Good Friday Meditation by Mark Wakefield on March 21 2008
Matthew 27.32-44

Simon of Cyrene carries Jesus’s cross. Originally from North Africa, he had probably come in from a neighbouring village to attend Passover in the holy City of Jerusalem. And here he is, unwittingly caught up in a deadly and sordid drama that would turn the tide of human history.

This was no act of charity. Such was the power of the occupying Roman forces that a soldier would only need to touch the shoulder of a Jew with the flat of his spear and the man would have to carry out any task demanded of him. In this case, the shameful task of carrying the cross of one condemned to the slow death by crucifixion that was reserved only for common criminals. For Jesus had spent the night being interrogated, scourged and mocked. And now, in the morning, he buckles under the weight of his own cross, as he is led on the longest route possible to the scene of his final agony and indignity.

This is a story about power. Pilate condemned Jesus to death in an act of naked self interest. Fearing the power of the mob and the wrath of his own masters he signs the death warrant. Civic peace bought at the small price of a man’s life. We may not admire calculating, cynical Pilate but we can understand him. All too well.

But this is much more than a story about the merciless exercise of political power. It’s also about the malevolent power that lurks in our human heart of darkness. It’s about the pleasure of meting out pain and suffering to the defenceless, the hated and the vulnerable. Not content with driving nails into Jesus’s hands and feet, the soldiers cast lots for who shall have the naked man’s clothes. Indignity upon cruel injury.

The passers-by mock him. “If you are the son of God, come down from your cross”. Painters through the ages have preserved our Lord’s modesty with a loin cloth. But it was not so. We think of the cross raised high above the ground when it would have been but a few inches. So the passers by would have taunted him to his face.

For a Roman crucifixion was an exercise in subjugation, designed to humiliate, to reduce a human being to a tortured, pain-wracked animal.

The Chief Priests stop by to savour their moment of triumph over the man that has bested them in argument so many times and challenged their smug assumptions, so typical of those who lay claim to righteousness and religious certainty.

And lastly, the two criminals, hanging either side of Jesus. In spite of their own agonies they too follow the crowd in mocking and taunting him. Was there ever a more wretched, lonely, forsaken man than Christ on his cross?

The taunts and the mocking questions hold a mirror up to the values of our world:

“You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself!

He saved others he cannot save himself.

He trusts God; let God deliver him now if he wants to.”

Despite the cross, despite the resurrection, despite the faith we profess, we so often show the same misunderstanding of God and what he is about as those who mocked our Lord.

For we, like them, are obsessed with the idea of a mighty God – one of awesome power, of strength, of control, of dominion.

But the cross tells us something quite different. This God, our God, is the God of love. He cannot be or do other. And to love is to offer, to engage, to appeal but never to impose. To love is to risk – to risk pain and loss, to risk the ultimate, humiliating rejection that is the cross of Christ.

The New Testament theologian John Fenton wrote this of Jesus on the cross:

“He cannot refute what people think. They think he is the last – the dregs, the bottom, the worst person who has ever lived, a deluded mad prophet, a would-be destroyer and rebuilder of the temple, a deranged healer, a neurotic, a psychopath. He’s nobody. That’s why he is the king: the last shall be first. You can hardly be more last than he was; you’ll not be more first either.”

How different from our worldly Gods and heroes. We look enviously at the trappings of wealth, power and success. But no one looks on Jesus and says “I wish that were me”. It’s Jesus’s power in powerlessness, lordship in humility that destroys all the barriers between us and him. There’s nothing in him that any of us need fear or envy. And that’s why we can all be his subjects.

This truth, the difficult, challenging truth of Jesus’s self-emptying servanthood, is the central truth of Good Friday and the foundational truth of our faith. Too often it seems like sheer folly to us. And yet even in the depths of our dark hearts we acknowledge it and know that within it lies the key that will unlock our humanity.

Amen