When we hear this story, it’s hard not to think we are hearing the world saying no as loudly as it could to everything Jesus lived for. It was a no to all his teaching in the countryside, gathering the poor to be encouraged and healed, going from place to place doing no apparent harm, there was something about it that led to today, it all had to be stopped, both religious and civil leaders saw it as easier to just put him to death. And he was subjected to the worst kind of death they could think of, not just execution but degradation, a way of saying that he had to be made an example of. People like to say sometimes that Jesus wasn’t political, but in the end he must have seemed dangerously political to everyone, the founder of a parallel kingdom in this world where things were to operate completely differently. It sounds like a harmless and gentle idea, but apparently turning the world upside down, with the poor exalted, the rich sent away, is still an idea that the world mostly doesn’t want.
When we hear this story it’s also not hard to see that we’re still in a battle between light and darkness in this world. I could give you examples, but everyone here knows, you know the afflictions and illnesses in your own life, the sense of darkness or paralysis that can take us over, or you see the reality around us: the wickedness of humans who treat others like they are subhuman, the rich who aren’t worried about those with nothing. The only solutions to all this we find out about today are the ones Jesus gave us: they are obedience, and service, and love and self-sacrifice, they are the only weapons Jesus had and the only ones we have. They brought him to the cross, but in the end, the cross was a place of liberation and not death. He gave himself up, and set the rest of us free to follow.
The thing that is still hardest to understand is how this suffering and this one death did set us free. What did it do for us, is that liberation something we can feel? The old Catholic prayer says, “Passion of Christ, comfort me,” it doesn’t say, “Passion of Christ, make me feel guilty,” or “show me how awful this world is.” That prayer tells us what’s happening here. We were unworthy, but Jesus counted us worthy. All humanity deserves judgment, but instead he gave us mercy and forgiveness that never end. After today there’s nothing more God can possibly do to show us what God feels about us, the people he created. If you feel weighed down by your failings or by the failings of this world, they have no power now that can change that love for us. They don’t change the freedom that is ours.
If you want God to take this world over Jesus showed us today how that works. If you believe that we’re all set free and forgiven, then despite the sadness in life, the injustice in this world, the failure in our church, we can keep going. We can look straight at some of the ugliness and selfishness in this world and take it on, we keep going on behalf of those Jesus would have cared most about, people with nothing and no one on their side. He did all this for them, and for us.
There’s a tradition in the Orthodox church of painting icons imagining what happened to Jesus after his death but before his resurrection the day after tomorrow. And the picture that they paint is of someone who has already begun the work of liberation. These icons show Jesus in some dark place setting free from death all the dead who died before him, the patriarchs, Adam and Eve, all now liberated by the death of this man, and in these paintings, for someone who was just on the cross he looks strong and determined, someone you can count on, he’s reaching down and grabbing them by the wrist and pulling them up, one by one, and on the ground when you look closely are piles of broken chains and smashed locks. That’s us. God wants to pull us up by the wrist, to stand up as free people, because now nothing, even death, can take away what God wants for us.