Service and Solidarity (Good Friday)

Mark 15:37-39

April 10 MMXX

I.

Can we imagine what this centurion is thinking?  He’s an officer in the Roman army who has just overseen yet another gruesome execution, carried out by his unit at Pilate’s orders.  He stands there watching sternly as his soldiers do what they do regularly, taking these hapless Jews who somehow offended Rome, marching them through the city, which was particularly crowded for their Passover holiday, out to the dump outside the wall, forcing them on their backs, spreading out their arms and nailing their wrists to  wooden planks, and hoisting them up on to upright posts, into which they drove another nail through their feet, leaving them there to suffocate, each agonizing breath pushing their bloody feet against the bottom nail, ripping through their flesh.  

Why would he even think, let alone say out loud, that one of these men was God’s Son, of all things?  What would it mean for him to utter anything quite that ridiculous?  Is he really admitting that he just killed God?  The person he was professionally bound to proclaim as “God’s Son,” was his ultimate boss: Caesar, the Emperor in Rome.  Now he is saying that this guy, with his crime, “King of the Jews” ironically nailed on a plate above this head, is God’s Son? 

Some interpreters suggest that there really should be a question-mark at the end of the centurion’s comment, as if he is scoffing about how anyone could ever consider this loser to be God’s Son.  As if what he really said was, “Seriously?  This man was God’s Son?  So much for that.”  The original Greek text has no punctuation, so it is technically a possible reading.  Maybe he is observing the undignified, hideous cry of pain as proof that there is no way this wretched, pathetic reject could possibly be God’s Son.  The idea was preposterous.

Remember that this is the same centurion who reports to Pilate later the same day, in verse 45, that Jesus is indeed dead.  He’s still doing his duty; what he saw did not change his life in the least.

But someone who was there, probably one of the women disciples, heard and remembered the words of the centurion.  And the followers of Jesus preserved those words and have always taken them as a kind of confession of their faith.  God uses words that were perhaps spoken in one way to reveal a deeper truth when taken a different way.  

The church has ever since heard in his words a confession that the true Son of God is there on the cross giving his life for the life of the world, and the tyranny of other leaders claiming to be Son of God — like Caesar — is over.  Their power — the centurion’s power, the power to kill, threaten, coerce, extort, deter, punish, and torture — is exhausted.  Their reign of terror is doomed. 

II. 

In the middle of this spectacle, Mark gives us this observation about something that happens simultaneously, about a thousand yards away, in the Temple.  He says that the veil of the Temple, the heavy curtain that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the sanctuary, was “torn in two, from top to bottom.”

The veil was intended to function as an interface between heaven and earth.  It was supposed to be like a connecting membrane, mediating God’s saving Presence into the world.  In a sense, situated at the heart of the Temple, it represented the established religious institution of the time.  

Jesus’ critique  of the established religion is that it had degraded and degenerated into a barrier, blocking and obstructing that Presence, keeping God’s Light from shining.  The veil had become like a wall between God and creation.  It therefore has to go.

The rending of the veil happening at the same moment as the death of Jesus means that the barrier between God and creation is now removed and there is a new Mediator, and it is not in the spectacular gleaming white edifice on the hill, but he is bleeding outside the walls, in the dump, a victim of Caesar’s brutality.  The Way to God is revealed as self-offering, giving one’s life for others, as a ransom for many.

The pierced and torn flesh of Jesus’ body becomes as it were the “crack in everything” which is how Leonard Cohen says “the Light gets in.”  The light of God’s new life begins now to pour through the One who offers himself in love for the life of the world.

The Temple, the place where we meet God, is no longer a building.  Indeed, that rending of the curtain is just a foretaste of the day, 35 or so years later, when the Temple and the whole city would be destroyed by a Roman army.  Now the true Temple is revealed to be a person, a person who became flesh to dwell among us, who embodies compassion, healing, humility, wisdom, and love, who breathes his Spirit into us, who feeds us with his Body and Blood, who thereby becomes us, empowering us to be his people and continue his mission.  Therefore, we are now Christ in the world, to the extent that his life — that is, his work of self-offering in love — is taken on by us.  Christ within us makes us, even our bodies, the true temples.  God’s Presence in the creation emerges now in our actions.

Now we live in him and he in us.  And we follow him in resistance against the institutionalized tyranny of our own fear, anger, desire, selfishness, and ego, spawning the violence, injustice, and terror that throttles the world.  We follow him by living in service and solidarity with its victims, as he does.    

III.

Service and solidarity with the broken of this world is the way the Light gets in.  It is the way of Jesus Christ.  It is the way the world is remade according to the will of the Creator.  It is what transforms our the hard-hearted cynicism of our duty, into a full-hearted affirmation of the saving Presence of God, emerging in and through our broken places.

Today it is the people doing the dangerous work of healing those afflicted with the coronavirus who are embodying Christ in the world.  It is those who are making personal sacrifices to make sure others are fed and cared for, that connections are maintained, and that we stay safe, who express his life in self-offering.  These are the folks whose actions witness to the tearing of the veil that separates us from each other, continuing to do Jesus’ work of solidarity with and service to others. 

Which bring us to the people who served as witnesses of Jesus death on the cross: the women whom Mark mentions at the end, watching from a distance.  It may be the most subversive and radical element of the story, to remember how it was the women who stayed with Jesus as witnesses.  

These disciples who followed Jesus from Galilee are the ones who provide the continuity through all this.  They are the ones who hear the last words of Jesus, and remember, and interpret the words of the centurion.  They will be the ones who go to the tomb on Sunday, intent on giving Jesus a proper, decent, respectful burial.  

And then, just as does Miriam in her celebratory, exultant song at God’s victory over Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea, these women will be the ones who knit and knead together the story of all these events as the deepest good news of Jesus’ resurrection.  They see beyond and within the facts, the truth of God’s victory over the power of death itself.

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