The Hell March

Jesus, by Genzoman

Propers: Good Friday, AD 2022 C

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.

Death. It obsesses us.

Some say it gives to life its meaning, that the story has no point if the story has no end. And there’s truth enough in that, I suppose. Yet even this assumes that there’s still something beyond the end, that there will even be a story left to tell. For how can meaning exist if there’s no-one around to discern it?

Death is the dark force looming behind all our structures of power. Why do what we say? Why, because we have guns. Why pay your bills? So you won’t freeze or starve. Why not get involved in Ukraine? Because the Russians have nukes. Death is the trump card, the final arbiter. The buck stops here. Rich and poor, young and old, all are equal in death.

We try to domesticate it, make it entertaining: action movies, horror movies, trot it out at Halloween. We try to justify it: the founding myth of America being the use of righteous violence. “God made men; Sam Colt made them equal,” right? And we try to cover it up: to banish signs of aging with hair dyes and pills; heck, we even put make-up on corpses. “It looks like he’s sleeping”—isn’t that what we say? But it doesn’t change a thing. All that just kicks the can down the road.

Death is still death. And death is still king, the debt all men must pay. To borrow a line from an old Western: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all that he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”

God has come in Jesus Christ to save us all from death, from the abyss of nonbeing. For whatever physical or philosophical definition we might apply to it, death is nothing other than separation from our God; from the God who is Himself life and light and love and bliss, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” To know the love of God is to have eternal life, to possess the great I AM who banishes “I am not.”

Death is not a thing, not a substance, but a lack, an absence, a great black hole, and Christ has come to fill up this chasm, and every last pit of hell, full to bursting with the very Breath and Blood of God, which can neither be staunched nor stopped. Christ has come to conquer death, that death by death would die—for “what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” Still that Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

You’d think that this would be good news. Indeed, that’s what “gospel” means. But it’s a funny thing about human beings: the very things that frighten us most can help us make sense of our world. And so we’re often more afraid of losing our fears than of those fears themselves. Better the devil you know, I suppose. This is clearly seen in the life of Jesus. When a storm threatens to capsize the Apostles, Jesus rebukes the winds with but a word, and they fall silent. The natural response, one might think, would be joy. But no, the Apostles are terrified.

When Jesus then encounters a demoniac, raving amongst the tombs, shattering the chains in which he is bound, Jesus drives the demons out with but a simple command. And they flee! But other than the man himself, the whole countryside now quakes with fear. They’re afraid of storms, yes, afraid of demons. But how much more are they now afraid of this Man who dismisses them both!

The things that scare us most are scared themselves of Jesus. What does that mean? Who is this guy, what is this guy, that the winds and the spirits obey Him?

And then of course we have death, that black abyss, the power behind the edge of every arrowhead and sword. Jesus banishes even death—quietly, at first, secretly, at first: a widow’s son, a rabbi’s daughter; private resurrections. But then comes Lazarus, and everything changes. Here is Christ faced with a corpse mouldering four long days in the tomb, in the punishing Levantine heat; the corpse of a friend and most beloved brother.

And here before the assembled hosts of Jerusalem, here before the crowds of the capital city, the City of God, here Christ makes a mockery of death. He humiliates death! To hell with the rotting, to hell with the stink, to hell with all the physical impossibilities of cellular decay. Jesus calls out—and the dead man gets up! Because I don’t care where you are, brothers and sisters. I don’t care how far you’ve fallen, or how beaten-down and broken-up you may be. I don’t care if you’re stone dead in the ground. When God calls your name, you get up.

And this is the wonder, this is the glory, this is the fear that gets Jesus killed. Because what on earth can anyone do to a Man who undoes death? We can’t even imagine that. We’re afraid to imagine that, terrified of it, of Him, of who He must be. For who can call the dead to life, save only God on earth?

You know how this story goes. They couldn’t let Him live after that. No-one in this world has the right to mock death and walk away from it unscathed. The old authorities must be reasserted. The old certainties must be reaffirmed. And to do that, we need death. We need that final arbiter, or everything down here goes mad. So we’re not just going to kill Jesus, no. The kid gloves are off. We are going to make an example of Him to the world. We’re going to offer Him up as a sacrifice, as the main course at a banquet of death, a symphony of suffering.

We’re going to show Him everything we’ve learned down here, down in the darkness, down in the depths. We’re gonna make it slow, and we’re gonna make it agony, and we’re gonna make Him gibber and bleed and cry and bow and break. And so we rip the skin off of His back with hooks in a whip. And we tie thorns around His head and then into His skull. And we make Him haul His own cross when He can barely stand up for pain. And then—and then—this is beautiful—

We put nails through the nerve centers in His ankles and His wrists. It’s brilliant, because when He pushes up with His feet to take the weight of His hands, it causes His legs to explode in pain. So then He has to take the weight off His legs, and back onto His arms, which causes them to explode in pain. And so He dances up there, up there on that Cross, naked and bleeding and shredded and helpless for everyone to see. And eventually He’ll run out of juice and He’ll just hang there until the weight of His own body crushes the breath out of His lungs. Beat that, Jesus!

What do you have to say now, smart guy? Who’s laughing at death now?

And He opens His mouth, through His cracked, bloody lips, and He says:

“Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”

And that’s it. That’s the moment. We threw everything at Him, everything we had, every cruelty, every sin. We held nothing back. We dehumanized Him, tortured Him, murdered Him. And still it couldn’t stop Him. We couldn’t stop Him. Still He forgave us. Still He prayed for us. Still He loves us from that Cross. My God. What can we do against that—against a power like that, a love like that? It breaks down everything, every barrier, every resistance, every limit we ever knew. I could be Satan himself, hidden in hell, and still this love would find me.

We thought that we were breaking Him, just like we broke the world. But all we did was break Him open. And now He can’t be contained. Now He can’t be controlled. Now He can never be stopped. He is beyond violence, beyond death. And He is coming, now, for you: for you who murdered Him; you who mocked Him; you who nailed Him to the Cross. And you cannot hide, and you cannot flee, and there is nowhere left in all of Creation for any of us to run.

He will march through hell. He will split open Heaven. He will break up the earth and all the graves that lie therein. Nothing and no-one will even be able to slow Him down in the slightest. And every step along the way His voice will cry: “Forgive them! Forgive them! Forgive them!” —until the fire kindled in that Cross consumes the entirety of the cosmos. And all that’s left to any of us is the white-hot love of God.

And that, my dear sinners, is how death dies.

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