Holy Friday
18 April 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
PASSION (II)
Mark 14.53-15.47
Following his entry into Jerusalem, Jesus was anointed for burial by an unnamed woman. As Jesus shares a Last Supper with the disciples, he has warned them that they will all desert him. While Jesus prays in Gethsemane, the disciples sleep. Eventually Judas arrives to betray Jesus into the hands of the authorities. He does so with that most intimate of acts: his lips of betrayal onto the cheek of infinite love.
They arrest Jesus in the garden and take him to the high priest, where all the
chief priests and elders and biblical scholars are gathered to hold the first Inquisition. They are here to protect orthodox religion and national security. You can’t have rebels and heretics running loose. They gain a following and you lose power. The religious leaders are looking for testimony that would sentence Jesus to death. They can’t find any. Some give false testimony, but even they don’t agree. The high priest calls Jesus to the stand. He says nothing until they ask the question: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One? And Jesus says, “I am.” I AM. The very name of God given to Moses. “This is blasphemy!” says the high priest. He stands up and tears his clothes, and says, “No more witnesses! You have heard this blasphemy!” So he calls the council to take a vote. And they all condemn Jesus to death. The elders and priests begin to spit on him. They blindfold him, then strike him across the face, and jeer, “Come on, prophet, tell us who hit you.”
What is it, I wonder, about living and preaching a gospel of overflowing grace and boundless compassion and the call for the poor to be treated justly in the name of God that sparks violent hatred among the religious and the politically powerful?
Though all the disciples have deserted Jesus, it seems that Peter does not flee as far away as the others. Mark says he continues to follow Jesus “from a distance.” Peter often gets judged harshly for his denial, but at least he’s still following Jesus, even if it is “from a distance.” The others are nowhere in sight. They’re not even around to deny Jesus.
Peter is in the courtyard of the high priest warming himself by the fire. The accusations begin as a private conversation between Peter and a servant girl. She accuses Peter of having been with Jesus. And before Peter knows it he is cursing and swearing over and over and over again: “I do not know the man!” And then the haunting sound of the cockcrow triggers bitter tears of failure and remorse from Peter as he remembers the words of Jesus from the Passover meal. Jesus’ prediction outlasted Peter’s promise.
Early the next morning the religious leaders decide to hand Jesus over to Pilate, the governor responsible to Herod for keeping the peace. They bind Jesus and lead him away to Pilate’s headquarters. As he stands before Pilate, Pilate asks him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus cryptically replies, “You say so.”
Why the illusiveness? Perhaps it’s because they do not understand the nature of divine kingship. Jesus is not a king here to take over the government and to enforce his rule by violence and coercion. That’s not his way. It’s not God’s way. A lesson even we have not fully learned.
The chief priests follow Jesus to the courthouse. They accuse him of many things. But when asked to respond to the charges, he doesn’t say a word. And Pilate is amazed! What kind of man would be silent when the accusations made against him could lead to his own death? This is no ordinary man. And Pilate is unnerved. We know from the other gospels that Pilate would just as soon set Jesus free and be done with him. But perhaps Pilate has a way out.
Mark tells us it was a custom at the Passover festival to pardon a criminal. Perhaps Jesus could be pardoned. Pilate lets the people decide. But at the urging of the religious leaders the crowd calls for the release of Barabbas, a convicted murderer and insurrectionist. Then Pilate asks the crowd the question of all questions: “What do you want me to do with this man you call ‘King of the Jews’?” And with a shout they say, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Then Mark records one of the saddest lines in all of scripture. It is the cowardly line of justification: “So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, (and in so doing save his political career), he releases Barabbas, and after flogging the innocent Jesus, hands him over to be crucified.”
The soldiers lead Jesus out into the palace courtyard. They clothe him in a purple robe and twist a crown of thorns upon his head. They salute him: “Hail, King of the Jews!” and mockingly kneel at his feet. They spit on him and hit him with a stick. They strip him of his robe and put his clothes back on him, then lead him out to be crucified. After his beating, Jesus cannot even carry his own cross. So as he makes his way up the hill to Golgotha, they pull someone from the crowd to carry the cross for him. When they arrive at Golgotha it is 9:00 in the morning, and there they crucify him. They strip him naked, cast lots for his clothes, nail him by his hands and feet to a wooden cross.
The charge against him is inscripted above his head: “King of the Jews,” it reads. The Romans think it is a wonderful joke. Those who pass by, with a look of derision, shake their heads at him and mock him: “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross so that we may see and believe!”
At high noon, as the oppressive power of human violence does battle with the vulnerable power of divine love, darkness falls over the whole land. Had there been a darker day since God brought forth light at the dawn of creation? Eight centuries earlier, the prophet Amos said that when God brings the kingdom on earth, the sun will go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. As Christ dies on the tree, this evil darkness rules from noon until three in the afternoon. And all the darkness of our lives is gathered in the noonday night at Golgotha.
His best friends in the whole world have turned their backs on him. And now at the end, Jesus is on a cross crying out that God has forsaken him too. At three in the afternoon, Jesus calls out the opening line of Psalm 22 in the prayer book of Jesus. They are his last words in the gospel of Mark: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” And after belting out one final cry he breathes his last.
But the climactic moment in Mark’s gospel occurs when we are told that a pagan Roman centurion was standing at the foot of the cross and when he saw that in this way Jesus breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly, this man was the Son of God!’”
Then Mark concludes: When evening had come, and since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council who was also himself waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate wondered if he were already dead, and summoning the centurion he asked him whether he had been dead for some time. When he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. Then Joseph bought a linen cloth and, taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid.
Why is it only at his death with a cry of godforsakenness on his lips that someone finally says, “Truly this man was the Son of God”? Why not after a healing or a brilliant teaching or after the resurrection? What is it about his godforsaken death that reveals his true identity?
I think perhaps it is because, as Nikos Kazantzakis accurately portrayed in his novel, the last temptation of Christ was to come down from the cross, to save himself and live an ordinary life with a wife and kids. But it was his faithfulness to the mission of God in the forgiving, non-violent, self-sacrificing way of God that leads the centurion to say, “Truly this man was the Son of God.” Lesser men would have saved themselves. The Son of God saved others. He is saving still. This is the way God is.
In the agony of crucifixion, we see clearly the Christ we are to follow. He shows us what love looks like. He looked for people he could serve. He spent his time with common, ordinary, everyday people. He kept sharing good news with the poor and the sick and the lost. He talked to people who had made terrible mistakes. He listened to those who had made a mess of their lives. And he gives his life away all the way to the cross.
The cross is about One who believed there was something of more value than his own life – the kingdom of God: a world where grace and mercy form the heart of religion, where exploitation of the poor is brought to an end, where judgment and retaliation cease, where forgiveness of sin is an ever-flowing, life-giving stream. That was the passion of Jesus. And he was willing to die for it.
Do you and I share the passion of Jesus? Do we have a passion larger than the happiness of our family and the preservation of ourselves to risk our safety and security for the sake of the oppressed and rejected of this world? A passion for which we are willing to give our lives?
It is not an easy road. The road became so dark and lonely for Jesus, he felt as if God had abandoned him. Forsaken by all his friends, Jesus pleads for a word from God, but there is not a sound from heaven. Jesus understood how heartbreaking God’s silence can be. So when we wonder where God is, we can know that Jesus wondered too.
And yet, even in the deep darkness of feeling godforsaken, Jesus kept praying: “MY God, MY God.” The darkness of feeling all alone comes to us all. But even when we do not feel God’s presence, we can still trust that God is with us.
My father died on the Monday before Holy Week in 2022. The previous three weeks, sitting at my father’s hospital bedside in ICU at Piedmont Atlanta, had been some of the most difficult of my life. He had two strokes caused by a brain aneurysm, and spent ten days on a ventilator. I watched him struggle through one challenge after another gradually coming to the realization that he was not going to get any better. My dad was a man of strong faith. And while I felt God’s loving presence around me, I can only pray he did to.
Because the cross is not just the symbol of God’s forgiveness. It is the promise that in our deepest darkness, in our final fleeting breaths, Jesus has been there and he understands. And it is to trust that our crucified God will hold us through the night until the light of Easter morning breaks and death brings forth new life.
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
that would be an offering far too small.
Love so amazing, so divine,
demands my soul, my life, my all.