Thinking Anew: IT MUST have seemed an impossible task to the followers of Jesus to move out into the world with a gospel – good news – which had at its centre the grisly events we revisit year by year leading up to Holy Week.
To the uncommitted at the time theirs was not a success story; it was an unmitigated disaster. All that was known publicly was that their leader had been judicially executed on a cross and his cause was in ruins. Indeed St Paul acknowledged their difficulty when he wrote that the crucifixion of Jesus was “to the Jew a scandal and to Gentiles nonsense”. The disciples themselves struggled before making further commitment. Had they been mistaken, fooled even? Was there in fact no God in whom they could trust? Could it be that suffering, hatred and killing were the final word? It was only in the light of Easter that they came to faith once more.
In much the same way people today can have difficulties making sense of the cross. They may admire and value the person of Jesus, the example of his life and his teaching as found in the Sermon on the Mount, but making sense of the cross is another matter altogether.
Sheila Cassidy understood the dilemma when she wrote about her difficulties with Holy Week. “We are plunged ever deeper into the passion, gazing upon the sacred head ill used, the disfigured features of the man of sorrows, caught up in the horror of unsolicited violence, man’s appalling inhumanity.” But she suggests that we have to see through and beyond liturgy to what is shown on our television screens in war zones and refugee camps and wherever else human cruelty is portrayed. These are the mysteries we should be contemplating each Good Friday, “not trying vainly to imagine how Jesus looked as he climbed the hill to Golgotha. We know what he looked like; what we need to learn is how to comfort him suffering here and now.” But in order to do that we must connect with what happened when Jesus was crucified 2,000 years ago. At that time the cross was nothing but an instrument of terror; it was the irreversible end to everything standing for hope and the future.
This is illustrated by events that took place about a century before the death of Jesus. In 73 BC a large number of escaped slaves rebelled against the Roman Republic in what came to be known as the Third Servile War. After a long campaign they were defeated. The victors were paraded in triumph along the Appian Way, which was lined with some 6,000 crosses where captured rebels were executed. The cross was the symbol of Roman ruthlessness when it came to dealing with enemies. They were not to be trifled with.
The cross of Jesus was intended by his accusers to be more of the same but it became something quite different because it is the place where we are shown that God’s ways are not our human ways. Jesus endured every possible indignity and humiliation that man could think of, culminating in his death, but his love for that same fallen and brutal humanity could not be broken: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” On the cross he was revealing to us the God who is unable to hate or seek revenge or destroy; he is the God who is love and who can only give hope.
The Taiwanese theologian Choan-Seng Song suggests that God is powerless in terms of hating or destroying. “That is why he is the most powerful God. He is the God who loves, who lets live and who gives hope. The cross was therefore the victory of the powerlessness of God over the power of hate, destruction and death. It was the triumph of love over hate, heaven over hell and life over death”.
GL