Good Friday

Naked and unashamed

Good Friday

Is. 52.13-53.12; Heb. 4,14-16, 5.7-9; Jn. 18.1 - 19.42.

I think the best summary of the fact of the crucifixion was given by Paul the apostle, an early follower of Jesus. He says that preaching a crucified Messiah was a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. I think that is the key thing because I believe that you could read an enormous amount of Christian history as an attempt to conceal the scandalous nature of the crucifixion. Part of it is, in a sense, innocuous. For instance, we read the gospel of John, which is presumably the last of the four gospels. By the time it had come to be written there were three generations of the followers of Jesus who had thought and thought and had been troubled by this scandalous fact and came up with their Jesus who hardly seemed to undergo anything. You'll notice that this Jesus has no agony in the garden. He is just standing there, sublimely in control of everything. So when he identified himself, they all fall down. Radically different from the Jesus who sweats blood, according to Luke's account. What is going on, of course, is what we call a development of Christological thought. So we get a Jesus who seems more and more removed from the historical reality of the event. A Jesus so overlayed with later thought and praying and thinking, that these have almost occluded the real events here. It had the effect in other words, of defanging the scandalous quality of the crucifixion, I believe for us and certainly the history of the Church. For example before I came in this afternoon, I noticed in the news broadcast a celebration of the Holy Week services in the baroque splendour of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. I had a sense of anomaly: here is the most brutal form of execution that the Romans knew, totally overlayed with gold vestments and all that grandeur. It's comforting, I mean it has the effect, of course, of comforting us, distancing us, of course, and setting us a safe space that really doesn't impact on us as it might. So, today I would like to take a few minutes to kind of disencumber the crucifixion.

The first reality of the crucifixion is a sociological one. The Romans took crucifixion from the Persians. It used to be impalement. So, they just stuck a spike in the ground and dropped the body on top of it, impaling the body. Not very pleasant, but it didn't last long. The Romans said they needed something a little more draconian to make the point. So they devised this other method of nailing a body through the wrist on an upright. It usually took three to four days to die. Crucifixions always took place in very public places. The body was totally stripped. If it was a male, facing outward. If it was a female, they had the woman facing the wood. It was a mode of execution so "declassé" that it was against the law to crucify a Roman citizen. Crucifixion was reserved for the most heinous of criminals and for the most egregious of crimes. That's why Paul had a really difficult time of selling that crucified figure as the Saviour. That's why it was a scandal to the Jews. We see the intent, very early on in the Christian movement, to rationalize the crucifixion. So we will say Jesus knew everything that was going to happen as in the gospel of John. Or that this was clearly God's will. So the whole thing becomes a great kind of play enacted before spectators, the ending, of which everybody knows and anticipates. Again, the effect is simply to defang this.

Or, to go to the second level of thought, we get all these nice tidy, comforting theological affirmation "Jesus died for our sins", which we find reflected in the New Testament. This man died for our sins. It's as though a scrim had fallen on this historical reality and us so we could sit somehow inoculated from the horror of this event and then count our spiritual benefits. What is missing, of course, is the human reality. We made this all kind of a divine pantomime. So, by way of helping us, I'd just like to remind you of what has happened in our century. We have lived in a century probably the most murderous in human history. But we've had a number of extraordinary events. Yitzhak Rabin, Mohandas Gandi, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nasser. I made the list but have probably forgotten some. Murdered. Usually by people who were supposedly on their side. Why? Because they were troublemakers, because they upset the expected order or because they breached all these borders within which we keep ourselves to make ourselves somebody.

The extraordinary thing is that it is as in the case of Jesus the Jew. He was killed by some of his fellow Jews, for that very reason. Because a good Jew does not eat with sinners. A good Jew does not break the Sabbath observances. A good Jew does not hob-nob with the handicapped people, who are ritually impure. A good Jew does not speak publicly with women. If you push this further and lay it out programmatically, such a person is a menace to society because society, cannot continue as it must, as we all feel it must, if all these boundaries were to fall down, if the outline between myself and the rest of the world becomes porous and the world flows in and I flow out. And before we can talk about Jesus dying for our sins, or Jesus standing sublimely sovereign in this event as in the gospel of John, this is the reality I would like to propose that we badly need to think about. Because neither as individuals or as institutions are we very comfortable with that prospect. We go to the edge, and then draw back. So much.... no more. Because it's unsafe to hob-nob with the left-outs, to say we are available to everybody. I mean, what will the donors give us if we criticize them? Donors, for ourselves or our institutions are all those people who feed into our sense of being okay in our society. We do not do it well. We do not do it well either as individuals or as institutions. Certainly the Roman church has no great claim to this kind of behavior. Rather we immediately, and with extraordinary ease, start to sentimentalize or romanticize this troubling figure in our own history. We must somehow make him safe before we can live comfortably with him. Yet we want to say that this is a supreme act of love. Okay? That the death of Jesus is a supreme act of love. But why? Because he made himself available to everybody. Because he did not do what we do: tailor our self-image so as to make ourselves acceptable to whatever social situation we are in. Doing this, of course, makes us inaccessible to other people, because they do not see who we really are. So love is impossible or, at least, seriously hobbled because of all this social management or psychological management.

What we are talking about here is not some kind of political revolutionary scheme. We are talking about one human being able to be, in the glorious words of Genesis "naked and unashamed" before everybody else. Jesus did not pretend before others. Therefore, others did not feel they had to pretend before Jesus. But that's hazardous, hazardous to your health. It's mortally dangerous.

So, the crucifixion is an enormously important day. An enormously important day in our history as Christians. Above all, it is not simply to feel bad: "Poor old Jesus. Poor old Jesus.". This is the way the day is very often treated, I'm afraid. Instead of giving us the opportunity which I have been suggesting throughout Lent, to shed light on us. To shed light on our cowardice and above all on our dishonesty. So if we wonder why there is so little love in the world today, the crucifixion casts light on that too. How can you love what you don't know? For how can you let yourself be loved if you don't let yourself be exposed, in all your reality, to someone else? That's the issue. That's why this day is so glorious to us in a strange, strange paradoxical way.

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