One of the reasons this story grips us is that this is the human world we know. It’s a story of everything turning bad for a person who truly did not deserve it, a life of teaching and peaceful religious work out in the countryside interrupted for no reason with something that should never have happened. We see Jesus pulled into a terrible sequence of events. We see religious leaders who are mainly concerned about keeping the system going and making sure there’s no trouble. We see friends we thought we could count on who suddenly let us down and break promises and disappear when they are most needed. We see someone executed for a crime that doesn’t even seem like a crime. So if we needed proof that Jesus was human, and lived a truly human life, here it is.
But what is hard to grasp about this story isn’t that it happened, because as terrible as it is, it’s not that unusual, bad things happen all the time to people who deserve better from this world. What’s hard to realize is what Jesus says over and over, that this was supposed to happen, and needed to happen just this way. This wasn’t an interruption of a life that otherwise would have headed for many years in a different and better direction, what happened today was the whole point of his life, it was part of the reason God sent his son to us, and Jesus seemed to know this all along. He told his disciples this would happen at some point as his life went on, and they didn’t understand.
So we don’t understand either, and every year we ask the question why, why did this have to happen? It seems to come down to this. Jesus led a life that had absolutely nothing to do with the violence and power of the world, nothing to do with all the struggle for leadership and influence and security we see in life, no aggressiveness against people who disagreed with him or opposed him — none of that, to him, was part of the life he was trying to tell us about. He truly turned the world upside down. Back in the Sermon on the Mount, he told people that life was giving things away, not accumulating them, it was about peacemaking, and not division and blame, it was about forgiving over and over. He talked about a kingdom that just wasn’t like other kingdoms, a different kingdom from the one you think you live in, but no one ever understood how different he meant. He said you could see that kingdom when you saw a man beaten up by the side of the road brought back to health by a stranger who knew nothing about him, you saw it when you saw a shepherd abandon a hundred other sheep to find just one that had been forgotten, you saw it when you saw all those people who were the dregs of the earth turned into friends and disciples of God. God is on the side of the powerless, and to show us, we have today. Jesus was someone who didn’t assert any authority, who preached nothing but generosity, and unfortunately, that is not the way this world lives, a world with so much anger and blame and jealousy and scapegoating, and so the world turned against him. You could say all this proves is that God is unfair, but maybe it’s the only way God could really show us the way this kingdom is meant to be, with a God who became a victim to show us God’s real priorities, that love is the center of everything.
I don’t know what your past year has been like, but there are years when we all see too much suffering. We see good people get sick who don’t get better, Christians murdered in their churches, I’m sure you have your own pictures in your mind, and you are wondering about the other victims of this world. When do they get that kingdom of God that Jesus promised us?
The only answer we get, is that the kingdom of God is available to us here even now, as he always said it was, and in this kingdom even death is completely different from what it seems. Jesus told us that his death on the cross would not end in death, that it would be transformed into something that is not like anything we can imagine or describe. The signs of the kingdom are all around us, Jesus said, and then he gave us this last sign, maybe as a way to show us that there is no place on this earth so miserable and pointless where that kingdom of God cannot win. That transformation of death into life is the kingdom we are waiting for. And yet he told us that we would see this kingdom, this real kingdom of God, right now, wherever we see love for people the world cares nothing for. Even on the cross, maybe we can see this new world being built.