Palm Sunday
March 25, 2018
Mark 14: 1—15: 47Nativity, Washington, D.C.
“Truly
this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15: 39).
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The Three Marys and St. Longinus
by Mathias Grünewald - commons.wikimedia.org
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Have
you ever noticed that our Profession of Faith—whether the Apostles’ Creed,
which goes back to around 200 A.D., or the Nicene Creed, which goes back to
325—there is only one reference to the public life of Jesus Christ? We profess, “For our sake he was crucified
under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried….” Not a word about his preaching, his calling
of disciples, his instructions to them, his parables, his miracles, even his
institution of the Eucharist. Just that
he suffered death by crucifixion and was buried at the direction of Pontius
Pilate, the Roman prefect or governor of Judea from 26 to 36 A.D. One bare historical fact underlies the core
belief of our faith, viz., that this Jesus who so suffered, died, and was
buried then rose from his tomb by the power of God and so turned his suffering
and death into something “for our sake,” for our benefit.
The
Romans were harsh executioners, and crucifixion was their preferred method for
dealing with rebels, pirates, ordinary felons, and slaves. It was excruciatingly painful—the root of excruciating is crux, “cross.” They
inflicted it upon tens of thousands of criminals and enemies of the state,
partly to make them suffer extremely, partly to terrorize the general
population. And they were very good at
it, experts.
Crucifixion
was so routine in the Roman Empire that our evangelists don’t even bother to tell
us what it was like; everyone knew. So
they report simply, “They brought him to the place of Golgotha [that’s Hebrew;
in Latin, it’s Calvary]…. Then they
crucified him” (Mark 15:22,24).
So
what made the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth different from all the other
thousands and thousands of Roman executions?
Why would St. Paul place the cross at the center of his missionary
preaching when it was so repulsive, such an instrument of torture and terror?
Because
the resurrection gave a unique meaning to the death of Jesus. He was not killed, buried, and forgotten
like, e.g., the 6,000 slaves whose crosses lined the Appian Way from Rome to
Capua in 71 B.C. after the revolt of Spartacus was crushed.
Because
the passion and death of Jesus, following his resurrection could be interpreted
in the light of the sacred Scriptures, specifically the prophets and psalms.
Why
could not Jesus have died like most of us do—of illness, accident, or perhaps
victims of a crime? Would that have
shown the depths of God’s passionate love for humanity? Paul reminds us that Christ, God’s equal—or
his Son, as we’d say and the Roman centurion proclaimed—completely emptied
himself of every dignity; he “took the form of a slave,” even in the brutal
manner of his death (Phil 2:6-8). God
wished to reach down as low as he could go within human society so as to raise
up, to elevate, everyone: no one left
behind.
Jesus
did that heavy lifting from the cross by offering himself as a sacrifice. All the gospels tell us that it was Passover,
when unblemished lambs were being slain, their blood poured out, in
commemoration of how the blood of lambs saved the Hebrews in Egypt by marking
their houses. Jesus associated himself
with that offering—in his case, unlike the lambs’, a free and conscious
choice: “This is my blood of the
covenant, which will be shed for many,” he announced as he passed a cup around
to the Twelve on the nite before he died (Mark 14:24).
Isaiah,
on the other hand, prophesied about the Servant of the Lord who would bear our
infirmities and be crushed for our offenses; who would be chastised that we
might be healed; who would be ranked among the wicked altho he had done no
wrong; who would give his life as an offering to take away sin and win pardon
for offenders (Is 53:4-12).
This
is what Jesus did on the cross, turning shame into glory. Thru his death Jesus won life for us even tho
we, unlike him, are sinners, are guilty, do deserve shame and condemnation.
The Lord’s resurrection after his crucifixion, in the words of one
commentator, “is the mighty act of God to vindicate the One whose very right to
exist was thought to have been negated by the powers that nailed him to a
cross.”[1] Therefore St. Paul exulted in the cross,
found it glorious, preached it was our salvation: “I decided to know nothing while I was with
you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified,” he wrote to the Christians of
Corinth (1 Cor 2:2); “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are
perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18);
“May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal 6:14).
Mark
begins his Gospel by announcing “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”
(1:1). The climax of his Gospel is the
centurion’s recognition that this crucified man “is truly the Son of God”
(15:39). What leads him to this
recognition? Seeing how Jesus died. We can’t really explain that, only
acknowledge it—make the same confession of faith.
In
Jesus’ last moments, as we just heard in the reading of the Passion, he
resisted the temptation to come down from the cross in a miraculous display of
power: “Come down from the cross if you
are the Messiah, and we’ll believe you” (cf. 15:32). He did not call upon Elijah—the prophet who,
according to tradition, had not died but had been carried off to heaven and who
would usher in the messianic age—he did not call on Elijah to appear and save
him (15:36). No, he stayed on the cross,
even while feeling abandoned by God.
Jesus was completely faithful to God, even at the cost of betrayal,
abandonment by his friends and by God (it seemed), mockery, shame, torture, and
death.
The
centurion, there to see Pilate’s sentence carried out, sees all this, hears
Jesus cry out, watches his final breath—and believes. A pious tradition calls him Longinus and
claims that eventually he was martyred for Christ. There’s a large statue of him in St. Peter’s
Basilica.
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St. Longinus in St. Peter's
(Bernini)
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Longinus
found God on the cross. Where do we find
him? Among us, among human beings in all
their wretchedness—economic or social wretchedness, to be sure; in the
wretchedness of suffering and death. But
above all, in the wretchedness of our sins, our faithlessness. Jesus has been there and is there to
counteract it all and convert us, too, into the children of God when, like
Longinus, we see him for who he is.
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