Good Friday March
25, 2016
Gen 22:1-18
Ps 22Heb.10:1-25 John 18:1-19:37
In the Passion Gospel of John the Inscription that was written above the
head of Jesus on the Cross by Pilate, in three different language states: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. It was
written in the language of the Jewish Scripture, and in the lingua franca
which followed the conquering of the world by Alexander the Great, a simplified
version of Greek and in the up and coming lingua franca of the Western Roman
Empire, Latin.
This inscription is both ironic and is a proclamation device within the Gospel
of John. In the lead up to the cross in
the Gospel of John, Jesus said, “If I be lifted up, I will draw the world unto
myself.” And what languages did the
immediate world of the Gospel audience of the time speak? Hebrew, Greek and Latin. So the Gospel of John presents the Cross as a
sort of bill board to the world for Jesus Christ.
And this is ironic because the text was assigned by Pilate who was
presented as a cynic about what kind of king Jesus was. “You want to be a king, Jesus, okay, we’ll
let you be a legend in your own mind. We’ll
preside at your death even while we mockingly make your cross a billboard for
your delusion and the delusion of your followers.”
Another characteristic of the writer of John’s Gospel was making fun of
those who took words “literally.” Pilate
wrote mocking words upon on the cross about Jesus being a king and the
literalist Jews said to him, “Don’t write that he is a king but that he said he
was a king. Pilate we don’t want people
to take the words literally. They won’t
understand your mocking irony.”
So Pilate believed that Jesus was a phony delusional king and he mocked
Jesus with an inscription which contradicts the dead body of Jesus upon the
cross. Can such a dead man upon a
cross really be a king? Pilate and many
other Roman citizens and soldiers believed that the Caesar was the king of
their world and Jesus could not be a king.
The community from which the Gospel of John wrote also knew that the Caesar
was the king of the world. They knew
that Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Roman army.
Most of the Jews who remained in the synagogues and who excommunicated
the followers of Jesus did not believe that Jesus was the king of the
Jews. They did not believe Jesus was
like another King David because Jesus did not liberate Israel and restore its
independence.
The Gospel of John was written by writers in the last part of the first
century and in the first part of the second century. They had witnessed the Jesus effect in the
cities of the Roman Empire. Jesus was
beginning to take over neighborhoods one person at a time.
Jesus as the Risen Christ was experienced within very effective
communities which were integrating new people into their gatherings. People of diverse backgrounds were finding
social identity within these religious social clubs called churches. The informal gatherings were gaining cohesion
and were already proto-institutional.
These churches had become so successful one
wondered how such successful social groups could derive from the dead body of
Jesus upon the cross. Can you get the
sense of how the writer of John was completely savoring the irony of Jesus on
the Cross? The Gospel of John was
written by people who were confident about the social revolution caused by
people who had post-resurrection experiences of Christ. They could go back and write with great
confidence that the Cross of Jesus was the necessary plan of God in bringing
about the transformation of lives within the Roman Empire.
So Jesus on the Cross was seen by many Romans to be the delusion of
Christians who did not understand what real kingly power was. Jesus on the Cross was seen by Jews who
remained in the synagogues as one who could not be confessed to by a messiah
king like King David.
But for Christians who lived in two worlds, the natural world where
Caesar was the worldly king, and the spiritual kingdom of God, the Cross of
Jesus was like the experience of an elevator of learning that we live in both
the world of the kingdom of Caesar and the kingdom of Christ. Christians had learned from Christ to lives
as children of God and children of human families at the same time. The Cross of Jesus was an event of dying to
the limited view of being only in the world of Caesar; it provided the way for
resurrection ascension into the kingdom of Christ.
In the Gospel of John, Pilate and the Jews were treated as those who
understood only the literal natural world of what could be verified by the
common understanding of what a king was.
The writer of the Gospel of John lived and witnessed the lives of many
people gradually coming into an internal transformation and conversion by
another kind of power which was not understood by Pilate or the Jews who
remained within the synagogue.
The Passion Gospel of John was not written by people who viewed the Cross
as a site of suffering defeat; it was a billboard which proclaimed with secret
irony that indeed, Jesus was and was becoming the king of many, many souls.
Just remember today on Good Friday that the
Passion Gospel of John was written by people who were witnessing the power of
the Risen Christ to convert the lives of people and to form them into growing
and successful Christian Clubs.
We accept the cross of Christ as glorious providence now because we
think it was resolved and reconciled by the subsequent events of the
resurrection appearance.
Today we live in a world of many events of suffering, loss, pain are not
yet resolved or reconciled because we do not yet know the full future.
As we return to the Cross of Jesus, let us bring to it all of the
current suffering in the world which does not yet have resolution or
reconciliation.
Let us accept that Jesus is a king because he represents God suffering
with us now. And let us in the suffering
Christ, have faith to believe that in Him there will be future resolution and
reconciliation of all things. Amen.
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