Dear Dom,
What a wonderful suggestion to do something creative-forming a new liturgy for Passion week services! I like this idea.
I definitely have no problems with highlighting the roles of women in the Passion events, since, as you may know, I did my doctoral work on Women in the Ministry of Jesus (later published by Cambridge U. Press) precisely because I thought their roles were underappreciated and had positive implications for the roles of women in ministry today. In my view, if the risen Jesus himself commissioned Mary Magdalene to be first to proclaim the Easter message, that's more than enough historical precedent for me, answering definitively whether women should be ministers and proclaimers or not.
I would not want, however, to pursue this liturgical trajectory in quite the way you are suggesting. The Gospel accounts of Jesus' crucifixion, at least those that mention the bandits, distinguish Jesus' death from that of the others who are dying with him on that occasion. In other words, they do not identify the bandits with the echoes from the Psalms, only the death of Jesus. Why is that? Precisely because Jesus is not merely the climax of all Israel's suffering righteousness, though that is of course also true.
I am perfectly happy with the idea of emphasizing that Jesus is not only the climax of prophecy but also of the foreshadowings in the so-called messianic psalms as well. But when we do that, then we realize that in fact Jesus alone experienced our God-forsakenness for us. This is why we have the cry "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" on Jesus' lips alone in our earliest Gospel Mark, and then in Matthew as well.
What makes that quotation of Psalm 22.1 so poignant on the lips of Jesus is not merely that he is yet another Jew suffering an injust death, though that is also true. It is that here is the only place in Mark that Jesus calls God 'God' rather than Father or Abba.
In other words, our earliest portrayal of this event makes perfectly clear that the One who had had ongoing and abiding intimacy with Abba throughout his life experienced God-forsakenness-our alienation from God--for us while on the cross. This is a part of what Jesus had in view when he asked the cup of God's wrath to pass from him in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Furthermore, since I believe there are good arguments for the idea that Mark 10.45 goes back to Jesus himself, it seems clear to me that Jesus would encourage us to see his death as indeed a fulfulliment of Isaiah 53, in a way that would distinguish him from even what some of the Maccabees thought about their deaths. Jesus died alone for our sins, though it is also true to say that he died in solidarity with other Jews who had suffered unjustly. In short, both the continuity and discontinuity between Jesus' death and other deaths of Jews in similar situations need to be emphasized, not just the continuity. I quite agree with you, however, that this new liturgy needs to do a good job of stressing the Jewishness of Jesus, and the goodness of that fact.
Apparently unlike you, I do not take these Gospel accounts to have been largely created out of the Psalms and other such texts. In my view, they are not prophecy or psalms that are later 'historicized' and applied to Jesus. Rather, the story is an example of showing how the actual historical events of Jesus' death make sense in light of the old prophecies and psalms.
It is the Passion events themselves which made Christian interpreters scramble back to the Old Testament, looking for where the Passion could have been predicted. This led to some very creative uses of that Old Testament material, some of which was, of course, not prophecy in the first place.
The reason there was a need for such creative use of the Hebrew Scriptures is that the earliest followers of Jesus were not looking for a crucified messiah! They apparently did not intepret even Isaiah 53 this way. It was Jesus, both as intepreter of the text in application to himself (Mk. 10.45) and in the events which climaxed his life, which led to such creative use of the psalms and the prophecy by his earliest Jewish followers.
I like your suggestion to use Ray Brown's material in "The Death of the Messiah" to create a liturgy, and will want to ponder that some more. In the meantime, I will tell you a story. Not long before his death, Father Brown came to Asbury to give four lectures during Lent on each of the four passion narratives. These were very rich lectures, not least because they made very clear indeed that Father Brown believed that those Passion narratives were historically substantive, especially in regard to the claim that Jesus' death was in important ways distinctive, uniquely redemptive, and atoning for sin. I would not want to create a liturgy using his material that would obscure his own stresses on these Gospel truths.
In the meantime, I wish you and your family a blessed Easter in the name and spirit of the One who died once for all atoning for all sins past, present and future, and arose alone on Easter morning, not merely in the hearts of the disciples or in their own subjective visions, but in the flesh and in space and time. He was the first fruits of the future resurrection of all believers, as Paul was later to say, not the merely the last fruits of earlier ideas about corporate death and corporate resurrection.
Blessings,
Ben W.
