Good Friday 2005

When we contemplate the Passion of Christ, we tend to focus on the acts of physical brutality: the scourging, the arduous walk along the Via Dolorosa or, of course, the Crucifixion itself.  Recently, however, we have shamefully been reminded during the trials of both UK and US service personnel of the equal impact of psychological torture on a prisoner.  So, perhaps, we might look with new eyes at the account of Jesus’ mockery by the soldiers as they trussed him up as a pantomime king with a crown of thorns and abased themselves before their Victim.

In so doing, they fabricated Christ into what they wanted Him to be – a fitting target for their derision.  It may well have been, for them, the only moment of light relief in what would otherwise be a tedious day.  However, in a way, what they did that morning has been done ever since by Christian people and others as they present Christ and His Gospel to the world.

For those Christians and maybe some of the others, there is no intention to mock – often quite the reverse – but still they dress Christ up into what they want Him to be and fall down to venerate the image that they have made.

To some extent, of course, we all have a problem knowing exactly who Jesus of Nazareth was.  The accounts of His life are hardly comprehensive and even at the earliest stage, represent what the authors want us to know of Him – and everyone has their own perspective.  Someone said, recently, that when there are two people together in a room there are six identities – the people each thinks him or herself to be, the people each thinks the other to be and the people they really are – on that basis this church is packed with identities this afternoon.

Following this line of thought, even if we had walked with Jesus two thousand years ago, every one of our perceptions of Him would have been idiosyncratic and all of them astray from the reality.  When this is combined with the filters of the accounts of others and two millennia of reflexion, the perils are obvious. 

None-the-less, there is a distinction to be made between the vagaries of perception and the deliberate, imposition of our own wishes on the identity of Christ, brazenly propping up our own opinions and prejudices by a spurious commandeering of our Lord’s authority.

When we do this, we dress up Jesus to look as we wish Him to do rather than how He actually appears.  In so doing we open Him up to ridicule as we impute to Him values and opinions that are not His.  If we are earnest, therefore, in our desire to proclaim the real Christ, we must make every endeavour to narrow the gap between our perception and the reality.

The Christian pilgrimage is a voyage of discovery as we gently enter more deeply into the knowledge of Christ and His Gospel.  It is an enterprise that is informed by experience, by listening, by reflexion and it requires of us the humility to recognize when we may have misunderstood and the courage to change course.

There are, however, some fairly basis tenets of the Gospel that should be easily accessible from the outset.  Generally, they have to do with how we treat others.  They do not require that we feebly acquiesce in the folly of those around us – how could they when we see the price that Christ paid in holding firm to what he believed to be right?  But they do fairly clearly govern the way the way that we treat others, even when we disagree strongly with their point of view.

It seems feeble not to find anything more original to say on Good Friday than to restate the law of love of which the Crucifixion is the ultimate icon, but for all its familiarity as a message, it remains our greatest challenge.  In the Incarnation, the divine divests Himself of His power in pursuit of the love He has for His creation – a course that leads through conflict to the Cross; and yet, Godly people find it so hard to put aside their own pride and self-serving qualities as they engage with the debates and disputes in their own progress through life.

The commandment to love and respect is in the first rank of the Gospel imperatives.  It cannot be trumped by doctrinal or other ethical questions.  When, by our words and actions, we dress up Christ as one who seeks endlessly to condemn and reject, then the image that we portray is as much a travesty of His teaching as is dressing Him up in a rag of purple cloth, a reed and a crown of thorns.  When we venerate that image by barking hysterically at others, spitting venom across the divide and refusing to listen, we mock every bit as much as the soldiers’ homage in the guard room.

This may all seem hopelessly naïve in a world where opinions are pressed by muscle, political, financial or military, but in the long view it is vindicated again and again.  The expediency and pragmatism of the moment can cost us dear.  The Inquisition, the Crusades, the accommodation with cruel regimes remain marks of shame that undermine our witness to Christ to this day; and the antagonisms of internal debate can rent the fabric of the Church for generations – centuries even.

When the time had come for Jesus to set off to Calvary, we are told that He put back on His own clothes and we see not a king but the Christ hanging on the Cross – the reality of What is being killed.  At some point, no matter how we dress Him up, Jesus Christ will assume His own identity once again and the image that we have created will disappear – where will we stand then? 

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