Let us take a break for a moment or two from the events in Jerusalem.
Let us consider a couple of images of the crucified one from closer to home.
A few weeks ago, I took a funeral. After the service here in the Cathedral, we went to Clydebank Crematorium. I got there just before the time that the service was due to start and witnessed a strange ceremony that I have never seen before.
On either side of the chapel there are metal grills and on the grills, hang crosses. The crosses are attached with clips making them removable. There is nothing surprising in that these days – plenty of people want to have a funeral without religious imagery.
However, I witnessed the changing of the crosses. Plain crosses were being taken down. They were replaced with almost identical ones which bore the body of Christ on them.
Crosses were being substituted for crucifixes. The undertaker had rightly given instruction that we would want a crucifix rather than a cross.
The point is, though, that the image of the man on the cross could still this day move people to behave as an angry mob.
So ingrained is sectarianism in the society in which we live, that they have a routine at our place of death. Someone is paid to change over the crosses to crucifixes to make sure that the mob don’t get provoked into their riotous behaviour at a funeral.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting that the angry mob in Jerusalem was made up of angry protestants or fundamentalists or angry catholics either for that matter. Of course not. The mob was made up of people like us. A mixed up bunch of mixed up people.
Fickle people who could be whipped into a frenzy at a moment’s notice. The crowd that had so recently cried hosanna and welcomed him into the city now turned on him and cried crucify.
No doubt there were good people in that crowd. No doubt there were people who wanted the best for Jerusalem, for Israel, for God.
They believed with all their hearts that it was right for Christ to be taken away and killed.
Isaiah hinted that the suffering servant would be taken away by a perversion of justice. For my mind, capital punishment is always a perversion of justice.
For what does it achieve?
What did this death achieve?
There has been a petty squabble in the church this week – nothing new. A Lent Talk was given on the radio on Wednesday night by Jeffrey John – a man who knows his own share of suffering and betrayal.
He said, in reference to the crucifixion:
The explanation I was given went something like this. God was very angry with us for our sins, and because he is a just God, our sin had to be punished. But instead of punishing us he sent his Son, Jesus, as a substitute to suffer and die in our place. The blood of Jesus paid the price of our sins, and because of him God stopped being angry with us. In other words, Jesus took the rap, and we got forgiven, provided we said we believed in him.
Well, I don’t know about you, but even at the age of ten I thought this explanation was pretty repulsive as well as nonsensical. What sort of God was this, getting so angry with the world and the people he created, and then, to calm himself down, demanding the blood of his own Son? And anyway, why should God forgive us through punishing somebody else? It was worse than illogical, it was insane. It made God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this we’d say they were a monster.
Well, I haven’t changed my mind since.
And even before Jeffrey John gave this radio talk, the mob got going again. Spluttings could be heard coming from those who needed to defend this understanding of the cross as being the only one possible.
It isn’t the only possible understanding of the cross, and I wouldn’t believe it even if it were. For I agree that it paints a monster in the place of God.
So what was going on as Jesus was taken away to suffer and to die.
For me, the whole events of Good Friday are testimony to the reality of Christ’s incarnation rather than a way of hoodwinking the devil out of a payment for sin.
For me, the point about Jesus coming was that he came. The point about the Saviour being the saviour of the world is that he came into the world. He was not of the world, but entered in. He was that God who joined in. The God who came amongst us.
And being human, becoming human meant sharing all that human life can bring.
It means knowing what birth is, what death is, what pain is.
Westerners have a problem with suffering. People sometimes wonder aloud how a good God can allow suffering. The truth is that a good God knew the reality of suffering and came to share it, came to experience it.
That Life is suffering was one of the teachings of the Buddha and I think that it is something that has to be accepted and acknowledged to be the truth before we can make much progress in the spiritual life.
The worst thing that can happen to anyone is that they be betrayed by a friend, falsely accused. Taken. Misunderstood. Tried on trumped up charges and killed slowly, unjustly and despicably.
What does a good God know about the suffering that you and I know is part of life.
Every last thing there is to know.
Amen
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