"All this you did for me..."--Good Friday

GOOD FRIDAY April 6, 2012 Ss. Peter & Paul, 12:00 noon
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There is much that we do not know about Jesus. The gospels are hardly helpful in reconstructing a full life of the historical Jesus. There are conflicts regarding the date and place of birth. We know nothing of his early, formative years. Various gospels place him in various places in Judaea. Few external sources, only Josephus, give us a record of him and his work.
There is only one fact about Jesus that is undisputed, historically certain, without doubt. He was crucified. In his early thirties, after a brief career around Galilee, the Romans arrested him, tried him, then nailed him to a cross to die. Jesus was crucified.
In June of 1968, a skeleton was found in northeastern Jerusalem, the skeleton of a young man who had been crucified. Why, out of all the thousands to suffer crucifixion, was this the only body found? Probably, says John Dominic Crossan, because it was rare that a corpse was buried after crucifixion. It was more typical to leave the body hanging there as food for birds and wild dogs—the final insult among a people for whom burial of the body was important. And leaving crucified bodies served as an example to passersby that they could not mess with Rome.
The Syrian governor, Publius Quinctilius Varus, had to quell three major peasant uprisings in Judaea after the death of Herod the Great, four years after the beginning of our era. When he arrived at Jerusalem, according to Josephus, he crucified two thousand rebels. Here is an account of another mass crucifixion:

Many of the peaceable citizens were arrested and brought before Florus, who had them first scourged and then crucified. The total number of that days’ victims, including women and children, for even infancy received no quarter, amounted to about three thousand six hundred.
Four years later, in the early summer of 70 AD, Titus’ army encircled Jerusalem.
When caught, they were ... scourged and subjected to torture of every description, before being killed, and then crucified opposite the walls ... five hundred or sometimes more being captured daily. ... The soldiers out of rage and hatred amused themselves by nailing their prisoners in different postures on their crosses; and so great was their number, that space could not be found for the crosses. (J.D. Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography)

Thousands were crucified during Jesus’ day, particularly Jews; it is staggering. In our day, the number is into the millions. Remember the Holocaust, Rwanda in 1994, South Africa during apartheid, Kosovo, and present-day Sudan.

Yet it is a Christian claim, not only that Jesus was crucified, but that he was crucified for us. Crucifixion itself is tragedy enough. But crucified for me? As St. Paul says, “Why, you might be willing to die for a good person, but he shows his love for us in that, at the right time, Jesus died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6). US!

An Archbishop of Paris stood in the pulpit of Notre Dame Cathedral. He was there to preach the sermon, and his whole sermon was built around a story. Thirty years before, he said, three young students had come into this cathedral. They were rough, rude, cynical men who thought all religion was a racket.

Two of them dared a third to go into the confessional and make a bogus confession to the priest. But to win the bet, he did. He tried to fool the old priest, but the priest knew that what he was saying was a lie.

The old priest listened to the fake confession, sensed the arrogance in the man’s attitude, and said, “Very well, my son. Every confession requires a penance, and this will be yours. I ask you to go into the chapel, stand before the crucifix look into the face of the crucified Christ and say, ‘all this you did for me, and I don’t give a damn.’”

The young man swaggered out of the confessional to his friends to claim the bet, but they insisted that before they paid him he would have to finish the performance by completing penance. He went into the chapel, looked into the face of Christ, and began, “All this you did for me, and I ...” “All this you did for me, and I ...” He couldn’t say it. He never finished the sentence. It began for him a painful experience that changed his life and finally brought him into the priesthood.

The Archbishop telling the story leaned over the pulpit and said, “That young man is standing before you today, preaching.”
It takes a hard heart to be unmoved by this.

As the mystery-writer and theologian Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote: “[Christ] was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own ... by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.”
All the Scriptures agree, whatever else there is to be said about Jesus: he was crucified, one of the millions of Jewish martyrs. He was crucified.

This day, remember: he was crucified by us, because of us, for us. For us. And we continue the journey as Fr. William Tully, Rector of St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, reminded his parish: “Holy Week gives you something the world cannot give you. Yes, we know the story. We can talk it—maybe we can even recite it. But walking it gives us something we can get nowhere else.”

Gracious God, on this holiest of days, we marvel at your love for us. You did not forsake us, even in the worst of our sin. Forgive us and work with us, even in our unspeakable evil. Restore us to yourself. For us, there is no other way except the way of your total, complete, infinitely forbearing love.

Adapted from homily given at Ascension Parish on Good Friday, April 2, 1999 and again at Ss. Peter & Paul, April 10, 2009; ideas from William Willimon in Pulpit Resource, Vol. 27, No. 2. Quotation from D.L. Sayers online from Ekklesia and from W. Tully via Geranium Farm and Barbara Crafton. By Phil Ayers+