Preached on Good Friday, March 30, 2018
Scripture readings: Mark 15:21-40
I don’t know where all the
pictures in my head have come from that show me the stories of Jesus. I’ve got
these pictures in my head. Some of them are moving, talking pictures of the
crucifixion.
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| Some Stations of the Cross Our Lady of the Desert Parish Mattawa, WA Spring, 2017 |
I see Jesus struggling to
breathe, and he raises himself up on the nails in order to take each and every
breath. In the end, he’s trembling when he lifts himself to take his final
breath. He shouts a loud shout, and I think he says, “It is finished.” Finished
means that he has accomplished what he came for.
Then the earth shakes and
cracks open in places. The rocking of the world moves the Temple, perched high
on its terrace on what they used to call Mount Moriah.
This shaking does
something spiritual and miraculous. By the hand of God, the curtain or veil
that covers the entrance to the Holy of Holies is ripped open from top to
bottom. The Holy of Holies, in Jesus’ time, was an empty room where God
concentrated his presence and his attention.
Centurion means the
commander of somewhere from eighty to one hundred men in the Roman army.
Because it was supposed to have a hundred men, a centurion’s unit was called a
century. That would make him the equivalent of something like the captain, or
the major, of a company in the United States Army or Marine Corps.
Maybe there wasn’t a whole
company or century of soldiers at the cross. Maybe the centurion brought some
smaller detail to do the job of the crucifying and guarding of the convicts.
But Jesus was a kind of security risk to the province and to the Temple. They
were on alert because of Jesus.
I was surprised, this
year, comparing the four gospels. I found that it wasn’t only the centurion who
came to a strange, miraculous conclusion about Jesus. Matthew says that the
whole detail was shaken from their mission and from their dice game.
In just a moment, they
took it all in. They found themselves saying a bunch of stuff at the sound of
the shout and the earthquake. Probably the whole scene came through for them,
along with the uncanny darkness of the sky. What they had heard and seen of
Jesus, how he conducted himself, and how the crowd (and how nature itself)
responded to his execution.
Together, the detail
became a military jury rendering their verdict: “This was an innocent man. This
was a righteous man. Surely, this was the Son of God.”
Something grabbed them and
changed them. They had done many, many crucifixions in this rebellious
province. They weren’t overwhelmed by the cruel and boring detail of crucifying
criminals. Jesus made this long, tedious day different.
With a body that was
beaten and torn into a bloody pulp, Jesus heaved himself up on the cross to
take his final breath. With that breath Jesus bellowed, and dropped, and hung
still as the corpse that he was, upon the nails of the cross.
His shout seemed to shake
everything. The earth itself shook, and the people steadied themselves upon it,
but their hearts shook as well.
The Temple Mount and its
sanctuary shook. Its marble walls seemed, almost, to pull apart and snap shut
again, but the parting tore in two the veil that hid the holiest place from
view. A shaken witness reported that he had seen the veil tear from top to
bottom as if it were the work of some invisible giant.
The inner room of the
presence of God could be clearly seen, even by those who, in spite of the
shaking earth, stood outside the Temple and looked through the line of now
completely opened doors. “Look! There’s the room of God!”
The shouting and drooping
Jesus was the wounded and bloody hand of God himself, shaking whatever was
capable of being shaken. The bloody hand of God tore the veil from the
forbidden door.
That same hand also tore
the veil that hangs over the place, in human souls, where our hearts go to
hide: where we hide our hearts in order to avoid knowing ourselves too well.
Just now, we may not know
where our own hearts are, or what they’re hiding, until that wounded, bloody
hand of God in Jesus shakes us as it shook the Roman soldiers and officers.
That wounded hand (or
maybe it would be better to call it the wounded heart of God) has a special
power to shake things up. It has the power to shake and to carry the sins of
the world.
That power can shake the
whole planet. Its wounds carry the authority of a proven faithfulness (faithful
to death) to judge the whole planet; the whole universe; and each and every one
of us.
When we meet that hand and
heart we meet his carrying that same authority of long ago. We find ourselves
shaken, and carried, and judged, and changed.
Through their army life,
the centurion and his soldiers understood power and authority. They understood
coming into an order of command, and training, and discipline. They understood
being changed by that into something they had not been before.
That’s what I wanted to
happen to me, at one time, when, late in 1968, I considered enlisting in the
armed forces. Then I told my parents what I had decided, and they freaked.
They freaked out big time.
They wore me down for days, till I gave up my plan.
I thought it might have
made me a new man. In the end, Jesus did that in his own way. He changed me.
But it was with the power of that bloody hand and heart. I couldn’t resist that
when he grabbed me and held me in his grip.
I think the centurion and
his detail became the first converts to Jesus after his death. That would make
sense to me. They found out who Jesus is by crucifying him themselves.
Jesus, himself, changed
before their eyes into someone they could never have imagined, even though they
had crucified so many people before. They became changed because they saw their
whole lives, up to that point, in a completely different light, once they
recognized what it meant for them to have crucified Jesus (just as we all
have). They knew what it meant that Jesus had died because of them (just as he
has died because of each one of us). Their understanding of the whole world
changed because they now saw how Rome, and its famous laws and Roman peace,
that claimed to shape the world for good had been the enemy of the kingdom of
God.
The mighty Roman Empire
called their Emperor the Son of God, and yet Rome had killed Jesus the true Son
of God. These soldiers knew this.
The soldiers would change
how they would see themselves from now on. Their real life would change from
representing the power of war and military security to serving Jesus the Prince
and Servant of Peace, even if they still wore the uniform of Rome. Their true
aim in life would turn them into servants of peace.
We all change like that
down to our heart and core. We all change like that, down to every detail, when
the sacrifice made for us by that wounded, bloody hand and heart have grabbed
us and shaken us.
Now we see God and his Son
with the eyes of faith. We recognize who God and his Son are, and what they
want for us, and what they give to us. We will all be changed. In God’s time
everything will change.
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