it means to be a Christian.