Faith in Dark Places by David Rhodes

Author:David Rhodes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK

11

The dying Christ

Luke’s little fragment comes at the most horrific moment for the followers of Jesus: the crucifixion. Finally and inevitably, Jesus has been arrested. He is put on trial and condemned. Later he is made to carry the heavy cross-beam of the gallows on which he will be put to death.

He is stripped and nailed to the cross. Crucifixion was not a Jewish practice. It was a brutal and humiliating form of execution used by the occupying Romans for those involved in political uprisings. It was Rome’s ultimate deterrent against rebellious subjects.

Like thousands before him, Jesus is left hanging, naked, on the cross to die.

Alongside him hang two political criminals. They too are being put to death as a warning to others. Perhaps they are like freedom fighters in the French resistance being executed by the Nazis: ordinary men, driven by oppression, injustice and the dishonour of foreign occupation to strike back against the might of imperial Rome.

The three men hanging side by side on the gallows are the poorest people in the world. They have been stripped of their possessions, clothing, dignity, hope – and now, finally, their lives.

The horror and suffering of the cross is unspeakably real. Jesus is at his most vulnerable and weak: nailed to a filthy cross.

But when was Jesus most completely and effectively living out the love of God? What was the moment when he was most powerfully sharing the good news? When do we see God so unconditionally reconciling the world to himself, and making love, the essence of life, real? In that very moment of death, when Jesus utterly refuses to give in to the forces of oppression. The cross is good news from the poor as the good news had never been before.

It has been said that Jesus was ‘passive’ as he hung on the cross. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like an Olympic weightlifter, he is silent and still but every atom and sinew in body and soul is totally active – straining to hold up a huge and crushing weight. Refusing to be beaten into submission by the colossal forces of injustice and oppression bearing down on him.

How might the authorities have achieved that submission? By Jesus betraying the love of God and the nature of the kingdom. By reacting to suffering with anger and retaliation. With a desire for revenge; with hatred. Or he might have done what a great many people do under torture and tried to save his skin by a false confession. Submission might have meant Jesus pleading for his life in return for a denial of God’s love for the poor. By saying his whole life had been a deception.

The vital fragment

But, even now, we are not at the heart of the matter for Luke. We have still not picked up the vital fragment of evidence. It comes now: the spark of life.

In that agonizing moment of suffering and death on the cross, the whole life and meaning of Jesus appears to have collapsed in ruins.

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