In these addresses I have been trying to focus on the text of the gospel story to see what it says and to see what it might mean in the context of first century Israel. This can sometimes be an illuminating task but it can also be a dangerous one. When we look at the life of Jesus historically we do it from an interested position. Our interest is to discover the real Jesus and what he really meant. And perhaps once we have discovered that, we might feel that we know where we really stand we shall somehow be confident that we are standing in the right place. And by the right place we mean the place in which we can know that those we disagree with are wrong. We see truth as something we are competing for. If history can be made to tell us the truth then the competition is over and we have won because this is what the Bible incontrovertibly says. And that is why the search for historical truth can be dangerous, if it makes us the winners and the others losers.
It has often been pointed out that the gospel story of the last week of Jesus’ life makes frequent use of the verb to hand over’ or in its passive form to be handed over’. The Greek word that is used here can also be translated as betray’ or deliver up’. And that verb is always used of Jesus. Jesus is handed over by Judas to the high priest; the high priest hands him over to Pilate; Pilate hands Jesus over to be crucified. In all of this Jesus seems passive he does nothing and rarely speaks.
By a deep irony of language the word used here is also, in one of its forms, a word which can mean that which is passed on, or handed down that is tradition. In Greek tradition and betrayal are derived from the same word. So in Scripture the life of Jesus is handed over to tradition and history and to the processes whereby they are created. Jesus is the willing victim of history as he was the willing victim of Judas, and Caiaphas and Pilate. And so Jesus can also becomes the victim of our need to win battles about theology or morality or church politics.
Has all that I have been saying here this afternoon been a waste of time, therefore? For it must be true that I too have been shaping his story to suit my own position, my own interests, my own needs. I have been using Pilate and the Jewish authorities and the women at the cross to put across a point of view. And now finally I am going to look at what might have shaped Jesus’ own understanding of the cross the most perilous piece of interested historical speculation there can be. Perilous because of the possibility of distortion by my own agenda but also perilous because by going back into the thought patterns of first century Judaism I am leaving our own ways of thinking far behind. And that may lead to your thinking on both counts what has this go to do with me? With this health warning I shall go ahead but come back at the end to both problems to see how they may be related to Jesus and his cross.
When we begin to think about who Jesus is, I suppose the two questions to emerge most quickly are these. Did he think he was divine that he was in some sense God? And did he intend to die? We may shy away from answering either of those questions in the affirmative because it makes Jesus sound pathologically deluded. Yes, he thought he was God, and yes, he intended to die! The first question about the divinity of Jesus is not for detailed discussion now. It is I think sufficient to say that Jesus had a profound sense of vocation; and his calling absorbed him totally. But called to be what we then have to ask? The options in Judaism in ascending order are these: rabbi or teacher; itinerant charismatic and miracle worker; prophet; martyr; Messiah. From the gospel story Jesus could be perceived as fulfilling all of these roles as they were understood against the background of Jewish history. And it would seem that each of them influenced his understanding of what he was called to be. And yet it would also seem that he avoided being clearly defined in terms of any of them while being willing to accept all of them. He was a teacher, certainly; he was a charismatic miracle worker; he was regarded by many as a prophet; his death could be seen as martyrdom at the hands of the Romans; and his role was messianic though in ways that rewrote traditional expectations of a messiah. None of these titles, however, point to a sense of divinity. Jesus did not know that he was God, whatever knowing yourself to be God could possibly mean. Jesus did know that he was loved by God. And his disciples seem to have sensed the truth of this as exceptional. Here was a man whose sense of being called by God and being loved by God was total and unique in the experience of those who knew him.
But did this sense of being called and loved lead to a conviction that he must die? And if so why should he have to die? How would he have tried to understand a vocation to die? The starting point for any kind of answer has to be the Last Supper. It is the time of Passover when the Jews remembered their great escape from Egypt. And to Jesus’ contemporaries that meant not just a past event but a future promise. They had escaped from Egypt but in the promised land they had known defeat and exile and return and again defeat. And alongside these outward defeats there was the inner defeat of sin. So the God they looked to at the Passover was a God who would deliver them from the oppression of the external and the internal enemies of Israel. And when that deliverance came God would truly be their king.
Jesus had taught his disciples to pray thy kingdom come’. His parables were all about preparing for the kingdom and the reversal of those who could expect to be in the kingdom the first shall be last and the last shall be first. We cannot avoid the impression that Jesus expected the kingdom to come soon and that his ministry was the announcement of the coming kingdom. The symbolic action in the Temple the turning over of the tables announced God’s coming judgement on the Temple. Alongside that we must set the symbolic action of a last supper and the giving bread and wine.
This meal was at the time of the Passover. The idea of sacrifice and covenant are bound up with the events of Passover. A lamb is sacrificed; unleavened or hastily prepared bread is eaten escape is made possible and a new relationship with God is forged. So in giving bread and wine to his disciples Jesus is pointing to a new relationship about to be forged with God in the context of his sacrifice his death. Could his death inaugurate another great escape from sin and oppression?
The Passover is not the only context in which Jesus could have shaped a meaning for his death. Some Jews of his time believed that the great deliverance they prayed for would come about through a period of intense suffering. In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus says lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.’ The word we translate as temptation can also mean testing or a time of trial. In other words Jesus is telling his disciples that they should pray that God will bring them safely through the period of intense suffering before the dawn of the kingdom.
In the Dead Sea scrolls we find a belief that the sufferings of the Qumran community and its founders are pointers towards liberation and deliverance from sin. Or again in the story of Judas Maccabeus the leader who delivered Israel from oppression in the second century BC, we find the idea of martyrdom. And for the Maccabeans a martyr identifies himself with the sufferings of the people and offers his suffering as a means whereby the nation may find peace.
Jesus had warned the people that the time of trial was upon them, that God’s judgement on the Temple was about to be enacted. But if that was to be the case then how could the messenger deliver his terrible message and remain unaffected by it himself? He did not know precisely when these things were to happen. It is possible therefore that in his death Jesus saw himself identifying with the suffering that was to come upon his fellow Jews. As he says rather mysteriously to the women weeping for him on his way to the cross, Daughters of Jerusalem, don’t weep for me weep for yourselves For if they do this when the wood is green what will they do when it is dry?’ He is the green tree Jerusalem is the dry. Jesus had declared a message of peace, he had instructed his followers to love their enemies; he had said that those who are persecuted are blessed as are the peacemakers; he had rejected armed insurrection as the way to defeat the powers of this world. The time came in AD70 when the sons and grandsons of those weeping women who mourned for Jesus, rebelled against the Romans and Jerusalem was destroyed amidst much bloodshed and cruelty. In his crucifixion Jesus as martyr identifies himself with that destruction he is sure will come. He doesn’t simply deliver his message and escape from its consequences.
Jesus understanding of his own death is hammered out therefore in the context of what had happened to martyrs and prophets and the people of Israel in the past and which he believes will happen to them again before the kingdom of God is born. And Jesus dies as a Jew for his vision of Judaism which is a Judaism for everyone – Judaism which will be the light of the world and give birth to God’s kingdom on earth. And the victory of that kingdom would not come about by force of arms, or wealth or superior wisdom or spirituality or intelligence or diplomacy but by the handing over of the messenger of the kingdom to the forces of all that opposed it for them to do their worst.
To see Jesus in this way prompts an obvious question: was Jesus mistaken? Whatever we believe happened on the first Easter day it was not obviously the birth of the kingdom. And yet the disciples didn’t give up. Nor did the church not the least of the mysteries about Christianity was and is its ability to surmount the non-appearance of the kingdom about which Jesus spoke so frequently and powerfully. The church not the kingdom was born and Jesus was handed over to history. And that brings us back to the problems with which I began this address: the problem of history’s distortions of the story of Jesus in its own interests and the problem that if we try to recover the historical truth about Jesus it will seem irrelevant to our place in history. Is it inevitable that if we try to relate Jesus to our time we shall prove untrue to the Jesus who actually lived in Palestine 2000 years ago? What more simply does it mean now to know Jesus?
I suggested earlier that we might believe that if we had historical certainty about Jesus we could know finally where to stand in order for us to be proved right and others proved wrong. But the message of Good Friday is this: knowing Jesus means standing where Jesus stands and the implications of such a position have nothing to do with winners and losers in a competition for the truth. It was the fault of the Jewish authorities and of Pilate that they wanted to prove themselves right, justified in their struggle for power. And Jesus seems to have refused to take part in that game. Either he was silent or when he did speak he failed to make himself clear in the way his interrogators wanted. He is not a competitor in their game. He is not trying to take over the space they are defending. The kingdom Jesus speaks of, is not of this world in the sense that it does not compete for space in this world it is radically undermined by violence, rivalry and hostility. The present is only opened up to the possibility of the kingdom by our remaining anchored in the present, pinned down to it, forced to accept it and simply to be there. That is why Jesus does not compete for space he isn’t trying to get anywhere he is simply and wholly attentive to where he is.
We on the other hand are always trying to be somewhere else. And the more painful the present is the more we want to be somewhere else. We want solutions to all our problems; solutions to poverty and disease and global warming; to crime and conflict and the threat of war; solutions to our personal problems – our loneliness, weakness and need. We make plans or we look the other way. We try heroically and though there may be moments of change and success, yet if we really care, it is almost impossible not to feel despair. We look at the news, from the Sudan, the Middle East, the Arctic we buy a cup of tea for a homeless person reeking of drink we receive a phone call and learn that someone we care for has an incurable cancer and we cannot connect with it we want it to be different but there is nothing we can do.
A modern writer has said that God is in the connections we cannot make.’ The person or situation that reminds me of my own limitations, my own helplessness leaves me feeling unconnected. But if I am able to stay in that place of un- connectedness then I will begin to know Jesus, for that is where he stands and always will stand. And as we are stripped down in that place, as we learn at last the discipline of standing still, so our minds and hearts will begin to be reshaped by Jesus, and perhaps for a moment, for us and for whoever joins us in that space there will be a glimpse of the kingdom which is to come. Amen.
Post script
Most sermons arise out of a combination of ideas found in books which have appealed to the preacher. The books that went into these sermons are: Rowan Williams: Christ on Trial (2000)
On Christian Theology ch 7 (on Christianity and Judaism) 2000 Women and the Ministry in ‘Feminine in the Church’ ed Monica Furlong 1984 N T Wright; Jesus and the Victory of God 1996
Gerd Theissen & Annette Merz: The Historical Jesus 1998
E P Sanders: Jesus and Judaism 1985