The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Good Friday
April 7, 2023
The cross is the scandal that changed the world. The cross is strange, terrifying, shameful.
We forget that the cross was not a nice way to die. The cross was not a dignified punishment for dignified people. It was brutal, it was public, it was degrading and shameful.
It was not the quiet dignity of Socrates drinking a bowl of poison hemlock. It was not the peaceful death of the Buddha reclining on his side as he entered parinirvana. The cross was a shameful, degrading death unprecedented in religion and philosophy – it was designed by the Roman Empire precisely because it humiliated the condemned and left no room for human dignity. The cross is so degrading that our Muslim siblings who proclaim and adore Jesus as a prophet do not believe he was crucified – they believe he was whisked up to heaven and wasn’t killed at all.
But we Christians insist: to understand the power, the life, the love of Jesus Christ is to proclaim him crucified.
Jesus’ life was not smooth and comfortable, and in all the Gospels, the shadow and the light of the cross illuminate the message. Jesus did not have the successful, prestigious, glorious life that one might expect of a wise teacher. Matthew’s Gospel says his parents, Joseph and Mary, had to flee to Egypt with the baby Jesus to seek refuge from the murderous King Herod. Luke’s Gospel says that when the child Jesus was presented in the Temple, that the prophet Simeon proclaimed that the child’s life would reveal the contents of the human heart, and that Mary’s own heart would be pierced, a foreshadowing of her child’s future death. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples to pick up their own crosses and follow him. John’s Gospel proclaims that Jesus will be lifted up on the cross, and the cross will be his glory.
The cross is the glory of Christ. If this does not shock us, unsettle us, then we need to spend more time with the crucified Lord.
The shocking message that God loves the whole world that he endures the worst we do to each other. God suffers torturous, degrading execution at the hands of humanity, and God embraces all those who suffer torture, degradation, and shame. On the cross, God proclaims that the dignity of every human being matters, that this dignity cannot be stripped away, that even as the powers and principalities work to dehumanize, that God has embraced this human dignity on the cross.
Jesus did not strike down his enemies with divine power. He did not mow down his enemies with swords and celestial fire – Jesus is not the conquering hero who strikes down the villain in the final scene. No, Jesus refuses that role in the crucifixion: and his painful death exposes the injustice that passes for human justice, where humans mistake power for righteousness and cling to violence and force to keep the peace.
There is a peace that is no peace – systems of violence, force, oppression, degradation, dehumanization, deprivation. And we see that so-called peace all around us. Jesus, on the cross, forever unmasks it and debunks it. Power is not justice. Triumph and force are not true strength.
And instead, on the cross Jesus embraces those who are at the bottom. He reaches out his arms on the cross and lifts up the victims of injustice, indignity, cruelty, inhumanity. Christ breaks the chains that hold people imprisoned.
His arms hold the forgotten, the abandoned. He pours out his blood to wash away sin and separation with the power of his very life. He breathes out forgiveness and hope to all who long for newness of life and a renewed creation.
The triumph, the victory, the glory of Christ is shown most fully on the cross. The depth of his love, the power of his life, the deep desire of God to restore, redeem, renew a creation that has gone astray.
It is a scandal – that God chooses the way of lowliness, of shame, of rejection – God chooses this way to change the world.
It is a scandal – that God would choose a way of failure and weakness to be the means of our redemption.
It is a scandal – that God does not measure victory by a human measure. God does not choose what we think is victorious, triumphant, successful.
God’s love is not limited by our measure. No, the measure that matters is the one that God chooses: the measure of love poured out on the cross.