Sermon for Good Friday

“They will look on the one whom they have pierced.”

Let us not forget that what is happening today is an injustice, of which no one is innocent. No rationalization is sufficient. As the Christian Church moved from the Holy land into the Roman Empire, it was perhaps inevitable that many Christians would try to soft-pedal the image of the Roman Governor. There is even some evidence that Pilate was treated as a heroic saint, trying desperately to save Jesus. The testimony of John, whose testimony is true, and who knows he tells the truth, allows for no such rationalizations. Gentile or Jew, we are all guilty of a gross injustice.

Jesus is a pawn in the political machinations of the Jewish Leaders and the Roman Governor. Earlier this week, Jesus went in and threw out all those selling birds to be offered by pilgrims in sacrifice. In doing so, Jesus proclaimed that no longer did the Jewish people have to come to the Temple in Jerusalem in order to worship God and to know God’s forgiving presence. It might seem like wonderful news that God is present to all people everywhere, but not to the Priesthood that could claim descent from Moses’ brother Aaron; not to the priests who kept the Temple that God had commanded Solomon to construct. They had a deep tradition to uphold, and no backwoods upstart from Nazareth could be allowed to destroy it.

Jewish law decreed that someone defying the Law given by God to Moses in this way was to be stoned to death. And the Priests would probably have been content with having Jesus stoned to death for being a “blasphemer” against God. But the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, has taken away from the Jewish leaders the power to carry out executions. Pilate’s successors would give that power back, so that the first martyrdom, of Stephen, recorded in Acts, was in fact by stoning. But today, if Jesus is to be done away with, a convincing pretext must be found to get the Romans to do the dirty deed.

And so they drag Jesus to the Praetorium, the headquarters of the Roman Governor, who has to come out to the priests, out of respect for their cultural peculiarities. A Roman governor, going out to people under his power! Not the kind of thing that Pilate would ever want to admit to his fellow Romans. But it is a small price in irritation to pay in order to keep the peace in a city stuffed to the gills with pilgrims hoping that this Passover, they might see God’s liberation.

So Pilate is hardly inclined to do these people any favors. So first he asks, “What accusation do you bring about this man?” “He’s evil.” “And…? For this you get me up at 3 am, to mediate your trivial religious disputes! Deal with him yourselves.” “But we cannot put anyone to death.”

Ah, if they’re asking for his death, then this Jesus might be guilty of sedition against the Empire. And Pilate cannot ignore that. He has to at least question the man. And so he interrogates Jesus, and after hearing such lofty phrases as, “My kingdom is not of this world…I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth,” Pilate barely suppresses a laugh as he replies, “What is truth?” Whatever kind of king this guy is, he’s no threat to Caesar.

And so the dance between Pilate and the Jewish leaders continues. The more they cry for Jesus’s death, the less Pilate wants to do anything to help them. But they have asked for his death, which at the hands of the Romans comes to those who claim to be a king against the Emperor. And so Pilate decides to use Jesus for his own purposes. He has Jesus dressed in royal purple, he is given a “crown.” And if Jesus is to be crucified, then he needs to be prepared as anyone else is to be prepared for that fate, with a thorough whipping. Then Pilate parades a beaten Jesus, still dressed in royal purple and wearing his bloody crown, before his people and sarcastically proclaims, “Behold the Man.”

But when he hears that this Jesus has “made himself the Son of God,” he becomes “very much afraid.” For the first time, he suspects that this Jesus might be more dangerous than he first thought. But he will still play this for all it’s worth, to humiliate these people he has come to despise.

He’s really no threat to the Empire, Pilate says, to which the Jewish leaders retort, “If you release this man who claims to be a king, you are no friend of Caesar.” “Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate asks incredulously. And those charged with preserving the traditions of their ancestors take the bait. In the Passover liturgy is this declaration:

From everlasting to everlasting thou art God
Beside thee we have no king, redeemer, or savior,
No liberator, deliverer, provider
None who takes pity in every time of distress and trouble
We have no king but thee.

And throwing away their faith in the promises of their one King they say, “We have no King but Caesar.” Pilate has gotten what he wanted. Now he can dispose of Jesus.

And so we see the human drama of two political forces jockeying with each other. And between them is this innocent man. He was not blaspheming when he claimed to be the Son of God. Just a few weeks earlier, only two miles from Jerusalem, He had shown his power over life and death by his raising of Lazarus from the dead. The response? They “made plans to our Lazarus to death as well.” Pilate understood that Jesus presented no threat to him or the Emperor Tiberius. But he was a useful pawn to be sacrificed on the chessboard in order to checkmate the Jewish claims to a king of their own.

On the human level, we see this day a deep injustice: a man falsely accused, mocked, tortured, toyed with for the purposes of others, finally subjected to the horrors of being nailed, hands and feet, to a wooden Cross and left to die.

Or at least that is how all this appears to us. But look more closely, and suddenly it becomes clear that Jesus is not the pawn. He is the King, Queen, Bishop, Knight and Rook all rolled up into one. And it is the supposed masters of their universe, Pilate the tribune of Caesar, and the Priests of the Temple, who are the pawns.

See how, when he is arrested, his mere speaking drives those come to arrest him to their knees. Do not doubt Jesus’s power to escape the clutches of mere human beings. If he is arrested, it only because He chooses to be arrested. When the High Priest’s officer slaps him on the face, do we see Jesus bristling at his wounded pride, coming back with the appropriate put-down, or spitting at the man? With no sense of personal wounding, Jesus simply says, “If what I said is wrong, bear witness about the wrong; but if what I said is right, why do you strike me?”

I think that what frightened Pilate more than anything was to see a man so unconcerned with his supposed “authority.” “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” To which Jesus calmly replies, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above.” In a sense, Jesus answered him earlier, in chapter 10: “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again.” Hanging on the Cross, he exercises his authority as his mother’s son to transfer her care to the disciple he loved. And at the very end, after he has decreed, “It is finished,” it is Jesus who gives his spirit to the Father with whom He is one. He does not gasp for his last breath, he goes to death, confident that he has accomplished something far greater than those who plotted his apparent downfall.

What did Jesus accomplish on the cross. First, he confronts each and every one of us in this world with the knowledge of how we have hurt each other. Note the final word in today’s Passion, “They will look on the one whom they have pierced.” Never has there been a clearer act of injustice. And it shines through the millennia. And it shines on all the other injustices that we commit against each other. But the light of the Cross does not burn. It was not, and is not, our Lord and Savior’s purpose to exact revenge, but to bring about reconciliation. But reconciliation takes two, and if the one who has done the piercing does not accept the offer, then as Jesus said, they “loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil,” and that is the judgment. They are in a desperate race against that darkness, a race they are bound to lose.

But should they turn to the One they have pierced, shining down on them, they will see the truth of what they have done, and find the grace of forgiveness and reconciliation. I remember my first Kairos weekend in a Virginia prison. While one shouldn’t assume that nobody there has been wrongly convicted, there’s no doubt that most of the residents are there for having pierced someone. They are all clearly in need of forgiveness. But the central point of the weekend is when each resident writes down the ways in which they have been pierced. For the fact is that these people do not live in the same world as you or I, where we can assume that our interactions with other people are based on reciprocity, on give-and-take. If these men and women have behaved as predators and treated others as prey, well they were prey first. Well having written down the ways in which they have been pierced, on a special paper, they are invited to come to a container with water, place their paper in the water, and watch it dissolve.

The truth here is that those who need to be forgiven must first forgive others. Only when they do that, can they accept forgiveness, and begin to trust that it is possible to live in a society that is not divided between predators and prey. Only then is reconciliation possible.

The cure for injustice is reconciliation. Anything else creates a wall between us and that darkness. That wall may be made of concrete and barbed wire. It may be made by the contracting muscles in our hearts that tense up whenever we are confronted by the memory of what was done to us. We can build all the walls we want. But the darkness will break out.

What Jesus begs us to do, on this day of all days, is not to turn to our personal darkness, our sin, our anger. Let us all turn around, together, and look on Him who has been pierced for all of us.