God of Battle

Scripture: Good Friday, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

For centuries, Britannia stood as the farthest outpost of the Roman Empire: a wild, savage place, populated by barbarian Celts renowned for human sacrifice and for festooning their domiciles with the severed heads of vanquished enemies.  Yet by the might of the legions and the strength of commerce, civilization managed a foothold on this wild isle, even if it meant that the Romans had to build a great wall defending the southern half from the bloodthirsty denizens of the north. Those northern reaches, dubbed Kaledonia, were left to the tribal ravages of the Gaels and the Picts—collectively known as “Scots,” the term for bandits.

The Celts under Roman domination embraced urbanization, open markets, education, and all the benefits of the Empire.  Romans had called them “Britons,” meaning “tattooed,” after the garish war paint that the natives wore when Rome had first arrived.  Now, however, the Britons were as Roman as the Romans themselves. Eventually, the Empire abandoned the bloody paganism of its past and found itself converted to the Light of Christ, as the life of the Church pumped along those famous Roman roads as blood courses through arteries.  The Britons, too, rejoiced in Christ.  Gone were the war-gods and human sacrifices of their shameful past. The Pax Romana paved the way for the Prince of Peace.

Alas, as history has shown time and again, civilization rarely lasts for more than fits and spurts.  Having spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth, the Empire herself began her long decline.  By the Fifth Century A.D., Rome withdrew her legions from Outpost Britannia, recalling them to the Continent to defend the homeland. The civilized, Romanized, Celtic Christian Britons suddenly found themselves alone, surrounded on all sides by their pagan kin: Scots and Picts and Irish, oh my.  So it came to pass that Vortigern, a Briton king, sent out the call for mercenaries.  All across Europe, the Teutonic tribes, Scandinavians and Germanics, were beating back Rome, and to these same invading hordes Vortigern promised reward. Come, help us beat back our uncivilized kin, and we shall pay you handsomely!

So indeed they came, tribe upon tribe: Angles and Saxons and Jutes and Frisians, pagan Germans come to save the Christian Celts from the pagan Celts.  And, to no one’s surprise, they accomplished their task with alacrity and vigor!  Good killers, these Germans. Ah, but then came time to pay the piper, and the royal coffers ran dry.  When the Britons realized that their own King Vortigern had brought the Anglo-Saxon hordes to their shores with no means to pay them, his own subjects trapped him in a tower and burned him alive! A fiery king in a tower still lingers in British art.  The Germanic tribes, however, having come all this way to such a fine island and realizing that its Celtic inhabitants seemed rather easy to slay, simply took in lieu of payment massive swathes of land.  Thus did the better part of Britannia come to be known as the land of the Angles, or Angle-Land: England.

The civilized Celtic Britons retreated to a rump kingdom in the west, where they were mocked ever after as “Welsh,” which means “slaves.”  A new breed of barbarian had repaganized the country: a fresh new crop of souls in need of salvation.  So came a new wave of Christian missionaries, Roman and German and Celtic.  And they found the Anglo-Saxon hordes surprisingly eager to abandon their blood-soaked pantheon of pagan deities, every bit as savage and carnivorous as the Celts’. But theirs, mind you, were barbarian kingdoms, not the civilized villas of Roman Britain.  They valued battle, honor, strength, victory—all the barbarian virtues.  So for as much as they could see the truth and beauty of monotheism, as much as they flocked to hear of a single all-powerful Creator God, it seemed too bizarre, too anathema, to accept that this God had come down to earth as a Man… only to die on a Cross. How indeed can a Prince of Peace rule within warriors’ hearts?

It’s an ancient story, really.  It surfaces time and again in the Bible.  Pagan peoples flock to the message of One God, an Almighty God, Creator of everything and everyone, Judge of the exalted and of the damned.  People love that stuff. But tell these same enthusiasts that this God is Lord of the weak, of the oppressed, of the slave and the despised—that He champions Moses over Pharaoh, David over Goliath—and their enthusiasm sputters. Tell them furthermore that this same God took on flesh and came to earth, not as a conqueror or emperor or even a mighty warrior of great renown, but rather as the poor Son of a humble Virgin, adopted by a pious carpenter, living in obscurity until becoming a wandering desert Rabbi at age 30, and dying without battle on a Cross—A Cross!  The punishment for worthless bandits and scum of the earth!—then watch the faithful scatter.

God is not the stumbling block.  The Incarnation is not the stumbling block.  But the Cross… oh, the Cross will get us every time.  What sort of God comes to die?  Even Peter, Saint Peter, Prince of the Apostles, foremost of Jesus’ inner circle, cannot comprehend this. He is the first, God bless him, to realize, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit Himself, Who and What Jesus is: namely, the Christ, the Messiah, the divine Savior sent from Heaven to save the world and set all things right!  But as soon as Jesus explains to him what this actually means, what saving the world must entail, Peter is scandalized. Peter rebukes Jesus, telling Him to stop blathering on about such nonsense!  Torture?  Humiliation?  Execution?  What kind of a Messiah is that?  Doesn’t Jesus know what a Christ is supposed to do?

Thus Jesus says unto Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!  That you can see the Christ, is, indeed, from God—but your notion of the Christ comes straight out of Hell.”  Peter couldn’t see that the Cross, the Crucifixion, the Atoning death of Jesus Christ, was the greatest act of bravery, of strength, of self-giving love and Godhood that could ever be enacted. He thought the Cross a shame, a scandal, because he looked upon it with the broken eyes of this world.  Yet if he could see with the eyes of Heaven—as indeed he would later, after the Resurrection—Peter would realize that the Cross shall be the greatest, most complete, most astoundingly divine victory in all of Creation!

The barbarians of Angle-Land had the same problem, of course.  And, if we’re honest, so do we today.  For us, the Cross, the grave, the self-giving sacrifice are all marks of shame, of weakness, of scandal.  (Who does that?  Whose God does that?) They make no sense to a savage world, a world of conquest and bloodshed, that still thinks of power as consisting in domination over the weak.  The Anglo-Saxons could not see the Cross for what it was: strength, divinity, victory, glory.  They had to be taught to view it with new eyes, Christian eyes. Then came the vision.

A Saxon warrior, traveling with his thanes, his bosom companions in war, had a dream: a miraculous dream, a beautiful, poetic dream: The Dream of the Rood. As he fell to sleep one night he saw “a wondrous tree lifted into the air, enveloped by light, the brightest of trees.”  The tree was covered in gold and gems and precious garments, a glorious treasure, yet as it turned the dreaming warrior saw it dripping and drenched in blood. Its appearance changed continually, from gilding to gore, until the dreamer realized that, impossibly, the glory and the blood, the treasure and the horror, were somehow one in the same.  That’s when he realized that this tree was the Savior’s Tree: the Holy Rood: the Cross of Christ.  Lo and behold, to the warrior it spoke!

Years ago I was cut down from the edge of the forest, the Cross proclaimed.  Strong enemies seized me… commanded me to lift up their criminals… until they set me on a hill… Then I saw mankind’s Lord hasten with great zeal, that He wished to climb upon me.  There, I did not dare break to pieces or bow down against the Lord’s words, when I saw the surface of the earth tremble… The young Hero stripped Himself [for battle] then; that was God Almighty, strong and resolute. He ascended the high gallows, brave in the sight of many; there He wished to release mankind.  I trembled when the Man embraced me.  However, I dared not bow down to the earth, fall to the surface of the earth, but I had to stand fast.  I was raised as a Cross.  I lifted up the mighty King, the Lord of the heavens…Now I command you, my beloved warrior, that you tell this vision to men, reveal in words that it is the tree of glory on which Almighty God suffered!

After the vision, the warrior-poet continues in his own voice:  I look forward to the time when the Cross of the Lord… will fetch me, and will then bring me to… joy in the heavens, where the Lord’s people are seated at the feast… The Son was triumphant on that expedition, mighty and successful, when He came with the multitude, the host of souls, into God’s Kingdom, the Lord Almighty, to the delight of the angels and of all the saints, who in the heavens before dwelled in glory, when their Ruler, the Almighty God, came where His homeland was!

Christ the brave, unflinching warrior.  Christ the fearless conqueror of Hell.  Christ the returning young Hero, the Father’s triumphant Champion, leading hosts of rescued souls to the mead-hall feast of eternal victory in His heavenly home.  Now the Angles saw the Cross for what it truly was. God willing, so can we.

Truly, this was a Good Friday.

Thanks be to Christ, greatest of Warriors, gentlest of Kings.  In Jesus’ Name.  AMEN.