The Day Christ Died

Prologue

Make no mistake the cross is horrible. If the film "The Passion of Christ" makes one point more cogently than others do it is that. The brutality, suffering and humiliation meted out to those who were crucified churned the stomach and offended the senses. It was meant to. The scourging and torment of Christ on the road to Golgotha, his death on the cross was a dreadful agony; it was part of the politics of terror that secured the peace of Rome - Pax Romana. 'That such a death should lie at the heart of Christian faith seems an affront to all that speaks of life and the goodness of creation. And yet it is at the cross, that God who created the world with all its ambiguities and ambivalence, with its chances to produce love and creativity and wonder, which are logically balanced with the possibility that it might. turn out wrong, it is here at the cross that God accepts the world as it is. Jesus is granted no special favours, no divine interruptions of the grim reality of political expedience, no psychic tricks to dull the horror or by-pass the pain, no assurance that envy, hate and betrayal were not the last word. It is easy to see the cross from the other side of Sunday, but so important to see it as it is today. The end. A death.'[1] A terrible and divine agony. That is what the reality of the cross is about. And God is in the midst of it, bearing it all, knowing it all, from the inside.

Jesus the man from Nazareth - a personal pain

Hymn: My song is love unknown -63

Mark 14. 32- 42

"I am deeply grieved even to death... take this cup from me"

When the supper was over, when all the psalms had been sung, Jesus and his disciples went to the Mt of Olives, we are told that a sudden fear overcame him and he became very distressed, to the point of death. The tension wells up inside him; suddenly all his farewell discourses are very real. A reluctant truth whispers itself to him - that the end is about to begin, that it could be worse than he has ever imagined and so he retreats at distance in fear, in dread, to pray.

The terrible night of fear is one of the most precious accounts we have of Jesus for it reveals him to us in all humanity... thirsting for God, for God's will to be done and yet also fearing what that might mean in the here and now. His night in Gethsemane is a night of combat, a struggle with terror, with God and with a terrible aloneness. Perhaps this is the most poignant truth of suffering. That whoever is near by, whatever words or actions are offered in consolation the painful reality is the sense of isolation that suffering produces. Real then is the grief that his disciples failed to keep watch with him in his dark night. Why could they not keep watch with him? Was sleeping the response to their own dark night of fear in the face of loss?

Much has been written on dark nights, they may be short and appallingly powerful, like a knife or amputation or long and drawn out with a weariness and isolation that defies description. Gibson's film begins with this dark night, but little attention is given to what is the beginning of Christ's agony. I think only of those who in the face of death tell of their life flashing before their eyes, memories and regrets crowding in on them.

Could this not be true for Jesus? He must surely revisit his brief ministry and think back to the works of healing he has performed, the conflicts his teaching has produced amongst the religious leaders. Does he flash back to the response of the multitudes; the raising of Lazarus; the amazement of his disciples and their failure to understand what he was trying to teach them? Does he perhaps flash back to his baptism; that moment when the seal of the Spirit was set upon him marking him for the work of his Father? And does he wonder, as we all do when things go horribly wrong for us, whether he should have done things differently?

What of his death? How will his end come? What will be the specifics? What shape will the rejection of his ministry and mission finally take? No wonder a terrible fear overtakes him. No wonder he prays to be delivered from it. Yet, Jesus' prayer of anguish in Gethsemane is not granted. Turning to his friends he finds them asleep or afraid or as we so often are found to be busy, away or preoccupied. He faces the church -it condemns him, which is regrettably characteristic of institutions - sooner or later there is something that works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. He faces the state - where appallingly and not unusually justice is seen only in terms of political expediency. The crowd, the people that followed him are appealed to, the poor and simple that he blessed, whom he had healed, and taught. Overnight they have become murderous. Finally he will turn to God with the agonised cry of dereliction, "My God, My God why have you forsaken me". His prayer for mercy is offered and then withdrawn as he submits his life in love for others in the words, "yet not my will, but yours, be done".

Abandonment takes tremendous courage. It is not just a hanging loose. It is an act of will. It is a letting go; a severing of the strings by which one manipulates, controls, administrates the forces of ones life. [2] I think it is fair to say that abandoning ourselves to God, to the will of God is a struggle for most of us and it usually involves tremendous ambivalence and protest, until in the words of Jeremiah we say "you have overpowered me - you were the stronger". [3]

Jesus' abandonment is rewarded with his arrest. For as much as he knew the end was near the moment of truth is still shocking. Knowing that we will lose our liberty or life is one thing but when it happens it's a shock, an interruption. Shock does not fit with our idea of bravery. More is the pity. Because bravery is about living with fear, not about being spared it. We all dread the loss of liberty, of power when we move from being a free citizen to captive, a healthy person to patient, a wife to widow. When what we knew is gone. Gone too is our sense of invulnerability and omnipotence. Yet this transition from saviour to victim in the garden becomes one of tremendous grace.

What he teaches us is that powerlessness is a sacrament: an outward sign of the inward truth; that we are created, sojourners in a land we did not make [4] , that we are totally and utterly dependent on God. In abandoning himself to his father Jesus shows the power of that grace.

Silence

Prayer: Lord we are afraid, we are afraid of you, of what you may ask We yearn for your coming, of your love, for your passion, but we are afraid. We cling t the familiar, to people and things terrified of trading the security of the known, for a future beyond imagining. Give us the courage to say 'Yes'.

The crowd - Facing the truth about ourselves

Mark 15. 7-20

"Cruc~fy him! Crucify him!"

And so it is that the one who restored the alienated to full community; the one who spoke truth to power and challenged the corruption of human dignity; the one who was hailed as the Son of David is ultimately the one who is rejected. To understand this we have to understand that shame and honour were preoccupations of the GraecoRoman world. So much of society was ordered around who was in, who was out and who had the power to say so. Entering into Jerusalem the seat of religious power Jesus enters a world obsessed with hierarchy and power, a society controlled and ordered by keeping people in their place. By re-instating the marginalised Jesus levelled the playing field and gave people a sense of their inviolable dignity before God. Perhaps subversively he gave them a sense of hope and a future. In 1992 I was part of group of seminarians in south Africa that were arrested for marching against the local authorities response to a crisis in the local township. We had been manhandled by police with AK47 guns and forced into police vans before finally being locked in holding cells. In response to our own fear and to boost morale we began singing freedom chants, beautifully, slowly and in four part harmony as only black voices can, when an eruption of anger came from those detaining us. The stronger our voices grew, the more confident our hope, the more menacing our guards became. Hope can be deeply subversive.

The irony is that Jesus became powerful because power was of no interest to him. He could act as he did because he had no aspirations towards power. He was not keeping half an eye on his prospects as a feted and celebrated rabbi. You see the truth is we envy those who are able to dispossess themselves of the things that trap the rest of us. Someone who sees all that we aspire to as meaningless challenges our endless struggle for status or approval. We experience it as rejecting of all that we value -rejecting our very self And so Jesus is mocked and taunted. His trial is a travesty where power games and political expediency masquerade as justice. The one who was feted is rejected. The "hosanna's" turn to shouts of "crucify him", and are fuelled by the defiant authorities and the mockery of his inquisitors.

So the stripping begins. Jesus is stripped prior to being scourged. It is tempting to ham up the role of his captors, to portray them as sadists. While that may be part of the truth, it is not all of it. Experience in the police vans and cells of the security forces of South Africa revealed a more complex truth - that there is often a real ambivalence in those who are asked to carry out violence on behalf of others. My arrest in a turbulent and politically charged demonstration in South Africa showed me young soldiers sometimes as frightened by their orders as by their captives and with mixed feelings about punishing what they might have thought to be a fair demonstration of protest. I believe those feelings may play themselves out in individuals in every occupying force across the tableau of history.

None of us enjoy being stripped of our defences and our masks, whether the exposure happens by force, betrayal, illness or bereavement. We are appalled at how we might be seen. So we put on brave faces to mask our brokenness. Jesus if offered no such choice. He is stripped of honour; of dignity and of power and in that powerlessness and nakedness we meet the vulnerability of God. We should not be deceived by the outward serenity of his heroic suffering for there is no short cut to freedom; and the torments of his soul are something we can only speculate on.

Meditating on the brutality of the cross is not something we do out of morbid fascination or an enjoyment of gore but that we should come to the knowledge of ourselves and sink and tremble. Tremble at the prospect of our fickle following of Christ, in the full knowledge of our betrayals and weaknesses and in recognition of the uncomfortable and painful truth that the worst betrayals often happen in crowds. So that we come to know ourselves as part of the crowd. For it is in crowds you can feel safe and lose yourself and shout things you would never shout on your own, and do things you would never do if you felt the camera was watching you. It was a crowd in the church that did it, a crowd in the civil service that did it, and a crowd in the street that did it and a crowd on the hill that did it. Facing the mayhem of the crowd who bayed for innocent blood he said nothing. He let them do their worst and then said, "Father forgive them, they do not know what they do".

Silence

Prayer: Merciful God, as those who inflict wounds on each other, as those who deny justice to others, as those who seize wealth and are greedy, as those who put others on trial and refuse to receive be merciful to us, reach into our darkness with your love that we may know your saving power through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Hymn: When the Son of God was dying (sheet)

A man from the country - Carrying one another's burdens

Luke 23.13-31

"In the bearing of another's burdens, in the sharing of another's pain, we begin to dance"[5]

Simon of Cyrene was a man from the country, probably a black man. People must have wondered who he was: perhaps they thought he was a relative? Perhaps they thought he was a zealous supporter of Jesus? More probable is that Simon was a pilgrim who had come to Jerusalem for the Passover and, finding the city to be overcrowded, had spent the night in the country.

What effect did carrying that cross have on the rest of his life? People's experiences of being with another in agony vary. Some walk away and it never seems to re-enter their living or talking while others are changed forever by the experience. Some years ago I met Isabel. An ardent bowler and the sacristan at my local church. Isabel was always immaculately turned out. Widowed twice she was fiercely independent. Until she was diagnosed with a vicious and ugly cancer. The tumour cost her her voice box. Undeterred, Isabel fought back and mastered speech with an artificial one. A second tumour took root and her pain became unbearable and so she was moved into the hospice. I visited her and she asked that I read her the psalms to her. Frequently my visits coincided with the nurses who came to dress her wound. . The care and cleaning of a permanent and open and foul wound demanded a strong stomach. She watched us intently to see if we would flinch from the odour of her decay and I gave heartfelt thanks that I was not squeamish by nature. The grim details of her death have stayed with me for years and shaped forever my understanding of the range of losses have to be faced in terrible illness. The end is then often, a mercy. It is the journey towards it that is the agony and the time when we most need the companionship, love and care of another.

Simon is an archetype of the men and women who accompany those in pain. He and people like him become what have been referred to as voluntary pain bearers. He is an 'icon person' of someone who shouldered another's pain. The gospels do not give him much space. He is a detail in the story of the passion and yet he stands for the weak whom God chooses to bear witness. We are not told of his feeling about being drawn into another's agony.... He may have tried to keep his distance from this orgy of violence and hatred. For all we know his children persuaded him to get a closer look and so watches from the fringe only to find himself pulled into the horror of another's death.

So often we do this ... keep distance from events or things that dismay us.

I built my house by the sea.

Not on the sands, mind you,

No on the shifting sand.

And I built it of rock.

A strong house

By a strong sea.

And we got well acquainted, the sea and I.

Good neighbours, not that we spoke much.

We met in silence,

Respectful, keeping our distance

But looking our thoughts across the fence of sand.

Always the sand between.

And then one day

(and I still don't know how it happened)

the sea came.

Without warning.

Without welcome even.

Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine,

Less likes the flow of water than the flow of blood.

Slow, but flowing like an open wound.

And I thought of flight, and I thought of drowning, and I thought of death.

But while I thought the sea crept higher till it reached my door.

And I knew that there was neither flight nor death nor drowning.

That when the sea comes calling you stop being good neighbours,

Well acquainted, friendly from a distance neighbours.

And you give up your house for a coral castle

And you learn to breathe under water.

Carol Bialock, Chile 1975

This poem fascinates me. When I first read it I saw the encroachment of the sea as the way God can take over our life in prayer, escaping from the confines of church and invading every aspect of our lives; where the things of the kingdom invade our usual defences and demarcations. Then I came to think of the sea as the agony of the word which we try to keep at a distance until it too breaks through our defences and overtakes us, either by being caught up in the pain of another or the reluctant witness of mob violence or injustice. When what we would rather not see or face, what we would prefer not to respond to is thrust upon us and everything we thought we knew and understood is changed forever. It is then that we have to learn to breathe under water that we submerge ourselves in Christ's world.

Giving up our defences we will come to see a world of unusual beauty and originality. Where those disfigured by pain show us truth, grace, courage and honour. I think of this an ordinary holiness - where people like Isabel have become translucent to the brightness of God.

Silence

Prayer: Gracious God, touch us. Be touched by us; make us lovers of humanity, compassionate friends of those in need, hear us into speech; speak us into acting and through us recreate the world. Amen

Hymn: Lord Jesus Christ shall I stand still - (Sheet)

The penitent thief - the promise of paradise

Luke 23 .32-46

"Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom"

There is a terrible poignancy about the last words of those about to die, an urgency and nakedness, which compels us to listen at whatever cost. That Jesus in the face of death can speak of forgiveness and the promise of heaven to a penitent thief is an underlining if you like of the tenacity of his love for the world. The only prayer Jesus offered at Calvary is the prayer, "Father forgive them". It is prayed amidst the clamour and weeping, blasphemy and agony, chaos and despair of the bystanders. It is a prayer of heart breaking poignancy.

Who, you might wonder is he referring to? Most obviously the soldiers, executioners under command, but also the priests, bent and warped by their scheming and calculating with all the mocked up concern for the safety of the nation. Forgiveness too for Pilate, pious, weak Pilate who washes his hands of the whole affair and for Peter brave, brash Peter who promised so much and failed. Forgiveness too for Judas, who for reasons of envy or disillusionment betrayed his own mentor and was consumed with self-loathing. Forgiveness then and now, for a world that still struggles to receive him. Meeting extravagant and unreasonable hatred with extravagant and unreasonable love is the lesson from the cross. It is the hardest action to follow. But maybe that is because we misunderstand forgiveness. We see it as a virtue we are called to practice instead of gift for which we must pray!

Jesus on the cross, keeps on loving those who keep on hating. He defeats sin and death by the resolute persistence of his love. Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in his words of forgiveness. That the promise of paradise and the words of forgiveness are spoken out of the horror of the cross embody his life's teaching, that we should love our enemies and prayer for those who persecute us.

So many of the conflicts that terrify our world arise from our inability to find a way of living that satisfies peace and justice. And anger and reprisal seem to fuel and engulf so many human conflicts. In Jesus words from the cross we see a different kind of hope... that persistent loving is transformative. I think here of people who have shown this : Nelson Mandela, who in the words of his trail said, "I never lost hope that transformation would occur. Not only because of the great heroes ... , but also because of the courage of the ordinary men and women of my country. I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there was mercy and generosity... when I walked out of prison my mission was to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor" [6]

There are countless others: Hassan Dehqani - Tafti when he was Anglican bishop in Iran after the murder of his son, who said that his sons' blood had multiplied the fruit of the spirit in the soil of his soul; the Jewish prayer found in the clothing of a dead child in Ravensbruck concentration camp which asked that the fruits of courage, generosity and loyalty that were the fruits of suffering become the forgiveness of those who inflicted ill will.

The penitent thief is one of the world's outsiders. His plea is based upon the recognition of divinity in Jesus and is what drew the outsider in him to a response of hope. It underlines the openness Jesus shows even at the point of death to the outsider. I'm not sure whether the man had an acuteness of vision yet denied to Jesus' closest friends and was able to believe that beyond the present travesty of justice, the future held for Jesus the royal triumph of the Messiah or whether he simply wanted to be kind to and innocent enthusiast who had fallen victim to passion and intrigue, I'm not sure. And in a sense whether he seized upon the words of the placard above Jesus' head or whether he was given an insight from heaven matters not. What matters is that he pleas for mercy and is promised paradise - the future home of the righteous. Not after purgatory, not in a distant unforeseeable future but immediately! Now measure that assurance 'Today' - 'this very day' as opposed to the man's vague 'when'. It says I shall be in paradise and you shall be with me. What a solid firm assurance, a comfort to one whose strength is defeated. Paradise for Jews was parkland, a Garden of Eden; Abraham's bosom, a place of cloudless joy and peace where sorrow and sighing have flown away. The response Jesus makes to his plea is the perfection of compassion.

Silence

Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. Amen

Hymn: There is a green hill far away - 137

Notes

[1] Part of a sermon on Good Friday by the Revd David Cornick, 2001

[2] Edward Farrell's, Disciples and Other Strangers

[3] Jeremiah 20.7

[4] Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

[5] Jim Cotter, Healing - more or less

[6] Nelson Mandela, A long walk to freedom, 1994.