The story that we’ve just heard is one that seems to show the world at its worst, all in one horrifying day. A good man is left to die alone, isolated, without support, rejected. His friend and best disciple, the one who understands him best, decides he is more worried about self-preservation than he is about telling the truth. Everything about Jesus’s life and his mission has fallen apart quickly in a day of misunderstandings and chaotic power politics; there’s an ugly crowd shouting for violence, trying to find a scapegoat they barely know to blame for their frustrations. All these things we’d say are the world at its worst, and as the story closes, it looks like that world has won.
But this leaves a question. Why is this cross, the climax of this awful day, why is it the symbol that we Christians cling to and meditate on, the one that even people who don’t know much at all about Jesus wear around their necks, thinking vaguely that it must represent something good, something greater than themselves, something they want to be part of.
The cross that is the turning point of this day it turns out is what shows us more clearly than anything else what God looks like, and is like. And it’s a revelation that no one could have predicted because it is so different from what people believed about God then, and in fact it’s different from what most of us believe about God now.
We see from this cross is that God is completely nonviolent, despite what we all might think, that God planned all this and that there had to be violence to satisfy him somehow. What we see instead is that when Jesus is confronted with the end of his life he puts his life aside, and undergoes what he needs to suffer without anger. The word passion for this story doesn’t mean intense suffering, it means that Jesus is undergoing something necessary almost passively. Jesus has given up control of his life but without resentment, without fighting, he is allowing himself to be led to what will be the greatest and most difficult moment of his life. For God, strength comes more from faithfulness and acceptance than it ever does from anger.
We also see from this cross and this day something else that we find hard to believe about God, that God is one with us in everything, that we don’t have a God looking at us from a distance, like an emotionally distant parent, but one who had to find a way to show us that there is no human place and no human suffering that God is not willing to embrace. It isn’t that God needs to see suffering, but through this picture of the cross we see that suffering and loss is a part of our work here on this earth, that God redeems it through being with us, that perhaps God is closer to those who are suffering, who have lost some part of their lives, who feel alone, closer to them than to anyone else.
We love this cross because this cross up here is also our cross, not a threatening sign that there is suffering ahead for all of us, although there is, but a sign that God is one with us, that when the world is at its worst God is closest. On this cross we can see the best of what we are all called to be, a man who gave himself up so that others can see and live, a sign to the rest of us of what our lives, at their best, can also be. That being willing to give everything, it turns out, is what changes death into life.