Though today we enter the most solemn time of the Christian year, I thought a little dark humour might be appropriate, especially as it leans into the profound mystery we encounter today. So … please imagine these images as I describe a cartoon I saw again recently.
Landed flying saucer
Two aliens (on their own)
Looking at the crucifixion
One says to the other: “You know what we need to do? We need to get the heck out of here, that’s what we need to do!”.
And of course, we can quite easily understand the aliens’ motivations – ‘to get the heck out of there’, to remove ourselves from the stark and violent reality that is the Cross, to escape from the world that could, did and does crucify those who come in peace, those who come in and as the Divine One.
But this is where we are. This is where we live.
We are here, with the Cross, because we are of the world and in the world, and the world makes the Cross.
Denys Turner, a Catholic theologian, author of ‘the Darkness of God’, once said:
“The Cross is what the Trinity looks like within the pain and violence of the human world”.
This is incredibly profound. We note that Denys did not say the Cross was the image of simply ‘God in the pain and violence of the human world, but rather he used the words ‘the Trinity’.
The Trinity, traditionally imaged as the father and the son and the holy spirit, the One who gives, the One who is Given and the One who is Gift – the Trinity is the icon of God’s personhood and God’s community. The Trinity is the divine community of self-emptying, self-giving love in relationship. Each of the three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, Spirit, completely and freely gives and receives of the others in an eternal and mutual community of loving inter-relationship.
And it is this relationship, this mutual self-giving one to the other, each to all, that the world of pain and violence cannot accept. It is the call of God to be in true and self-giving relationship with Her and with each other that is violently rejected.
This rejection most often occurs in this world of pain through the rejection of personhood. Throughout history, and throughout the history of the church, those who are shunned, persecuted and killed are not seen as full persons or as equal persons: people of colour, Jewish people, first nations people, LGBT people.
People in power, the people benefitting from unequal power and exploitation, people who control the narrative and the story of a culture, position and degrade certain other people and refuse to enter relationship with them. And we know relationship is the key. We all know or have heard the stories: people holding racist or anti-refugee points of view refusing to change no matter what data, what information, is presented to them. But once they get to know, once they form a relationship with a first nations person or with a refugee, once the see the person, then they change.
Personhood and relationship are the keys. And throughout the horror of our Gospel today we see this starkly enacted. The Judeans, trying to maintain their identity and culture in the face of brutal Roman occupation and oppression, cannot enter full relationship with Jesus, cannot see his Personhood as the Holy One of God. They cannot move into a new relationship with God, a relationship where God has come among them as body and flesh, warmth and blood, not as they expected, a conquering Messiah but as an arrested and powerless rebel. And so, they repel him, deny the divine among them: “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!”.
Rejection, and then, the cross. Refusal, and then torture. Denial and then, elimination.
The Cross though is also God, is also the Trinity.
The Cross is both HOW the Trinity comes into the pain and violence of this world, and WHY The trinity comes.
The cross is both the ultimate symbol of all the possible, all the many and varied ways of violence and pain the world can afflict, the worse we can do – and it is also the way through, the way through all pain, all violence, all erasure, all death.
Christ as second person of the Trinity in conscious, self-giving love for all, offering relationship to all, seeing all as equal and divine persons, walks the way to, walks his way with, and is raised up on the Cross. He goes through the cross, becomes the cross and thereby defeats the cross, having taken on and absorbed all the violence, fear and pain of the world.
The cross, and Christ, shows us the only way out is through. The only way out of the seemingly natural violence of the world, in our countries, in our society, in our hearts, is, like Christ, to consciously walk towards it. Like Christ, with his love and with his mind, we can see the violence and choose not to become violent, we can experience the rejection and not reject, we can be conscious of the forces of erasure, and choose not to erase.
This is the gift of the Cross, and the one who set his face and walked toward it.
And yet, even on the Cross, the one who is the Cross, continues his work, continues his new creation, continues to change the world, in and through forming new self-giving relationships.
26 When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” 27 Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.
It is only after this new relationship, after this new family is created, a family that we continue here today, it is only after this, that Jesus knows it is finished. And dies.
But his divine and perfect body, his broken and tortured body, is also life giving. When his side is pierced, there flows blood and water, just as blood and water flows from the Mother when a person is born. The Greek word for ‘side’, is the same as the ‘side’ of the earth-creature, Adam, from where new life, Eve emerged. Christ, his very body, is birthing the new creation and the new gathering, the church. Tradition also tells us that at that moment, angels collected his birthing waters and blood in a chalice, which we and world continue to spiritually share in the holy Eucharist, as part of the new Creation within the new Church.
And as his church we, have the gift here, right now of the Cross, the Gift of the Trinity within the pain and violence of the world, to transform and defeat this pain and violence, by transforming it within ourselves, by walking the Way of the Cross, which we will do shortly.
But finally, after we have walked the Cross with Christ, we are told, his broken and perfect, his life-giving and pierced body is laid in a tomb, a new tomb, a new empty space, like a womb … ready …