Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:15-53:12; Psalm 31:6, 12-13, 15-16, 17, 25; Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42
St. Paul begins his first letter to the Corinthians in an unexpected way. He proclaims Jesus Christ as God, not because of Jesus’ great miracles or signs of his divinity. No, St. Paul’s starting point in 1 Corinthians—the focus of his claim that Jesus Christ is God, and that in fact no earthly or heavenly power has any power; any wisdom of its own, but owes all power and all wisdom to Jesus Christ; to our one God—is the cross. “We proclaim Christ crucified,” St. Paul says, “to those who are called… the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Today we focus, as St. Paul once did from the beginning of his first letter to the Corinthians, on the cross. We, too, today, “proclaim Christ crucified.” We have before us (and will process up to adore it in a few moments) a cross: A brutally simple symbol of death. In Jesus’ time, in lands like Palestine that were occupied by the Romans, the public display of crucified criminals, if they were not Roman citizens, was somewhat common. It was a humiliating, painful way to die; a terrifying public display of Roman state power.
“We proclaim Christ crucified”; we proclaim Jesus Christ who, by his cross, disempowered Imperial Rome; disempowered the religious leaders of his own people who had him put to death; disempowered the cross as a sign of visible humiliation and death; transformed the cross into the ultimate sign of life.
In John’s Gospel account of Jesus’ passion, which we hear today, Jesus is in charge from start to finish. Jesus is the source and focus of power; all other powers are emptied of their power. We begin in a garden “across the Kidron valley” from Jerusalem. John does not name this garden, as the other Gospels do. Instead, John’s setting of the garden, “across the Kidron valley,” calls to mind the powers of evil ambition who tried to kill King David and take over Israel’s throne. David flees his own son, Absalom, across the same Kidron valley. Absalom is killed in battle; David’s kingship survives. Jesus, Son of David and Son of God, will be all the more victorious.
Jesus does not so much flee the people who arrest him, led by Judas, the apostle-turned-traitor, but he meets this mob and willingly reveals himself to them—twice—in the garden across the Kidron valley: “I am he.” The mob that has come to arrest Jesus has no power over him. Here I think we can empathize with Peter as he lashes out with his sword and cuts off the ear of the high priest’s slave, Malchus: Mindless, panic-driven violence. But Jesus heals Malchus’ ear; violence is emptied of its power.
Jesus is bound and taken to the high priests, Annas and Caiaphas. Inside, where Jesus is on trial before the high priest, he testifies to the openness of his teaching, “in synagogues and in the temple… I have said nothing in secret.” Outside, Peter just as openly fulfills Jesus’ prediction that he would deny Jesus three times before the cock crowed. But neither the sham trial inside the high priests’ quarters, nor Peter’s denials outside, in the high priest’s courtyard, of ever having known Jesus, will have any power over Jesus.
Even Pilate knows this truth. Pilate asks, “What is truth”? The truths before Pilate at Jesus’ Roman trial are many: Jesus has done no wrong. Pilate can “find no case against him.” Jesus is truly a king, but one whose royal power is not from this world, because it created and sustains this world. Caesar, Pilate’s king, and Pilate himself, are powerless before the God-ruler of the universe: “You would have no power over me unless it has been given you from above.”
But Jesus submits to these earthly powers to transform them; to transform the death they will inflict (and still inflict) into eternal life. The crucified Jesus disempowers and transforms the powers of this world from the cross by giving his mother into the care of his “beloved disciple.” Jesus entrusts his Church, beginning with his mother, to us, beloved disciples, sisters and brothers, even though we are also weak sinners. The crucified Jesus disempowers and transforms even our sin, so that we are no less than redeemed, beloved disciples, all of us.
And, finally, Jesus gives up his spirit. Jesus’ victory over death itself “is finished.” He has been in charge, from start to finish. Yet even after death, Jesus’ transformation and overcoming of the powers of this world, even death itself, continue to be revealed. Nicodemus, who had met Jesus by night, now joins Joseph of Arimathea in asking Pilate for and laying Jesus’ body in the tomb. Nicodemus, in a way he was not previously able to grasp, is “born again” along with Joseph into the light of this victory that only has the appearance of death; failure; darkness. By Jesus’ death we, too, like Joseph and Nicodemus, are “born again”; redeemed; saved. Death no longer has power, over Jesus or over us.
And so “we proclaim Christ crucified.”
“We worship you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your cross you have redeemed the world.”
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