Mockery

Propers: Good Friday, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

Who crucified Christ? Who murdered our God made flesh?

It wasn’t Judas. It wasn’t Pilate. It wasn’t the Judean people, nor even the Empire of Rome. It was us—you, and I, and all of us, all of humanity—we crucified Christ. We murdered the Living God, the Lion of Judah who came down as our Passover Lamb to take away the sin of the world.

That might sound extreme. We weren’t there, were we? We didn’t betray Him with a kiss, scourge Him with the lash, crown Him with a mockery of thorns. How can we say that we all murdered Christ, when He died 2000 years ago and half a world away? We weren’t even born yet.

But this has always been humanity’s response to gentleness, meekness, forgiveness. We always take mercy for weakness, pacifism for cowardice. Those who demand justice we brand as troublemakers and rabble-rousers. Those who speak up for the poor we demean as bleeding hearts or welfare queens. Even the heroes of our recent history, Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, we only revere in retrospect, now that they’re dead and gone, now that their memory can be domesticated by the very imperial systems that they opposed.

And of course both such fine men learned from Christ. It was His example they followed: King a Christian minister, Gandhi a Hindu lawyer. They believed in active nonviolent resistance, what the East calls active inaction. They turned the other cheek, went the extra mile, lent without thought of reward. Yet never once did they back down. Never once did they concede that violence held an authority all its own, and they were all the stronger for it. Yet look how we responded, what we did to each of them. Even so, their memory lives eternal. And their enemies—well, go and look for them now.

There is something deep within us, something broken and twisted, that reacts with fear and horror to grace, to mercy, to a spiritual love that encompasses all of humanity and all of creation within its sphere of unmerited, selfless self-giving. There’s something about that sort of love—the sort only taught by the great religious traditions—that puts the lie to our everyday sins, to our selfishness, our acquisitiveness, our tit-for-tat thinking and our Darwinian triumphalism.

When a man knows God such that he knows no fear, what can we do with that? Such a man, or woman, cannot be bought, cannot be threatened, cannot be wheedled or cajoled or cowed, cannot it seems be stopped. We begin to fear even that they cannot be killed. And so we lash out—that part within us so wreathed in shadow that it dare not step into the light—we strike and crush and cut and lash to reassert the dominion of death, the logic of power.

We crucify Christ. We shoot King. We arrest and we beat Gandhi over and over again. And we do so because they remind us of a Truth that we are all deeply invested in denying: that there is more to life than strength and wealth and violence. There is a light that outshines all darkness, a power that overcomes all force, and a life that outlives all death. And if we allowed ourselves to believe that, even for a moment—then the whole system of civilization that we have built would come crashing down. All of our pyramids of power would topple.

And then blessed would be the poor. Blessed would be the merciful. Blessed would be the peacemakers. You see? Utter chaos. Better to make an example of anyone championing such an illusory “Kingdom of Heaven.” Better to bind them and break them and haul up their corpse for all the world to see. That’ll teach ‘em. That’ll stop ‘em. All hail the Empire. All hail hell.

But this time, this Man—this Jesus of Nazareth, this wandering desert rabbi—it didn’t work with Him. And it wasn’t for lack of trying, believe you me. We gave it everything we’ve got. We paid His friend to betray Him. We scared His students into fleeing Him. We twisted His Apostle to deny Him no less than three times. And then we gave Him the standard would-be-king package: beating, binding, imprisoning, show trials, public lashing, constant mockery, gross bodily harm, lacerations and blunt force trauma, slow, grievous, agonizing death, and then impalement with a lance for good measure. I mean, the whole nine yards.

But it didn’t work. It’s the strangest thing, really. We poured out into Him every torture we could devise, and it just couldn’t stop Him. Why, it barely slowed Him down. Three days later He’s up again, with death defeated, hell harrowed, and all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train. He didn’t just defeat His own death; He defeated all death, for everyone, forever. He absorbed within Himself all of our violence, all of our hatred, and He drowned it all in the ocean of His love, a torrent of mercy in blood and in water that filled up hell to bursting and lifted all of humanity up into Heaven.

But that’s not the worst part of it. Did you know that? The Resurrection, to my ear at least, wasn’t the moment when He well and truly defeated the madness of mankind. Do you know what was? It was the moment when He was hanging there, pierced through the nerve centers in His ankles and His wrists, skin hanging off His back in tatters, thorns lodged in His scalp, slowly suffocating under the weight of His own body and with the peritoneal sack around His heart filling up with fluid to crush it in His chest—

And He said, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” Father, forgive them. Forgive these murderers. Forgive these monsters. Forgive these people who have tortured God to death. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. That’s the moment. That’s the defeat. That’s when He looked to us from the depths of unimaginable suffering and agony and desolation and loved us all the more—loved us even as we murdered Him—loved us all the way to hell and back.

That’s the moment when all of our lies, all of our evils, all of our wickedness and sins and hierarchies of wealth and of poverty were revealed as impotent, laughable, silly old shams. That’s when we knew that we were hopelessly, hilariously outgunned. That’s when we saw that no matter what we do or say, no matter how much hatred fills up our hearts like bile, no matter what horrors we may execute or conceive—the love of God is stronger, infinitely stronger.

And there is nothing we can do to stop it. Nothing we can do to escape it. Nothing we can do to prevent God at the last from healing us, from forgiving us, from raising us up from the dead. We hit Him with everything we had, and He didn’t even resist, and still we couldn’t stop His forgiveness. Still we couldn’t quench His mercy. Still we couldn’t fight His love. For the love of God in Christ Jesus is utterly inexorable. And all the hatred in the world can barely slow it down.

Tonight we killed our God. And in so doing, we are all of us defeated. Thank Christ.

So woe to you, who think you have won. Woe to you who cling to your money and your power and your status in society. For one word of mercy from that Cross has made a mockery of all the empires of this earth. A new Kingdom is now at hand, inaugurated in the most impossible way imaginable. And there is absolutely nothing you can do to escape that mercy which comes now for you.

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