Strange Fruit

The Fifth Sorrowful Mystery

The Crucifixion

Sts. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

When they reached the place / called The Skull

           They cru/cified Him

Jesus said, “Fa/ther forgive them;

           They know not / what they do.”

One of the criminals who was crucified with Him said, “Je/sus remember me

           When You come in/to Your Kingdom.”

“Indeed, I promise you,” / He replied,

           “Today you will be with Me in / paradise.”

Near the Cross of Jesus / stood His mother

           And the disci/ple He loved.

Jesus said to His Mother, “Woman, this / is your son.”

           Then to the disciple He said, “This / is your mother.”

And / from that moment

           The disciple made a place for her / in his home.

And darkness came over the whole land, and / the earth quaked;

           And the veil of the Temple was / torn in two.

And Jesus cried out in / a loud voice,

           “Father, into Your hands I com/mit My spirit.”

And bow/ing His head,

           He / breathed His last.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the / Holy Spirit,

           As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world / without end.

Homily:

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

The pagan gods of mankind’s great mythologies are held to have been immune to disease, age, impurity or imperfection. Death, we are told, did not concern them. Yet we often forget that the pagan gods were not, in and of themselves, immortal. They did not have a natural immunity from illness and decay. Rather, they imbued themselves with these properties—stole these properties, one might say—from something that they ate.

In Norse mythology, the gods stayed young and healthy forever by consuming divine apples tended by the goddess Idunn. It was really the Apples of Idunn that made them into gods; why, her very name means “Ever Young.” For the Greeks it was a sweet-smelling food called ambrosia, and a related drink dubbed nectar, that kept the gods healthy and beautiful and alive. A diet of ambrosia and nectar was said to turn a man’s blood to golden ichor, and descriptions of this divine nourishment sound suspiciously like different sorts of honey.

In China the gods ate Peaches of Immortality; in India they drank amrita, their own version of ambrosia or nectar. And of course alchemists, for thousands of years, have sought the elusive Elixir of Life to keep a man young and healthy forever. (It derives from that famous Philosopher’s Stone.) There’s always some fruit, some plant, some honeyed sap that imparts immortality. It’s never something that we find in and of ourselves. There’s always a Tree of Life.

We recognize that, now don’t we? We’re familiar with the Tree of Life. It was one of two miraculous trees found in the Garden of Eden, as described to us in Genesis. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, knew neither death nor illness nor exhaustion; they lived in perfect harmony with their Creator above and with Creation below. They were the stewards, the co-creators, the very crowns of Creation—a living bridge between the spiritual and physical worlds. And God lavished them with blessings.

Two of these blessings were a pair of miraculous trees found in God’s garden: the Tree of Life, from which they were free to eat; and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which was forbidden to humankind lest we eat of it and die. That may seem quite strange at first, to have a poisonous tree in the midst of an otherwise perfect and life-giving garden. But the Tree of Knowledge was in fact a strange and powerful gift to Adam and Eve: it represented free will’s choice.

To ignore God’s admonition and to pick the forbidden fruit was nothing less than to reject God as God. It was to judge good and evil for ourselves, to create our own rights and wrongs, and thus to be our own judges, our own gods—by separating ourselves from the one true Good, the one true God. The Tree of Knowledge was neither test nor trap; God did not want us to take it, did not want us to leave the Garden of paradise. Nevertheless, He gave to us the choice. He gave us the honor of an exit, should we so demand to take it. Love, by nature, cannot force, and so paradise could not be a prison. It had to have a door that we could open, that we could choose, even if it led to death.

Perhaps we never would have taken that exit had we not been tempted by the serpent, that false and fallen angel. But tempted we were, and choose we did, to our everlasting destruction. Our pagan mythologies have not forgotten this tree, either. The Greeks spoke of a serpent wound around a tree of golden apples—yet everywhere in Greek mythology, golden apples prove a poisoned gift, sewing discord and dismay wheresoever they may fall. The serpent is poisoned, yes—but an even deeper poison lies in his glittering treasures. By choosing death, we necessarily reject life. So when we ate of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the holy angels ejected us from paradise and barred the gate with a flaming sword. The Tree of Life was lost to us, presumably forever.

But now, brothers and sisters—now in these last days—we view a strange new tree. It seems at first a terrible tree of death, since upon it we hung the Creator of the world. It was meant not as a living tree but as a device, an artifice, a mechanism for torture, humiliation, and public execution. It is, in fact, a Cross. Or at least it was. But now we see a strange new fruit hanging from that tree, and from that fruit flow both holy water and blood most divine.

We are bidden to eat of the flesh of that fruit. We are bidden to drink of the blood from His side. Yet when we consume this nourishment, we find ourselves consumed. The old creature within us dies, the old Adam, that foe of God. He drowns in the waters, sinks in the wine. And there rises up within us a New Adam, a New Creation, Who needs not apples or peaches or honeyed wine, but Who is Himself the very source of Life and Light and Being eternal.

That ugly, dead Cross with that ugly, dead corpse becomes transformed, resurrected, and suddenly we see it for what it truly is: that Cross is the Tree of Life, returned to us at last, gifted when we deserved it the least! It has been uprooted from a barred and distant paradise to be planted here, in the center of the world, in the sight of every people, in the midst of each repentant and sorrowful human heart. We look to the Cross, to the very image of death, and we see that death itself has been defeated! Despair gives way to hope, anguish to joy, judgment to forgiveness, division to unity, brokenness to health, and death to life everlasting!

To see Christ hanging on the Cross is to see humanity’s greatest evil transformed into God’s greatest mercy. It is to see the literal embodiment of mercy, salvation, forgiveness lifted up for all the world. God lays down His life to lift up our own. Our rebellion is defeated, our relationships restored, and our future shines with glory. Look to the Cross. Look to the Tree of Life. And know that upon it the Author of all has given everything He has, everything He is, to raise you up in Him forever.

Thanks be to Christ, our Tree of Life and Paradise Regained. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.