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But that was friday...
"Huddled in the swampy trenches of the Somme thousands of First World War soldiers, many still teenagers, waited for the dreaded command to ‘go over the top’. Hauling themselves onto the field of conflict they would face the full range of enemy’s weapons. Guns, tanks and inhumane gas bombs which, on explosion, would turn the dismal battlefield into an eerie yellow nightmare. If an unlucky soldier didn’t find his gas-mask in a matter of seconds he would die an excruciating death. Faced with this horrific anticipation of terror on the Western Front, some soldiers actually began to sweat blood in the trench. Once that had begun, none of themBefore Judas arrived in the Garden of Gethsemane to betray his master, the Lord Jesus Christ actually began to sweat blood. It wasn’t just the anticipation of the physical pain and suffering that was going to come. He also knew that God was going to take him, the one man who had never done anything wrong, and ‘make him sin for us’. I don’t understand what that means. All I know is that God was taking one human being - the finest, the best, the bravest, the hardest, the toughest, that ever was - and planned to plunge him into the mess, into the sinkhole of this world’s corruption and use him to soak it all up. Little wonder he ‘sweat great drops of blood’. But Jesus went on living for nearly 24 hours. And through that Thursday night and Friday morning, when he faced utter loneliness and all the rubbish this world could fling at him, he went on loving his killers. When Judas arrived in the Garden, Peter, the tough one of the outfit, leaped up and took out his sword hidden beneath his tunic. You see he was that kind of fellow. You can imagine him saying in his defiant Northern accent: ‘They’ll never get past me Lord. They’ll have to get past me if they’re going to get to you!’. The first thing he did was make for a man who wasn’t armed and chopped his ear off. That wasn’t very brave. The Lord Jesus said to him, ‘Put your sword away. If you live by the sword you die by it’. Suddenly all of Peter’s courage was gone. He dropped the sword and, along with the other disciples, ran and ran. Then some soldiers seized Christ and down through the streets they took him in the darkness.They brought him before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. One of the cheapest and most effective tortures known to mankind is to blindfold the victim, standing him in front of a bunch of men and hit him from all quarters. The art of it is to prevent the man from falling down. The soldiers must have regarded this as a piece of sport. They taunted Jesus as they hit him and pushed him from person to person. And he went on loving them. And he never lost his temper. Then began the endless procession of encounters Christ had to contend with as he was pushed from authority to authority like a pinball trapped in a pinball machine. The High Priest, Pilate again.Then Herod. Herod, that drunken old man, one of the most wicked kings who ever sat on a throne anywhere, said: ‘I’m glad to see you. I’ve been wanting to for a long time. All we kings should get together, one king to another. I’ve been wanting to see a miracle for a long time. Show me a miracle and you can go free’. He just went on loving him. They sent him back to Pilate who didn’t know what to do. Maybe a flogging would satisfy the Jews. And well, it would be a shame of course, but some people had been known to actually die … it would be a terrible shame, of course, and flowers would be sent to the funeral, but it would save a lot of trouble …. So they strapped Jesus up and stretched him out. It may have been on a wooden frame but it is likely he was put round one of the great pillars in the basement of the Fortress Antonia.They then took a Roman scourge which was device of little lead balls embedded in leather thongs all the way down to the end, where there may have been a piece of copper or bone. He would be stretched out tight and his back would be like a drum skin. The first few strokes, as they began to flail it across a man’s back, would carve furrows in the skin. More strokes would pull off long strips of skin. Still more would sink deep into the muscle fibre, and flesh would be ripped off in lumps. Thirty-nine times. Still he went on loving them and never said a word. He was the hardest, toughest, bravest man there ever was. The gentlest and the funniest. The best. They wheeled him out in front of the crowds in a long red coat which it seems Herod had given him. By now somebody had found a crown. Somebody had probably said: ‘You can’t have a king without a crown - what a terrible shame ….’. The Romans were just like the British. It doesn’t matter what you do to somebody, you can be as cruel as you like, as long as it’s a joke. Somebody found some thorns, three or four inch long and hard as nails. He wound a crown out of these thorns and rammed it down on the head of Jesus. ‘Wouldn’t like you to lose your crown, O king. We couldn’t find a gold one so we knocked this one together for you. Hope you like it ….’ Thorns were rubbish. It was as if they were saying ‘if you are a king, Jesus, then you are the king of the rubbish heaps. That is our assessment of you’.So they wheeled him out in front of the crowds, wearing a purple robe, a crown of thorns on his head and with his face smashed. Pilate then, without realising it, said the wisest thing in his life. ‘Look at the man’. THE man. Because when God is in a man that is what you see. A beaten-up wreck ? No. Love, love, love. Love in human form. Love incarnate. The love of God, the most powerful force in all the universe. Loving those who would punish and beat and kick him. The crowd began baying like a pack of hounds, ‘Kill him, Kill him!’ Pilate knew he could do nothing. So like many of us would, and still do, he pulled out a bowl and washed his hands of the whole affair. They lead Jesus down through the streets of Jerusalem with his cross, through the baying mob, down into the valley and up the other side. And finally, that great heart and body gave up and collapsed. No wonder. They took him to the cross and nailed him to it. The Romans always nailed the right hand first. Then they dragged the left arm out and pulled that tight. A loop of rope would be tied round the legs. If you were going to die fast they didn’t give you seat for that would mean you died slowly, giving entertainment to the crowds for maybe a week. You would slowly waste away through gangrene and finally drown in your own juices. But the Jewish authorities, being terribly holy and sanctimonious said that there shouldn’t be any body hanging around the next day. It was a holy day and they didn’t want any nasty dead bodies reminding them.So they put a rope around him legs and tied it fast. Then they banged the spike home into the feet and dropped the cross into the socket in the ground. When that happened the joints at the top of the body would snap and what was once a man began to look quite obscene as it distended and stretched. But the terrible pain of it was on the heart, because the arteries began to stretch, pull and tear at the heart itself. While they were doing that he was saying ‘Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing ….’ When you begin to tear apart Jesus, who is God, all that comes out is love. Love towards the thieves on his right and left, and his own mother. Tender courteous love. Then the darkness came down, and in the darkness God was blaming him.The Bible says: ‘He bore our sins and iniquities in his body’. I don’t understand it but I do know this. Every time you do something wrong, it does something inside you, that is why we are all dying, because of the number of times we have done wrong things. Into the body of Christ God fed the corruption that you actually generated. Every lie you ever told he fed into Jesus, every time you stabbed a best friend in the back God fed it into him. Every time you punched a friend in real anger, every wound, every hurt you caused anyone God fed it into him. God blamed on Jesus everything that has ever gone wrong with the human race. If your mum got cancer, then blame him - but you’ll be too late because God has already done it. If your dad got killed in the war, or on the road, God has already blamed Jesus Christ for it. He has already felt all the pain that your mother felt, or your father, or your little brother who maybe died of leukaemia. God visited every sickness and pain that mankind ever felt anywhere and all the one that you don’t know about. All those nameless babies that died in Cambodia. All those little kids that got napalmed in Vietnam. All the Jewish kids that were burned in the ghetto in Warsaw and in the ovens in Belson and Buchenwald. All that they felt, God had already fed into Jesus Christ. He bore that sickness, disease and pain of the whole human race. I don’t know how, but I do know that healing is possible in the name of Jesus. This is the measure of God’s love. God vent all the terrible psychoses, like schizophrenia, that modern man has brought upon himself on Jesus. Because God loves people, and so does the Lord Jesus. There’s one more thing he blamed on him, all our guilt. The thing that makes man most miserable of all is his guilt. Christ dealt with that as well. As he hung there in the darkness, it all began to mount up inside him, until eventually there burst the most terrible cry: ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me ?’ And there was no answer for the first time since Jesus began to pray in public. No answer came from heaven. In the cold and in the dark it echoed around the hills. The cry of a man in hell. He said, ‘I thirst’ and they tried to give him anaesthetic in a sponge on the end of a stick, but he refused. If he was going to bear your guilt and mine he had to be conscious, aware of every single bit of it otherwise our sins could never be forgiven. God, in his own son, did not even allow himself as creator that little bit of comfort which crude anaesthetic could have given him. Finally he cried, ‘It is finished’, meaning ‘the account is fully settled and paid for’. Everything we have ever done wrong was paid for at that moment in the death of Jesus. Christ wasn’t only dying so we could be forgiven sinners, as powerless after believing as we were before, he died so we could die with him.But that wasn’t the end of the story although many people still believe it was. Scrawled up on a wall I noticed someone had recently written: ‘God is alive and well and working on a far less ambitious project’. Oh, but the writer was so wrong. Christ’s death wasn’t an heroic failure. His death paves the way into the kingdom because we were forgiven when Christ cried those glorious words: ‘It is finished’. So, many people believe the story ended there. But that was Friday ….
By Eric Delve and Tony Campolo
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Eric Delve and Tony Campolo, 19/10/2009 |
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