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March 21, 2008, GOOD FRIDAY,
2008, All Souls' Episcopal
On Good Friday, 2004, an
editorial appeared in the London Daily Telegram
which began this way:
In AD 30, April 7 was a Friday. In
Jerusalem, the women were busy indoors rummaging and
sweeping to make sure no scrap of leaven remained in any
garment or any room. For it was the Day of Preparation
before the Passover. Since the Sabbath began at sunset,
everything had to be ready by then. In the streets, men
were thronging in one direction, carrying lambs.
Each family would eat a lamb at
Passover, and each would be slaughtered by the man of
the house; but since this was Jerusalem, every lamb, as
a sacrificial victim, had to be killed in the Temple
precincts. In Judaism, life belongs to God, and the
blood of no animal can be shed without that life being
offered to God. With all the pilgrims in the city for
Passover, perhaps 18,000 lambs were being taken within a
few hours to the Temple.
Everyone was so busy that few would
have noticed a detachment of Roman soldiers taking two
or three criminals for execution. One of those condemned
men was Jesus.
I am often struck by the
profound ironies which surrounded our Lord’s passion and
crucifixion. Somehow, ironic doesn’t quite cover
things as a term, but there really are no words which
can adequately sum up what went on during this time.
Just imagine the scene in which thousands of worshippers
sacrifice their Passover lambs while ignoring the very
Lamb of God who was being sacrificed for all of them
that day. Some of these worshippers had actually brought
our Lord Jesus to Pilate to demand his death, and yet
they did not enter the palace of judgment for fear of
being rendered ritually unclean, and unable to offer
their lambs. They were exacting and scrupulous when it
came to observing a legalistic ritual which could not
bring them salvation while rejecting and repudiating the
very Lamb of God who could save them. And it doesn’t
stop there.
In the Book of Exodus,
Chapter 21, various laws are enumerated concerning
slaves. In Verse 32, we’re told that if you’re the owner
of an Ox which in the course of farm work gores a slave
and kills him, you are to pay the owner of that dead
slave thirty pieces of silver. That was considered a
slave’s price – thirty pieces of silver. Moreover, in
the eleventh chapter of the Book of Zechariah,
the Prophet, Zechariah, condemns the religious leaders
of his day as false shepherds. He has had enough with
being their prophet only to have them time and time
again fail to heed his words. He tells them, give me my
wages; pay me what you think I’m worth, and I’ll be
gone. They give him thirty pieces of silver. It is meant
as a derisive amount; the price of a slave. He casts
down the silver pieces, and says, “Give them to the
potter”, the official in charge of the smelter at the
Temple foundry where the silver was melted down. Those
who paid Judas thirty pieces of silver to betray Jesus
knew exactly the significance of that amount. But, when
a despondent Judas rejected their wages, they wouldn’t
keep it and contaminate their precious treasury with
blood money. After all, in their minds, protecting their
treasury; protecting their Temple; protecting their
positions of prominence as God’s servants was how they
justified their decision that Jesus, God incarnate, had
to die.
“His blood be on us and on
our children,” shouted the crowd who demanded the death
of Jesus. As Pilate washed his hands of the death of a
just and innocent man, the crowd, all of whom would be
sacrificing their lambs and eating their Passover meals,
told him to put his death, his blood, upon them. And so,
his blood is on us. His death is on us. It is humanity
that put him to death. We did it. The God who created
the world out of love, and who created us in his own
image as an expression of that love, came to us as one
of us, “bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh” so
that we could see him with human eyes and hold him in
our human hands, and so he could embrace us with the
human arms of his love and mercy. Our response was to
spit on him. Our response to this God was to reject him,
deny him, and forsake him. We arrested him on false
charges, testified falsely against him, interrogated him
illegally and brutally, and we then handed him over to
those who occupied his land so that they could dress him
up in funny clothes, mock him, torture him, and put him
to death by the most brutal method available to us at
the time.
We did all these things to
God incarnate for religious reasons. We decided he was a
blasphemer. We did this to him in order to protect our
religious institutions which he threatened. We killed
him because it was expedient. We thought he might incite
a rebellion which would threaten the peace, and so we
exchanged truth and justice and mercy for the expediency
of the moment. After all, security comes first. He died
for us. All human cruelty; all fear which leads to
violence; all contempt; all bigotry; all cynicism, all
injustice; all torture; all hate, and all sin was piled
on him that day. He died to pay the price for all of it.
His death was therefore an
act of propitiation. He paid the price for our sins. It
was a satisfaction fulfilling the demands of all
righteousness. His death was an act of expiation in
which our guilt and its consequences was removed by God.
His death was an atonement, once offered by himself,
both priest and victim, bringing about such a
reconciliation with God, we are bold to say, “Our
Father, who art in Heaven.” His death was the greatest
act of love by a man mankind has ever known.
The Psalmist once asked a
question we all must ask this day. “What shall I give
unto the Lord for all he has done for me?” There can be
only one answer, which the Psalmist then gives us. “I
shall take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name
of the Lord.” On this dark day, let us by God’s grace
walk in light, and let us take the cup of salvation, and
call upon the name of the Lord
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