Yet this is the move Lind proposes. This becomes plain when one turns to her second grief, namely the use of the Holy Week texts to sanction extreme wickedness. That this has happened too often in the past is beyond denial. That it happens still in too many darkened Christian hearts is all too probable. Shame on the Christian who is not ashamed by this and who fails in view of it to beg God's mercy on the entire Christian family.

Oddly, Lind says nothing of begging God's mercy. Instead, she handles the Christian shame by turning against the Christian texts, in effect advising us to hold them at arm's length and make faces at them. No more is Jesus to be the Christ, God's essential cure for sin and shame. If indeed he is risen - is he? - then lets him serve merely as exemplar of the righteous protest the rest of us should be mounting against injustice. For our part, perhaps if we squint at him hard enough, we can puzzle out some clues on how to start behaving better than we have. Thus saith the dean.

So when was the last time a good example, nothing more, accomplished a fundamental change in human behavior? Again, if the most Jesus can do is show us how to behave tomorrow, doesn't that leave today's iniquity untouched and uncovered, still reeking in the nostrils of the Almighty? Grave problems, these. Saints Peter, Paul and the canonical evangelists were alive to them. Glib Americans tend not to be.

In an apostolic reading of the great texts, one finds at least the following: first, in his dying, Jesus dealt definitively with human sin and shame. Because he wore it, the sin and shame died with him, in God's judgment if not in ours.

Second, Christ did this for every human being - not only the poor and marginal but also the rich and the elite; not only the victim but also the oppressor. "Father, forgive them." He means the ones who are killing him.

Third, to see who killed Jesus, don't look through your neighbor's window. Instead look in the mirror. Alternatively, if you want to see who is worth the life of God's Son, don't start with the mirror. Go look at the neighbor. Any and every neighbor. That even includes wicked Christians who have angered God and shamed us all by turning Jesus' death against the neighbor. These, too, Christ died to atone for. Thus the great texts.

For people tarred with this shame, the only sensible move is to embrace and relearn the texts, not to revise them. Else our shame lives forever, and we are dead.

---The Rev. Jerome Burce is senior pastor of Messiah Lutheran Church in Fairview Park, Ohio