Crucifying Jesus
a Good Friday sermon based on John 18:1-19:42
by Rev. Heather McCance

When I was seventeen, I took part in a Good Friday service at my home church. When the cross was brought into the church and placed in its stand, the priest invited us all to gather around it and write our names on small slips of paper. He then brought out a hammer and some nails, and one by one, we each nailed our own name to the cross. It was quite powerful, a reminder that Jesus hung there for each one of us.

A few years later, I attended a church that handed out a version of this morning's reading. Members of the congregation read the various parts of the reading, and we, the congregation, were to be the crowds. So we, who only a few minutes earlier had sung out "All glory, laud and honor," now called out "crucify him! Crucify him!"

It's a very jarring progression we make from Palm Sunday Sunday to Good Friday. We enter with joy, waving our palm branches, singing our praises to the king who comes in the name of the Lord. And we then bear witness through the ages as we hear him crying in anguish from the cross. Our emotions are stirred, sometimes in spite of ourselves, and we can find ourselves protesting, "How could they do it?" The chief priests were one thing; Jesus had clearly threatened their power. I can understand Pilate, too: he was a politician, caught up in a tight-rope diplomacy act--trying to please the crowds to forestall a riot.

Looking back at what happened on that Thursday night and Friday morning nearly 2000 years ago, I find myself pulled in two directions. One is to wonder, "How could they do what they did?" I wonder about Pilate, walking the tightrope between the wishes of the crowd in front of him, close to riot, and the demands of his Roman rulers back home. I wonder about the chief priests, sworn to never take a human life, and yet dodging their own law by getting the government involved, because of a man who threatened their authority. I wonder about Judas, what it was that caused him to do what he did, and the despair he must have felt afterward that made him take his own life. I wonder about the crowds, the ones who called "Hosanna to the Son of David!" on the first day of the week but yelled out "Let him be crucified!" on the sixth.

On the one hand, I find myself condemning them. I would never do that, I think. I can't imagine being a part of a crowd so bloodthirsty. I can't imagine giving into such an obviously unjust demand just for politically expediency. I can't imagine the level of hypocrisy needed to say "Thou shalt not kill," and then seeking a man's death. That year I was asked to read the part of the crowd in the story, "Crucify him!" I found the words catching in my throat, I wanted so very badly not to say them.

On the other hand, I find myself letting those folks off the hook. After all, didn't Jesus do that? "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing." he said, according to Luke. After all, how could they have known the impact their actions would have? They didn't know this Jesus was really the Son of God. They didn't know he was fully God, and fully human. They didn't know he was the Word of God that took flesh, that he was the Lamb of God sent to take away the sin of the world, that he was without sin. They really didn't know what they were doing.

And yet, down through the centuries comes that cry, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" and along with it, Pilate's words: "Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him."

In some times and some places, this sentence from scripture has been used to justify the hatred and persecution of Jews. Christ-killers, they've been called. It's not true, of course. Sure, the crowds that day were Jewish. But the soldiers who carried out the wishes of the Roman governor were Romans, Gentiles.

And I believe that the desire to find who was really to blame--Roman or Jew, soldiers or priests, Judas or Pilate--I believe that that desire comes from a very deep, unsettled feeling inside all of us.

The feeling, the nagging doubt, that maybe the ones responsible for Christ's death were us.

I'd like to think that I'd never be in that crowd, never cry out "Crucify him!" I'd like to believe I'd never be a Judas or a Pilate. But, I'm not altogether sure.

Because, you see, the story is not over. I don't mean just that we get to hear the happy ending on Easter Sunday. I mean that Jesus continues to die in our world, every day.

Remember when he taught that whatever we do to the least of his brothers and sisters, we do to him?

So, when a family in Iraq become refugees because their village has been bombed out in the search for insurgents, Jesus becomes a refugee. When one of their children dies on the road because of malnutrition, cold and the flu, Jesus dies too. And those bombs fell, in part, in my name.

When a woman works in a sweatshop in Indonesia, earning a pittance and working fourteen hour days in an overheated unventilated factory with no sanitary washrooms facilities and no workplace safety standards at all, Jesus is working there. And when she dies in a fire in the factory because there weren't adequate exits, Jesus dies, too. When I buy the running shoes they make there, I'm supporting the whole enterprise.

When a young man is horribly beaten to death because he is gay, Jesus is beaten to death, too. And when I am part of the one, holy and apostolic Christian church that has failed to condemn such actions loudly enough because of our own confusion about human sexuality, I am part of the problem.

When a child suffers from severe asthma, dying from an acute attack on a summer's day with a high smog advisory, Jesus dies of suffocation with her. And when I drive my car unnecessarily, I contribute to her death, to his death.

And Pilate said to them, "Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him."

Jesus dies in our world every day, and I'm not innocent of that blood. None of us is. We are still crucifying Jesus . . . ourselves."  And so I give thanks to God this day, perhaps more than any other day, for the amazing love we have received in Christ.

For God, our loving Father, forgives us. We are forgiven, just as Pilate and the soldiers and the crowds and the priests and scribes and even Judas himself have been forgiven, and not because we know not what we do. We are forgiven simply because God loves us with a love that is so strong it was willing to die for us. Amen.