My kingdom does not belong to this world.”
John 18
About this time of year, in 1989, six
Jesuit priests were dragged from their beds at their university on the edge of
San Salvador and shot through their heads with high-powered rifles. Their cook
and her fifteen-year-old daughter were also killed. The head of the Jesuits
working in Central America told reporters, and I quote, “They were
assassinated with lavish barbarity. They were tortured before they died. They
even took out their brains.” What did they do wrong? They were outspoken
advocates for the poor and the politically abused. They wanted change and the
fear of change threatened the powers to be in El Salvador of that time. Why did
they remove their brains? Jesuits are known for their intelligence. You have to
be smart to become a Jesuit. Their murders removed their brains from their
skulls to make a joke, as if to say, “We’ll show these “smart alecks” who’s
boss!”
Jesus, of course was not a Jesuit, but he
was treated the same way for the same reason. In his first public sermon, Jesus
had said that he too had come to “bring good news to the poor, to proclaim
liberty to captives and to set the downtrodden free.” This message made Jesus
immensely popular with the poor and outcasts of his world, but it attracted the
wrath and hatred of the political and religious powers-to-be.
Jesus never wanted to be a “king” in the
worldly sense of that word. He rejected that idea in the desert, when it was
proposed to him by the devil, before he went public with his ministry. He
shunned any talk of it when it November 25, 2018came up, and it came up quite
often. However, those “in power” would not believe that he didn’t want their
power. They never trusted him. Jesus was so popular with the little people,
those in power had become paranoid about him possibly trying to become a king
and about their loss of power.
When Jesus was arrested, they too made a
joke. Their joke was about him being a “king.” They dressed him in a ratty old
red robe, the color of royalty. They put a “crown” on his head, a crown of
thorns, mashing it into his skin and hair. Then they took turns genuflecting in
front of him, laughing their heads off at their own joke. For a “throne” they
nailed him to a cross and placed a sign over his head that read, “This is the
King of the Jews” for passers-by to laugh at. Ha, Ha! Big
joke!
(Point to the crucifix) Behold our king!
That certainly doesn’t look like any other king I have seen! Our king, innocent
and without sin, is the brunt of sick jokes. Our king looks like a total
failure! Our king was abandoned, even by most of his closest friends. Absent
are the things we normally associate with the kings and queens of this world:
power, deference, pomp and prestige. Our king is bathed in blood, sweat and
tears.
It doesn’t make sense to us today and it
didn’t make sense to the people who were there back then. When they were waving
their palms and welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem a few days before, they had no
idea that things would turn out this way. They had their plans for Jesus and
this was not part of them. They had plans for a political revolution, palaces
and powerful positions to be filled in a new kingdom. They knew Jesus could
escape if he wished. He had saved others, he could have saved himself if he
really wanted to. They could not comprehend the fact that he
willingly chose such a fate. No wonder they dropped him like a hot potato!
Why would Jesus willingly accept such a
fate? He could have gotten around it, he could have escaped and he could have
avoided all the pain. Either Jesus was the ultimate masochist or there is a
point to all this. What is the point?
Besides being the ultimate act of fidelity
to God, accepting even death on a cross, Jesus wanted to teach us a fundamental
life lesson: the secret to happiness. He wanted us to know that we do not solve
problems by running away from them or waiting them out, but through facing them
head-on. When we avoid problems and seek comfort at all costs, the evil within
us and around us grows. When we confront our problems, we can shrink them and
finally conquer them. That’s what Jesus did when he was faced with poverty,
disease, rejection, hatred, corruption and even death! He stood up to all of
them. He even beat death itself.
Whether it is a pattern of sin in our own
lives, a lump in our breasts, a marriage that isn’t working, a spending pattern
that is destructive, an addiction to drugs, food, alcohol or sex, an impending
death, we triumph over those problems by facing them, by embracing them and
looking them right in the eye. Denial and avoidance simply feed the problem.
There is no new person, without the death of the old person. There is no cure
without admitting the disease. There is no change without the pain of letting go
of the way things are now. There is no gain without pain. There is no
resurrection of any kind, without some kind of dying.
That is what the cross means. Our
crucified king has promised us that if we are victorious over small things, we
can be victorious, because of him, even over our own deaths and “reign” with
him forever. Our crucified king challenges us today, in the words of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, to “Faint not, nor fear, but go out to the storm and the
action…freedom will welcome your spirit with joy.”
