This is – for me, for many of you – a very familiar Gospel passage.
We hear it twice in Holy Week, in different versions, on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. But on those occasions we get this scene as part of the whole, long story of Jesus’ last night and day. Today we get just this little slice.
Reflecting on the text this week: trying to peel back the familiarity & many layers of the church’s understanding of what’s happening here, & notice what the text actually says…
Found myself noticing what it doesn’t say.
First: Notice that it doesn’t really explain what’s happening at all.
Doesn’t explain what crucifixion is or why it’s happening … or this Place of the Skull. Assumes the readers know.
Crucifixion means tying or nailing someone to a big wooden cross, and leaving them there till they die. Crucifixion was a form of public execution that the Roman Empire used to get rid of people they didn’t like, with the added benefit – from their perspective – of getting other people to shut up & go along with things, so it doesn’t happen to them.
NT professor Robyn Whitaker: “Slaves, the poor, criminals and political protesters were crucified in their thousands for ‘crimes’ we might today consider minor offences. The types of cross structures might differ, but as a form of execution, crucifixion was brutal and violent, designed to publicly shame the victim by displaying [them] naked on a scaffold, thereby asserting Rome’s power over the bodies of the masses.”
The Romans crucified somewhere between 300,000 and two million people, over the duration of the Roman Empire.
Being crucified was one of the least special things about Jesus.
As for the Place of the Skull, it was probably a place outside the city walls that was commonly used for crucifixions. Jerusalem has grown a lot in 2000 years, so the site is now lost.
The first Christian images of the crucifixion don’t start showing up till around 400 years after Jesus’ death. Scholars think this might be because crucifixion was seen as so shameful. The earliest image of the crucified Jesus we have kind of proves the point. It’s a piece of graffiti from around the year 200. It seems to have been carved by one Roman soldier to bully another Roman soldier, who was a Christian. It shows the Christian soldier, Alexamenos, standing before a crucifix with Jesus on the cross, with a donkey’s head. It has a caption: “Alexamenos worships his god.” So.
None of the Gospels really explain what crucifixion is or what it meant in that time and place. That silence is an invitation to learn, but it’s also an indication of the horrible familiarity of oppressive violence, of murder by the state for any minor pretext, for the first few generations of Christians.
Which brings me to another thing I noticed that the text doesn’t say: what the other two men crucified with Jesus had done. Two of the other Gospels actually say they were robbers, using a word that could mean brigands or highwaymen – theft with an element of violence and opportunism, not just stealing a loaf of bread in desperate hunger, Jean Valjean-style. Still, theft is often a crime of poverty, and we don’t know anything about these people except that the local Roman authorities had decided they deserved death.
While reading around about this passage, I read one commentary in which the writer assumed that when Jesus says, “Today you will be with me in paradise,” he is extending salvation to the criminal hanging beside him. That really surprised me – and then made me think about why I was surprised. I realized that It had *never* occurred to me that because these men had been condemned by the state, they had therefore also been condemned by God. I mean, they’re hanging next to Jesus.
I always assumed Jesus was naming something that was already true – that whatever this man’s circumstances or failures, he would be welcomed into God’s great mercy at his death.
It’s very easy – too easy – for Christians to equate criminal justice with God’s justice. It’s very easy – too easy – for Christians to forget that we worship a man who was arrested, condemned, and executed by the government. The church’s impulse to put Jesus on a throne definitely doesn’t help.
Which brings me to the third thing this text doesn’t say: anything about what Jesus’ crucifixion and death mean or do. Someone was just asking me about the Episcopal Church’s view of salvation, and I felt a little bad about not having a clearer answer. Our way of faith tends to let there be mystery around such things, but I know that can be unsatisfying.
Scripture itself is not definitive about what is accomplished, and how, by Jesus’ death and resurrection. And in 2000 years of Christian thought and theology, many different understandings have emerged. To begin with: Is it the death itself that saves? Or the resurrection, the return from death, the defeat of death? Or is it what happens in between – as in some Eastern Orthodox thought that doesn’t have Jesus lying peacefully in the tomb between Good Friday and Easter, but going down to Hell and fighting Satan and busting out all the dead who have been trapped there for aeons?
The understanding that’s most familiar to many people – that Jesus had to die to make amends to an angry God for the sins of humanity – is not the dominant view in Scripture. It’s basically a reworking of some Temple sacrificial practices of Judaism, and early Christian writers used it as one *of many* images and metaphors they offered to try to describe what they experienced as the saving or liberating work of Jesus on the cross.
This short Gospel passage is full of the language of salvation. He saved others; let him save himself! Save yourself and us!
The Greek word there is sozo. It means to rescue, or heal – to save someone’s life, one way or another. Early on in the Christian movement, Christians start to use it in a more abstract and theological way – that there’s some kind of saving, some kind of salvation, in Jesus that transcends ordinary matters of life and death. But more questions quickly crowd in. What does this salvation mean? Is being saved the same thing as being promised a place with Jesus in paradise after we die? Or is it something closer at hand, some different way of some new way of being or belonging that’s operative in this world, this life?
Save yourself and us! I think Luke, our Gospel writer, is aware of the irony of these taunts. The hostile crowds around the dying Jesus assume that saving, here, would look like Jesus climbing down rom the cross, his wounds magically healed. But there’s some deeper, larger saving at stake – one that doesn’t mean evading death. Whatever the meaning, the purpose, the efficacy of dying on this cross, Jesus has chosen it. He knew it was going to happen. He faced it with anguish and fear. He walked towards it anyway.
Today is Christ the King Sunday. It’s the youngest of our liturgical feasts – it’s actually its 100th birthday this year! It was established in 1925 by Pope Pius XI in the aftermath of World War I. I looked back at the Pope’s statement at the time; there was a lot in it about how there would’t be so many wars if everyone in the world was a devout Roman Catholic, a hypothesis that I’m not sure is borne out by history.
I do find value in this day and the meaning-making around it – that Christians owe their loyalty to Christ and the Kingdom of God above any national or ethnic loyalties; and that in fact being citizens of that kingdom unites us with people of other national and ethnic groups.
But: it’s complicated. In the crucifixion Gospels, when people call Jesus a king, it’s a taunt. They’re mocking him. Christians easily get comfortable with power – political, social, economic, cultural – and start to forget the irony, the paradox.
In the fourth century or so, when Christianity started to get comfortable with political power and vice versa, it was very easy for the church to start making art of Jesus using images of earthly power. Jesus as a king, with crown and scepter. Here’s an example – this is the first cross that St. Dunstan’s used in worship, back when they had church upstairs in the Parish Center in the late 1950s. He looks like a king, or a priest, or both. This kind of image is called a Christus Rex – Christ the King – Jesus on the cross, but all dressed in fancy clothes, and standing upright, not as if he’s actually being crucified.
These images of Jesus Christ on the cross in royal splendor are intended to show his victory over death and suffering. They’re intended as images of triumph and reassurance. But objects and images always have meanings beyond what’s intended, or what the artist would say they’re trying to do.
Take a look. Then, if you want, tell me in just a word or two what this image makes you feel…
When St. Dunstan’s built the new church building in 1964, they put a different image of Jesus at the front. A cross with Jesus on it, looking like he’s being crucified, is called a crucifix. This image is pretty familiar if you’ve spent any time in this space. These kinds of images, I think, are intended to call us into this moment in the Gospel story, as witnesses to his suffering. It’s a little unusual for an Episcopal church to have a crucifix at the front, rather than a plain cross. Some people say it it keeps us stuck at Good Friday, when every Eucharist ought to be a celebration of Easter.
Take a look. Then, if you want, tell me in just a word or two what this image makes you feel…
Christ suffering on the cross, Christ risen in glory, Christ the condemned criminal, Christ the King: Bless us as we live with the questions and the tensions. May our wondering lead us towards you; may we find you eager to meet us, for the first or the fiftieth time. Amen.
Robyn Whitaker’s article – this was an interesting read!