Behold, The Man

This Holy Week was one filled with reflection and insight for me. I attended a Good Friday Mass at a Catholic church and was once again reminded of how beautiful (and long) the Mass is. My favorite part is always the congregational reading of the Passion narrative from John. The priest reads Jesus' lines and we, the congregation, are first the Roman cohort that comes with Judas to arrest Jesus and later the mob that demands his crucifixion. There is something very humbling and shameful about being part of a crowd shouting, "Crucify him!" in unison. I think that's the point. Knowing those lines were coming, I found myself dreading them as we worked our way through the story. I'm reminded of the lyrics of the Stuart Townsend song, How Deep the Father's Love for Us, "Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice call out among the scoffers." All the disciples deserted him that night (except maybe for John) and Peter even called a curse down upon himself while denying that he ever knew Jesus, who stands as the only hero, the only one who got anything right that night.

Christ came with a kingdom of peace. The people he came to, while they liked him for a time, ultimately decided to do away with him violently. They chose sides against him politically and went with Caesar. "We have no king but Caesar". Until Jesus, they wanted out from Caesar's grasp. That's what they wanted Messiah to fix. Jesus basically told them that Caesar was irrelevant and had no real power anyway ('Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, but give to God what is God's'; 'You would have no power had it not been given to you by my father'), but that wasn't good enough. They seemed to have disliked Jesus' politics so much that they executed him in Caesar's name.

As Evangelicals, we're always told that the cross is all about judicial atonement. When we place so much emphasis on that alone, the teachings of Christ become secondary to his "real" mission. However, the cross and resurrection of Christ is the culmination of everything Jesus taught us the same way the New Testament is the culmination of everything in the Old (and the the cross and resurrection are the culmination of all that too). When the Jews (when we) rejected Jesus they weren't just rejecting his atonement for their sins, they were rejecting his entire kingdom; his politics (his polis), his ethics, everything that he calls us to be.

Let's get one thing straight: Jesus is a real, legitimate king and his kingdom is a real, legitimate kingdom. We like to spiritualize it, to read the kingdom talk just like the "other" metaphors the New Testament uses for the church - the bride, the flock, the temple, the body - but Christ's kingship and kingdom are a metaphor for nothing. The prophets promised us a king, and God delivered. His kingdom operates differently, drastically so, than worldly kingdoms, but we should expect this. Weakness is preferred to power, foolishness to wisdom, peace to violence, poverty to wealth, suffering to comfort. "My ways are not your ways". All of this, all of it, is right there in the cross and resurrection of Christ. Atonement for sins is just one piece.

Christ is in competition with Caesar, and he won. Absolute and utter victory over the world, the flesh, and the devil's ways. God's way - our way - worked, and it's still a better way. When we fail to see this, the best solutions we can come up with are voting and enlisting to try to control history. These, and many other things we do way too much of, are the world's ideas that we've unfortunately adopted. Remember, if God's ways are not our ways, then Jesus doesn't make any more sense to conservatives than he does to liberals, no more sense to Democrats than to Republicans. And if we are to serve Christ rather than Caesar, then that goes for serving America too. In choosing sides against Christ then, whether we choose violence over peace, wealth over poverty, power over weakness, or comfort over the sufferings of Christ, we then join the mob in chanting, "Crucify him!", or said another way, "It was my sins that held hem there." Let us recognize the victory of God over all things and how that victory was accomplished, along with what didn't work for the opposition.

Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur.

Our Lamb has conquered; him let us follow.