Today’s readings: 2 Samuel 5, 1-3; Colossians 1, 11-20; Luke 23, 35-43.
According to the testimony of Scripture the darkness on Golgotha is not tragic. Yet for many, darkness is negative and can be tragic, particularly when it threatens our mental sanity and leaves us with no alternatives except to opt for what we would have never dreamt of doing.
In We Preach Christ Crucified, Kenneth Leech writes “the crucifixion of the Son of God by one of the most advanced civilisations in the ancient world does not seem to be an acceptable or reasonable method of redeeming the world”. The act of crucifixion was cursed, and in Greek tragedy the curse is only destroyed when a pure victim suffers.
But there is another side of the story worth keeping in mind. It is the laughter directed at Christ in his agony, and coming from a crowd amused at the sight of a harsh punishment righteously inflicted on an idealistic blasphemer.
In his provocative book Laughter at the Foot of the Cross, Michael Screech writes, “After Christians had meditated upon the crucifixion, never again could laughter be thoughtlessly seen by them as a sign of simple joy and bouyant happiness. Laughter is one of the ways crowds, thoughtless, cruel or wick-ed, may react to suffering.”
Significantly, Luke opens the crucifixion account with the words “The people stayed there watching”. But as Thomas Merton would say, we can hardly ever consider ourselves ‘innocent bystanders’.
One of the marks which makes the Christian message sound contradictory and not credible with modern man is the so-called ‘wisdom of the cross’. St Paul writes in the second reading that by his death on the cross Christ made peace, which means he opened the way for God and humanity to be reconciled.
The feast of Christ the King may remind us of the days when Christianity aspired to temporal power. But Christ’s kingship remains mainly one of reconciliation.
Humanity needs God and searches for Him in different ways. The world’s many different religions all witness to this, even if they take different pathways in their understanding of humanity and its relationship with God.
The problem is the feeling of self-sufficiency, of not needing God in any way. Or worse still, the sense of ridicule which is protagonist in Luke’s account of Christ in agony, and which still surfaces in our times, as if to cast away any serious thought on the rationality of belief.
The watching crowd, including those who provoked Jesus to save himself, may easily find its replica in our communities today, particularly in the way we handle our faith and celebrate what we believe in.
The Gospel of Luke from which the Golgotha scene is proposed today, is the gospel about discipleship, about what it means to follow Jesus. Luke uses the cross as a metaphor to explain what the Christian vocation entails. But in the crucifixion the metaphor becomes event.
The story of Jesus continues to repeat itself unendingly, not only through neglect of human dignity and the abuse of the innocent, but also through the indifference of all those, ourselves included, who just watch things happen.
As Christians we do not follow in the first place, a doctrine but a person. Jesus did not dish out a doctrine and ask us to first abide by it. Deeper than that, he indicated himself as the Truth and the Way. He himself traced beforehand our way out of the power of darkness.
In one of her meditations, Simone Weil goes beyond the outer darkness of the scene to the inner crisis which occurred in the death on the cross. The darkness of the cross is terrible, she says, because God is torn in two. The infinite distance between humanity and God is revealed as a distance within God.
It is only by setting a safe distance between ourselves and the terrible reality of the cross that we can begin to make sense of it without it threatening our sanity.