God Bomb

Propers: Good Friday, AD 2021 B

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.

I was asked once: “Why the Cross? Why is this the preëminent symbol of our faith?”

And, caught a bit off guard, I replied: “Well, because of Jesus, of course.”

And he said, “Is that all?”

This is the night of the Cross. Tonight, heaven meets earth, God meets Man, life meets death, upon a rough-hewn slab of wood driven through with primitive iron nails. We killed a God tonight.

And I don’t mean a god like Zeus or Thor, powerful, flawed creatures with their own beginnings and ends. No, I mean “God” in the other sense of the word, with a capital G: God the infinite, the eternal, the Creator; the One, the Source, the All; all-knowing, all-mighty, everlasting, ever-present; the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; the utterly transcendent, beyond space, beyond time, beyond thought. That’s who came down to us in the person of Jesus Christ. That’s whom we nailed to that Cross on the rock.

It’s a hard thing to fit your mind around, I know. We’re not supposed to, really. All great truths delve deeper into mystery than the mind itself can dive. Yet when the Church speaks of mysteries, this is not prestidigitation, waving our hands to distract you from things that make no sense. Rather, the holy mysteries of the Church refer to things we cannot grasp until we experience them for ourselves. Foremost among these is the mystery of the Cross; of God made flesh to come and die, at our hands and for our sake. Christianity rises and falls upon the holy mystery of the Cross.

To believe in God is no scandal. Most everyone does. But to believe that God became human, while somehow still remaining God, well, that should give anyone pause. What a union of opposites the Incarnation must be: we, who are finite and fallen; He, who is infinitely high. Yet the crux of our faith, if you will, is the central conviction that Jesus Christ is God on earth, and we murdered Him.

Everyone knows something’s wrong with the world: that it’s broken, that life isn’t what it ought to be, that we’re all meant to be better than we are. And so the question of religion often becomes, “What is God doing about all this mess?” Because what we seem to want is a simple, straightforward, and violent solution. Oh, we wouldn’t call it violent; it might be deceptively bloodless. But what we’re looking for is God to just snap His almighty fingers and force the world to be good again.

Because that’s what we would do, if we were God, right? We love to imagine that we could solve the problem of evil simply by killing the devil. Peace through superior firepower. It’s all so very human, isn’t it?

But while we’re imagining what we might do if we were God, Jesus Christ is showing us exactly how God lives as a human being. Jesus is the Adam you and I were meant to be. Only He is truly human, for only He is truly whole. And what does He do? Does He raise an army? Make a list? Wipe out sinners by the bushel, as the Warrior-Messiah we wanted? Please. Prophets of sword and steel have always been a dime a dozen here below.

No, Jesus shows us how to be human by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, teaching the ignorant, speaking truth to power, insisting on the dignity and the humanity of those we cast aside: women, children, orphans, widows; the impoverished, imprisoned, and enslaved; aliens and migrants and foreigners in the land. And He upends everything we thought we knew of power: Blessed are the poor, He says; blessed are the peacemakers; blessed are the meek who lay down their lives, not for kings, not for wars, but for love of God and neighbor. The Kingdom of Christ is the empire inverted, and thus is still a threat to those in power to this day.

Jesus called for active resistance, for a fearless life of liberation and truth, for a third way between violence and passivity, neither fight nor flight but a refusal to surrender to injustice and untruth, defiantly turning the other cheek while never unsheathing the sword. And armies can’t fight that. Tyrants can’t quash that. Not without revealing themselves for who they truly are. Not without unmasking the devil underneath.

So how do you fight this God-Who-Is-Man, who raises no army yet trembles the throne? Why, you kill Him, of course. First you get His friends to betray Him, some silver for the zealot and fear to scatter the rest. Then you parade Him around a bit. Strip off His clothes, pull the flesh from His back. Give Him a crown of jagged thorns to show them all how cruel you can be. And when He’s standing there, naked and bleeding, impotent and helpless before the world, then you nail Him to a cross and lift Him high so that everyone can see how slowly fools can die.

Nails through His wrists, nails through His feet, through the bones to hold Him up, through the nerves to make Him dance. Give Him a little sign, so that they know that He’s a King. Then just watch as the hours scrape by, and the sack around His heart slowly fills up with fluid, crushing the life out of Him, so that He dies with a long, anguished cry.

After that it’s clean-up. Break the legs of the people beside Him to speed up their own road to death. Then get Him down before sundown, lest the people cause trouble. Let them bury Him and drop a rock on His tomb. And just for good measure, post a guard at the grave, that not even His corpse could be free from the threat of your sword. And that should be that, right? That should be the end of the whole silly story. Imagine a Rabbi from Galilee as God! What next, homeless angels? Heaven in a hovel?

But the Cross was never the end of His story. And now—well, now things really start to get spooky. Because if you thought the Incarnation was a paradox perplexing, just wait until the Crucifixion hits home. We’ve just done the impossible, people. We’ve killed God. We’ve divided by zero. Now just what do you think is going to happen, when Jesus hits hell?

We took Life Himself and hurled Him into death. We took Light Himself and buried Him in darkness. We took the presence of God on earth, the very definition of heaven, and dropped Him like a bomb into the deepest pits of hell. And when He hits, let me tell you, reality itself will come undone. The damned will be forgiven, the chasm sealed up, and Christ will rise victorious with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train. We thought we killed a Man tonight, but by death has death been slain!

Why the Cross? Why is this the preëminent symbol of our faith? Because the Cross is the axis upon which our world has turned. It is the Tree of Life, bearing on its limbs the strange fruit of the Crucified God. It is the crosshairs by which Jesus targets every wayward soul. The blood and water poured forth here have conquered death and hell, filling them up to bursting with His everlasting life. And the fire kindled in this wood will one day burn the sky—but it starts tonight in death and fear, and in love that cannot die.

We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You,
for by Your Cross You have redeemed the world.

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