Tuesday, April 2, 2013

This Friday of death we call good


Good Friday; March 29, 2013
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Ps. 22
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:37

Year after year of reading this story of Jesus’ passion and death can numb us to the horrific brutality it describes. After all, we know the end of the story. Aren’t the lilies stored somewhere, lilies-in-waiting to be gloriously displayed come Saturday night? Is not the bread already baked for the festival eucharist, the brass polished and the linen ironed? We know the end of the story so well it is a challenge to be here, now, listening to the story of a violent death.

Since this is probably the only story about first-century Palestine that most of us will ever read, we may think that this was a unique event, or that this crucifixion was singled out by the ordinary person of the day. We might even think that people paid attention to what was going on on that hill that afternoon.

Yet in first-century Palestine – during Jesus’ lifetime and the lifetimes of those who wrote the gospels – brutality was commonplace. The Romans as an occupying force had no qualms about using every form of state violence to quell those who tried to rise up against them. Urban terrorists ran through streets in which blood ran – their blood, the blood of their victims, blood shed by Roman weapons. Crucifixion was a common form of death for these insurrectionists, as well as for the innocent and the unarmed who tried to resist the violence with non-violent means. Thousands would be crucified when the Romans would quash rebellions. There was little unusual about what happened to Jesus in those violent days – except that some were allowed to take his body down from the cross and bury it.

The violence of human society is never far from the surface. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll still be awake and listen to the BBC World Service, hoping for some thoughtful story, or even for something dull to put me to sleep. More often than not, though, I hear horrendous stories, more vivid that we see on TV news, of brutality from some far away country, some account of an innocent person abused, a massacre, a pillage, a plunder. To remember those 21st century stories on this day, this Friday of death we call “good,” is to remember that Jesus knew that reality as well, as it swirled around him and carried him to his death.

Jesus faces that violence vulnerable and defenseless – all too human, we could say. Yet he resists the whole way, especially as John tells the story. He refuses to let the authorities, Roman or Jewish, who have the power of death over him, to have the power of life. He refuses to play by their rules, to show anger or retribution or force. He defines his own truth against their story of brutal defeat.

As night falls, Jesus is laid in a tomb – John describes a burial as extravagant as a king’s. Is this the beginning of a new kingdom? Jesus died as he lived, preaching that the kingdom of God will be entered not by force or wisdom or magic tricks, but by vulnerability and love. Those who enter it will do so as Jesus did: as their all-too-human selves, stripped raw and naked, childlike and vulnerable, confident that the worst death the world can deal holds no power over their lives.

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