Good Friday
Gospel of John, chapters 18 and 19
Pastor Urzula Glīneke
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In the chaplaincy service of the University of Edinburgh, where I work, someone had left some small brochures. They contained a message that I once believed — that Jesus died for our sins: “God created the world. People sinned, and were therefore separated from God. Because of this we deserve to die and to suffer in hell forever. But Jesus died and on the cross paid for our sins. Believe this and be saved!”
I no longer believe this message. I believe that God lovingly created the world — the Universe, the Earth, and all living beings. Us, human beings, too. I believe that God was present and at work in the natural processes: as the Universe expanded and evolution unfolded, wondrously and in great diversity. But I do not believe that Jesus, through his suffering and death on the cross, “paid” for our sins. First of all — to whom did he pay? To the devil? I do not believe in a personalized evil. Evil is in our choices: in greed and violence, in what we, human beings, do to one another and to nature. It is in what we choose to do or not to do. It is in how we oppress other people and lay waste to the planet on which we live.
Did Jesus pay God? What kind of God would that be?! A God who demands the torture, suffering, humiliation, and death of his own Son in order to pay for the fact that “our sins offend Him,” as was thought for centuries? That is the image of a feudal lord, not the image of God whom we meet and come to know in the life and teaching of Jesus.
Now I believe that Jesus died because his life and teaching were inconvenient to many, and so he was killed. He died because of our sins, not for our sins. I believe that God came to Earth, to us, human beings, because God wanted to be with us. God wanted to be one of us and to share our joy and our pain, our life and our future. Jesus — God With Us — set in motion a movement, a whole avalanche of change. Well, perhaps he did not start it; it was already present. Every missionary with an open heart and mind discovers that God is already with people before the missionary arrives, and is at work in the world; likewise God was with us even before Jesus was born. God was in nature and in all creation, God was in the wisdom and compassion of the Hebrew Scriptures, but also in other cultures, religions, and stories. God was in the hand extended in friendship across all differences; God was in the kindness and generosity shown to a stranger — and in many other places, too, in all sorts of circumstances.
Jesus came into the world as a vulnerable, helpless infant. He was born in a stable, in a manger, because there was no other place for him. He became a refugee, because he was threatened with violence and death planned by a despotic ruler.
Like the servant described in the Book of Isaiah, he grew up like a shoot breaking through hard, dry, parched ground. He was oppressed, despised, and in the end killed. But he was also loved. He brought a message of freedom for captives, of equality between the sexes, of a peace rooted in justice. Jesus taught and lived a message that gave hope to the oppressed. It was a message that disturbed, was inconvenient, and even dangerous to those who held the lion’s share of power and wealth — the political and religious leaders. And that is why Jesus was killed.
Reading the Good Friday texts — chapters 18 and 19 of the Gospel of John, as well as the story of the servant in Isaiah chapters 52–53 and in Psalm 22 — my heart fills with love for such a person. I think of Jesus, but also of many others. How often the people who are treated like the servant described by Isaiah are the ones who give so much — who even change the world. People considered insignificant and without influence; people thought to have nothing to give, yet who are often the greatest givers. Sometimes — only in the small things of everyday life, and that too is very important.
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Illustration: The Tree of the Cross — the Tree of Life, Arta Skuja 2026
