Good Friday Preaching of the Passion: 2. The Power of the Cross
Good Friday
Canon Tim Schofield, Canon Emeritus of Chichester Cathedral
The Bound Lamb (Agnus Dei) – Francisco de Zurbaran
Some years after the death of Jesus there was an outbreak of plague in the city of Ephesus. To stop the plague, the citizens looked for a scapegoat. The man they found, had all the right credentials – he was a stranger, a foreigner to the city; he was blind and poor and therefore vulnerable and powerless. And as fear and panic in the city grew, they took the man and stoned him to death. Some people said that in death his body looked like an animal, not a human being. So, with the victim fully dehumanised the city breathed a sigh of relief and felt back in control.
If we think that was a primitive reaction to plague from a pre-vaccination community then we might want to reflect on this. In March 2020 a man in Texas stabbed three members of an Asian family, including two children, because of what he had been told was the “Chinese virus”. This bears all the marks of scapegoating. The family were strangers to the attacker, people he perceived as outsiders. And they included the vulnerable and powerless in the shape of young children. It is another example of someone unable to deal with the chaotic randomness of a virus and who, as a way of trying to reassert control, placed the blame on vulnerable victims.
Francisco de Zurbaran’s painting “The Bound Lamb” is a disturbing interpretation of the death of Jesus, not just as a sacrifice, but as a scapegoating. The lamb is bound and helpless. The white of the wool against the dark background conveys not just innocence but vulnerability. And de Zurbaran obviously chose here not to give the victim a human face. Those who are scapegoated are always dehumanized, portrayed, if not as animals, then certainly as sub-human.
And the gospels reinforce this picture of Jesus as the scapegoat. We saw in the last address how at the time of Jesus’ death Jerusalem was a city close to being out of control. And into this volatile situation came Jesus. He entered the city as an outsider from Galilee – the first mark of the scapegoat. He was poor, a man with no political power or influence. His power as a preacher and healer, it was whispered, came from his being in league with demonic powers – the first step in the process of dehumanising Jesus. And the authorities seized on this potential scapegoat. He was accused of sedition, a threat to public order; He was accused of blasphemy, a threat to religious stability. But it was not just the political and religious authorities who turned on Jesus. The crowd, the mob, yelled for death by the cruellest possible means. Even his followers denied and deserted him. He was the complete outsider – utterly alone and vulnerable. He became the perfect victim for political and religious scapegoating; sacrificed to preserve the city from civil unrest and the terrible retribution that would follow. And yet the early church saw this as much more than a human act; God was somehow also involved.
In ancient literature accounts of sacrifice were not usually detailed or graphic. They preserved the mystery around the sacrificial ritual of scapegoating. But the gospels are very different. They do not spare us the horror or humiliation, the extreme physical and verbal abuse. And part of the reason for this is a very subjective one. We are shown in Jesus, God becoming the victim of the worst of human violence and wickedness precisely to alter the human mindset. The gospels are saying that scapegoating, persecution and violence are abhorrent to God. And we need to internalise this deeply not least because the cross has sometimes been used to legitimise human violence. Alongside that, any suggestion that Jesus was being scapegoated to appease an angry deity is to miss the point that God was in Christ. Now when we see the victims of violence and scapegoating, we are to see the face of Jesus in them, the image of the invisible God. And we are to look with compassion not condemnation, with mercy not judgement, with love not hatred.
But the scapegoating of Jesus is not just about changing our subjective view of the world. The power of the cross is that it also changes things in an objective sense. To show you what I mean I want to recall a more modern account of sacrifice which was itself a participation in the sacrifice of Jesus. It’s the famous account of a Polish priest Fr. Maximilian Kolbe. Kolbe was a prisoner in Auschwitz, that place intended for Nazi scapegoats – predominantly Jews but also gypsies, gays and the disabled. In July 1941 a prisoner had escaped and in retribution ten prisoners were selected to die by starvation.
One of the prisoners, when selected, broke down completely and Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward asking to take his place. And from this sacrifice, this willingness to suffer as a scapegoat, significant things happened. First, it seemed to release in Kolbe an extraordinary power of love. When the SS guards entered his cell, he looked at them with such love that they shouted at him to lower his eyes to the ground. His love was, in the words of another prisoner, a psychic trauma for the SS. Secondly, it released an energy and life that was remarkable. Not only did he keep those who were being starved with him full of hope by singing hymns of praise but physically Kolbe himself was filled with such life that he didn’t die as scheduled. In the end in desperation the SS had to administer a lethal injection to kill him. And this is how one of the survivors of Auschwitz described the effect of Kolbe’s sacrifice: “In this veritable hell of the greatest suffering and cruelty, of satanic degradation, …Fr. Maximilian was like the flash of a brilliant light of God”.
But while Kolbe reveals to us something of the power of the cross – its love, energy and hope – very few are called to participate in that sort of sacrifice. We, in our more mundane lives, are called to something rather different but also powerful – what the letter to the Hebrews calls the sacrifice of praise or thanksgiving. I mentioned how Kolbe’s sacrifice was perceived as a light piercing the darkness of Auschwitz. And interestingly the mystic Thomas Traherne talked of the sacrifice of thanksgiving leading the soul out of prison into the light of God. Thanksgiving releases light and love, the divine energy in us. So let us rejoice today in the power of the cross and as we reflect in the silence offer the sacrifice of praise to the Lord.