Continuing our series promoting the Michigan Conference’s Earth Day of Action, Rev. Sari Brown faces the hard questions surrounding Jesus’ death by looking more to the living Word in creation.
REV. SARI BROWN
Elder, Michigan Conference
“For he grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. . . . By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people” (Isaiah 53:2, 8, NRSVUE).
On Good Friday, we recount the story of a death we know so well that we can almost become numb to it. We have rehearsed the meaning countless times: Jesus died on the cross to save us from sin.
Whether you hear it in a service or read it on your own, I invite you to spend some time today with the long, agonizing story of Jesus’ arrest and state execution in John 18 and 19.
Let the difficulty of this story strengthen the heart muscles for living through these difficult times. Do not skip to the simple explanation. The cross is a scandal. Sometimes, it leaves more questions than even the miracle of resurrection can answer. Why did Jesus have to die? Was this really his divinely ordained destiny? Where is the justice in demanding more suffering to heal a broken world?
When it comes to the hardest questions, I have begun looking more and more to the living Word in creation. I take these questions to the divine presence in rivers and stones, plants and trees, soil and sand, spiders and snakes, deer and bugs. In this time of environmental collapse and crisis of disconnection from nature, there is no better place to understand suffering, sin, imbalance, and justice.
Jesus prayed beneath the trees in the garden of Gethsemane before he was arrested. He prayed to have this cup of impending suffering taken away from him. The next day, he was nailed to a tree and left to die.
Trees are the literal roots of life: food, shelter, and the air we breathe. Ambassadors of God’s abundance. And they have been contorted into instruments of death. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil bent by sin into a cross to crucify the Lord of love.
In recent decades, scientists have discovered how much we have in common with trees. In The Hidden Life of Trees, a former forester named Peter Wohlleben writes about learning that trees are social creatures. They communicate, work together, form familial bonds, and care for each other when old or sick.
Every tree is valuable to the community, even the dying and dead ones. Each one makes it a place where life can flourish. If any single tree is cut down instead of dying naturally, it affects the health of the whole forest. In this way, we are the same. One person being cut off prematurely from life profoundly affects the whole human community to which they belonged.
Jesus grew up from the dry ground of an oppressive regime. He was one of the many trees in the forest of humanity, unremarkable but resilient, without majesty or power, but with an uncanny gift for nurturing the healing and growth of others. He was irreplaceable. He was necessary for the health — indeed, the healing — of the forest.
What if Jesus’ arrest, trial, and execution were not divinely ordained to restore justice? What if they were, as Isaiah’s song of the suffering servant suggests, a perversion of justice?
It is the logic of a greedy, self-serving empire, not God’s will, that nailed him to the cross. Jesus, who is all of God’s love bursting at the seams in the body of a human being, was executed because of how much he loved.
There is nothing hopeful or redemptive about that. It is a gut-wrenching tragedy. We should be disconcerted by any simple, reassuring explanations of his crucifixion. Especially because the structures of power that could not tolerate his aliveness continue to shape our world today.
This is the world that continues to kill defenders of Indigenous peoples and land from Colombia to the Philippines at a rate of about one murder every other day. This is the world that continues to kill off entire species of birds, fish, insects, and animals that are essential to maintaining the ecological balance for all the lives around them. This is the world that justifies killing Palestinian children and Black men and trans women as necessary collateral to feel safer or more comfortably numb in our own skin. This is the world that is clear-cutting its own lungs.
We can talk about deaths like these as containing the seeds of new life or change or solidarity. We can talk about resurrection and how God will redeem these precious lives in the end. We can talk about how the bodies of dead trees rise again in the bugs, plants, animals, and saplings that find nourishment in them.
But it diminishes the sanctity of life if we skip to the hope. We lose something irreplaceable every time one life is cut down prematurely, maliciously, carelessly. When a tree is taken away from the forest, we lose an essential participant in the great forest of abundant life.
I wonder if asking why Jesus had to die is the wrong question. Maybe Jesus did not have to die as the just, right way to save us. Maybe the power of his sacrifice lies in the fact that it is unjust and not right. He took on the violent horror of sin and did not escape it because this is what our world does to people who love selflessly and completely.
The God of heaven and earth chose to live as a fragile human, and, if necessary, to die at our hands. God is awesome, not because he always wins, but because he loses. Just like so many other precious ones we have lost. Through Jesus, God not only grieves with us but also dies with us.
When he suffered and died for our sake, Jesus broke a hole in the roof of the hell we create here on earth. The light streaming in shows us that God never wanted this suffering for us in the first place. And somehow, through irreplaceable losses and impossible grief, new life will keep rising from this dry ground.
As we look toward our Earth Day of Action on April 26, I encourage you to join a group to plant trees in your area (click here for a list our Environmental Justice Task Force is compiling), or to reach out to a local chapter of a native plant organization such as Wild Ones for help with including some new native plants in your yard to increase biodiversity and support pollinators.
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Last Updated on April 22, 2025