We Crucify

Propers: Good Friday, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

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

The Cross is proof that we are violent, and the Resurrection is proof that God is not.

We tend to view the Crucifixion backwards, or perhaps upside-down. We have this notion, carried over from a pagan past, of an angry God gnashing His teeth, ready to burn the world for our sins. And so we are provided with this one perfect human being—a single sinless sacrifice—whom we offer up to God in our place. Jesus takes a bullet for us, as it were. God consumes Him and is satisfied, so that He no longer feels the need to eat the rest of us. The whole notion reminds me of those old pulp fiction adventure rags wherein primitive islanders would toss a virgin into the volcano to save their village from the full fury of an eruption.

But to understand the Crucifixion in this way is to get it exactly backwards. It is to view Jesus Christ’s atoning sacrifice upside-down. We don’t sacrifice the Son of Man to a cruel and violent God; the Son of God sacrifices Himself to a cruel and violent humanity.

Some would have us believe that Jesus had to die in order to satisfy God’s justice, that we could never have been forgiven were it not for the shedding of innocent blood. That’s horse apples, folks. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it’s blasphemy. In Jesus Christ, the Almighty God humbled Himself, emptied Himself, to become one of us. He came down to earth, down here in the mud and the blood, when we could not claw our way back up to Him.

And from the very beginning of His ministry, Jesus is running around forgiving people their sins—which is something that only God can do. He heals and teaches and forgives and frees and raises people from the dead, right from the get-go. And He doesn’t do this for the good people, for the just people, for the people who’ve rightfully earned His mercy and love. No, He does all this for us—for sinners, for broken people, people who can offer Him nothing in return. It’s pure grace. And that kind of love, that kind of superabundance, cannot help but change us, to raise us up, to make us whole, so that the love poured out to us in Jesus Christ overflows, out from us, to others, to the entire world!

This challenges the whole notion of a pagan god, of a pagan world, a world in which everything is tit-for-tat, where the strong survive, where the good are rewarded and the wicked abandoned to their just desserts. That’s not how God works. That’s not how any of this works. Christ is the Light shining in darkness, the Life raising the dead, the Truth putting to flight all our lies and obfuscations! And that’s why He had to die. That’s why we murdered Him.

We had all kinds of excuses, mind you. Religious authorities accused Him of claiming to be God. The wealthy and powerful condemned Him for upending traditional values. The Romans had Him pegged as a would-be revolutionary come to liberate His people. And all of them were right. But like I said, those were just excuses.

In truth, Jesus challenges all of us to one extent or another. He calls out our assumptions, our hypocrisies, our priorities. And if even half of what He says is true—about the poor, about the Kingdom of God, about the Son of Man and the Bread of Life—then we must admit that our whole world is upside-down. Everything we thought we knew about God, the world, and humankind, it’s all backward, it’s all inside-out. And so we get scared, and angry, and violent. Who is this Man to think He proclaims a truth that puts all our lies to shame? Who is this Man who dares to shine light on all that we would rather keep shrouded in darkness?

So we get one of His buddies to betray Him, and we rush Him through a trumped-up series of show trials. The High Priest finds Jesus guilty of blasphemy. Herod the Tetrarch, ever hoping to be entertained, finds Him guilty of being boring. And Pontius Pilate, Roman governor of Judea, finds Him no more a threat than any other dusty desert rabbi from out in the boonies. Still, the mob has whipped themselves up into a frenzy by this point, so Pilate just assumes hand Jesus over to be crucified. What’s one less Jew in the grand scheme of things? He washes his hands of the whole affair.

Now, we needn’t go into the gruesome details. That would just be sadistic. But we must realize what exactly crucifixion is. It’s not just an execution. One doesn’t nail a man to a cross simply to punish him nor to eliminate him. There are better ways to do both. No, crucifixion is by design a horror show. Its intended audience is not the victim but rather all the world around him. The purpose of the cross is to demonstrate overwhelming power: the power to humiliate, the power to dehumanize, the power to take everything from you before you die. Crucifixion displays to the world the utter futility of resistance to the power of the state. It is political murder as propaganda.

It should be obvious, then, that this was in no way God’s doing. The Cross was never God’s idea. We did this! We invented crucifixion! It is all too human. No matter how distant in time or space, the Crucifixion remains a gristly spectacle, our own little public theatre of mockery, humiliation, agony, and death. It is our own gruesome testament that man is a wolf toward man. Long ago, a stone’s throw from the site of the Crucifixion, God forbade Abraham to sacrifice Abraham’s only son to God. But now upon the wood of the Cross, we demand of God His only Son sacrificed to us. Alas, a bitter irony.

Such is how we treat the God who for love of the world emptied Himself, who put aside His power and glory, to come down here in the mud and the blood, to forgive us our sins and heal our wounds and raise our dead. This Cross is our reply. And I wish we could say that things have changed, that we’ve learned our lesson, but the truth is that we continue to crucify Christ every single day that we ignore and oppress and abuse the powerless, the vulnerable, the discarded.

All over the world, it’s missiles and nerve gas and mouths we refuse to feed. We haven’t learned a bloody thing, have we? We’re all still the same. The Cross was not the exception; it was never the exception. That Cross is who we are! It’s what we are and it’s what we do! We kill, we maim, we crucify, every single day. Oh, what a piece of work is Man.

And yet—and yet!—even as we are in the midst of murdering Him, Jesus announces, from the Cross, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” We cannot kill the immortal love that God pours out for His children and for the life of the world. We know. We’ve tried. He just keeps Rising.

It’s a funny thing, that Cross. It’s hideous and terrifying and grotesque. It’s a reminder of all the terrible things we do and are. But for those who have eyes to see—for those with some small glimpse of the world turned right—it actually looks rather like a tree. A familiar tree, one we once knew in the Garden of Eden, oh, so very long ago. A Tree of Life! And there in its branches hangs a strange and wondrous fruit.

Tonight that fruit has fallen and lies buried in the earth. But He will rise in three days’ time, bringing salvation, forgiveness, and life to the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.