No God

Anunimouse96

Propers: Palm Sunday of the Passion, AD 2024 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.

No god would stand for this, just so that we’re clear.

There is not a single deity in any Ancient Near Eastern or Greco-Roman pantheon who would voluntarily suffer abandonment, disgrace, torture, and death, all for the love of those same souls who betrayed and murdered him. Christianity is the only religion to have as its central event the humiliation of our God.

The ancient gods and goddesses cared little for right or wrong. They themselves were beyond morality, beyond mere good and evil. What concerned them was power, power and honor. Oathbreakers, blasphemers, criminals were punished not so much for injustice as for impugning the sovereignty of whatever god had placed their victims under divine protection. So many mythological monsters were made such by offending the gods, dishonoring immortals.

There was the notion, of course, in many ancient societies, that beyond the feuding fickle heavens there dwelt a God beyond all gods, a God not even properly termed a god. This was the God, the One, the Source, the All, the Unmoved Mover, infinite, eternal, beautiful, good, and true. Yet He was believed so far beyond us as barely to notice us. Still, the dawning awareness of the God beyond all gods can be seen in the Hebrew Prophets, the Greek philosophers, the Hindu Brahmins.

Jesus suffers death in the worst way we know how. It’s slow and agonizing and utterly intentional. The Romans made murder an art, indeed a political statement: “See what we can do to one who claims to be a king.” We have no king but Caesar. How do we respond to this? What is the point of this? Is it just to feel sad? Is it to squirm in our pews, or to be emotionally manipulated by the pathos of the scene? No, my friends, my Christians. It is so much more than that. The Cross turns our world upside-down.

The idea of a god who would suffer out of love—for strangers, for enemies—is foolish, scandalous, utterly abhorrent to the ancient or classical mind. Furthermore the notion, already present throughout the Gospels, that Christ is not just a god but the God, the God beyond all gods, compounds the shock by orders of magnitude. Entirely outrageous! To think that God could be humiliated, scourged, crucified, mocked, and murdered? No wonder early Christians flabbergasted Rome.

And then there’s death, from whose bourn no traveller returns. Make no mistake: the gods fear death. Persephone, the queen of Hades, can only escape but six months a year. Ereshkigal, the goddess of death, begs for her life to her husband. Thor is worn down by old age and time, and Odysseus finds Herakles in hell, his human half at any rate. Even our deities bow down to death, and those who return for a time do not come in peace.

Yet here has Jesus conquered death. Christ has arisen from the tomb! He filled up hell to bursting with the life and love of God, and ransomed all the damned from the time of Adam and Eve, with all of those who perished in the Flood, and raised them up to God in Him. Here comes Christ, this scraggly desert rabbi, with His ragtag band of misfits and losers, fishermen and tax collectors. And somehow storms obey Him! Demons flee before Him. The sea supports His footfall. All the things we humans fear bow down in supplication.

And now at the last even death. Even the grave. Even hell. Christ is more than we’ve ever encountered, more than we could imagine. If He so chose, He could snap His fingers and command the planet Mars to knock out the Earth from beneath Him. And what does He do with His power? How does He show us His glory? By feeding the hungry, forgiving the sinner, rebuking the abusive, instructing the ignorant, turning the other cheek, healing those who suffer, and raising up all of the dead!

He saves the people who crucified Him. He saves the Apostles who abandoned Him. He saves even Judas who betrayed Him. He does all this not through fire, not through wrath, not through legions of angels from Heaven, but by selfless self-sacrifice, by loving the loveless, forgiving the unforgivable, by a mercy the like of which this world has never seen. And He changes everything.

The Cross turns our world upside-down. Or rather, our whole world was upside-down, for as long as we could remember; the Cross now sets it aright. Right replaces might. Humility overcomes honor. He lifts up the lowly and casts down the mighty from their thrones. Human rights, rule of law, equality, abolition, all of it flows from the Cross. And even death, that ancient insatiable maw consuming us and all there is, has been conquered, has been tamed, has been resurrected as the Way to life eternal.

We can’t even truly tell properly pagan stories anymore. Modern depictions of Hercules, of Thor, of RoboCop, the Matrix, and the Crow, all involve someone suffering for love, even unto death, so that he can rise again to right the world. Christ is every hero we have known. A poor Jew, executed by the state, in an impoverished and colonized country on the edge of civilization, is for us the nexus where God and Man are One. And if that doesn’t blow our minds, if that doesn’t humble our hearts, then we simply haven’t been paying attention.

The Cross was never incidental. There we broke a Man. And God poured forth from His side.

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

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