Of the prophets Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the one easiest to identify is Jeremiah. If you’re thinking of going to Rome, let me tell you where this Jeremiah is. Were our ceiling at Saint Francis like that of the Sistine Chapel, the weeping prophet would be up here directly above the pulpit. It is a potent psychological portrait of weakness, weariness and despair. His sitting posture, his crossed legs, his downcast eyes, his right hand covering his mouth, Jeremiah is a picture of anguish and inner suffering. Michelangelo uses every angle to convey his pain. Everything in the scene points down; his head, the fingers of his left hand. His right hand covers his mouth as if he’s weary of his own complaints, a prophet who has nothing more to say.

The book of Jeremiah is about the crisis of the last days of Judah, a crisis culminating with the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 587 BC. We read about it in the last chapter of Jeremiah (52: 12 – 14): “Now in the fifth month, on the tenth day of the month — that was the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon — Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard who served the king of Babylon, entered Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the LORD, and the king’s house; and all the houses of Jerusalem; every great house he burned down. And all the army of the Chaldeans, who were with the captain of the guard, broke down all the walls around Jerusalem.”

Jeremiah was the son of a priest named Hilkiah. He was raised about three miles northeast of Jerusalem in Anata, a town halfway from Jerusalem to Jericho. He spent much of his life denouncing things which is why denunciations are called jeremiads. Recreational sex. The rich for exploiting the poor. The poor for having it coming to them. His own people for batting her eyelashes and winking at every new god who came riding in someone’s saddlebags into town. He stood at the gate of the Temple and told people as they walked in that if they believed God was touched by the highjinks that went on in there they should have their heads examined. When some took to indulging in a little human sacrifice on the side, Jeremiah showed up with a clay pot which he smashed to smithereens to show them what God was going to do to them when the time came.

At the beginning of the book we hear the voice of the Lord say to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” It sounds like a nice appointment but it isn’t long before the work of being God’s mouth, of trying to reform Judah, makes Jeremiah more pitiable and exasperated than any curate in the novels of Anthony Trollope, so that by the fifteenth chapter Jeremiah laments not just the work but the One who saddled him with it. Taking his complaint directly to God he asks him, “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Will you be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?” To this last question there isn’t any doubt that Jeremiah thinks the answer is Yes. A little later he says, “Cursed be the day I was born. Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, ‘A son is born to you,’ making him glad. Let that man be like the cities that the Lord overthrew without pity. Why did I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow and spend my days in shame?”

To understand his anguish, you have to remember that in the Jerusalem of Jeremiah the heart of the city was the Temple, and the heart of the Temple was the kapporeth or mercy seat — the empty space above the Ark of the Covenant between the two golden cherubim. It was the most potent sign of Israel’s repudiation of idols, the great speaking absence between the images. What the people of Israel lost above all when Jerusalem fell was the empty space between the cherubim, the place that was the center of their life as the covenant people, the space behind the curtained holy place where God is, the place where all the mercy comes from, what the psalmist refers to as “help from the sanctuary” and the “answer from heaven”.

The crisis that the burning of the Temple presented for Jeremiah was about the destruction of that empty space between the cherubim. If that seems strange to you just think of the crisis of having someone you cherish taken away. If you’ve lost someone you love you know a bit of what it is to live as Jeremiah had to, in exile. You have to live every day with what’s missing. When Jeremiah and the people of Israel lost the empty space between the cherubim, the place where all the mercy comes from, they lost everything. God himself was in the empty space, and the empty space was gone.

Today’s Gospel story takes place six miles up the road from Jeremiah’s hometown and six centuries after the destruction of the Temple. The silence between the cherubim, the silence from that empty space where God speaks becomes a God who has stepped into the world, becomes for a little while a physical hand outstretched as it were to Bartimaeus. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” he says. It’s the first time Jesus is called the Son of David in Mark’s gospel. Jesus stood still, and Bartimaeus came to him. “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus said, “Let me see again.” Jesus said, “Go; your faith has made you well.” He could see again but Bartimaeus didn’t go. Instead he followed Jesus.

The way Mark tells the story, here’s the next thing he writes: “Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the village of Bethany and you will find a colt tied….” And riding that colt Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the Temple.

I picture Bartimaeus watching Jesus ride into Jerusalem where he’s brought to trial, following Jesus as he is led by the Praetorian guard outside the walls of Jerusalem to Golgotha, named for the skull of Goliath whom David defeated to win victory on behalf of all the people of God. It was at Golgotha that they crucified him. According to Mark, Jesus’ last words were, “’My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ … And with a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.”

There is that silence again, the silence between the cherubim from which God spoke becomes the silence culminating in the death of the Beloved Son; the silence where God has nothing more to say.

You and I live between the Old Jerusalem and the New. Jesus is our altar and our sanctuary, our kapporeth or mercy seat. He’s the One I trust, the One you trust. He knows what it is to experience God’s absence, the empty space, the empty space being gone. And when he breathed his last the curtain of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Why? Because the God of Jeremiah, the God of the Temple, the God of that empty space between the golden cherubim had come out from behind the curtain to hang between two thieves.

Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,
and raise shouts for the chief of the nations;
proclaim, give praise, and say,
“Save, O LORD, your people,
the remnant of Israel.”
See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,
and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth,
among them the blind and the lame, those with child and
those in labor, together;
a great company, they shall return here.
With weeping they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back,
I will let them walk by brooks of water,
in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.

— Jeremiah 31: 7 – 9

A woman I know described to me once an experience she had in the process of giving birth to her first child. It was not too difficult a birth as births go, but at the point where the labor became most painful and difficult the doctor gave her an anesthetic to help her through the actual delivery itself, and in the few minutes that she was unconscious she had a kind of dream or vision that haunted her for months afterwards. She didn’t see anything in her dream, and that was part of the strangeness, just the darkness with nothing to get her bearings by, but she said that she heard a voice which in a very even-toned and relentless way kept telling her the same thing over and over again, and what the voice told her was to push and to keep on pushing harder and harder even though, the anesthetic notwithstanding, the pain was considerable and she believed that the pain and the pushing were going to kill her, the straining of her whole body, but she also believed that she was going to have to die in order for the child to be born.

And then the dream opened up or deepened into a kind of dream within a dream, and this was the dimension of it that haunted her for so long afterward. Because within that inner dream she came to believe that it was not just that she was going to have to push the baby out of her womb and die herself, not just that the birth of this one new life was going to cost her her own death, but that this was the way the universe itself had been born. The vision she had was of God laboring in cosmic agony in order to give the world life, and therefore the darkness of her dream was the unfathomable darkness of a world where God had long since ceased to exist.

The child was born and lived and the woman didn’t actually die in the process, but the vision she had under anesthesia is a vision which many people have had before her, to the point where forty years ago a theology became known by its name. This dream of life coming out of death, particularly this dream of life itself coming out of the death of God, like all the great recurring dreams of humankind, seems in some way to be the bearer of a truth, and it must be taken seriously and must be allowed to haunt us as it did this woman. She did not physically die that day; but there are more ways than one of dying, and there’s much that can die quite apart from the flesh.

The phrase ‘self-centered’ has come to have an unpleasant meaning in our day, and we use it to describe people who are self-contained the way someone is contained in their own house when the door is locked and the phone is off the hook — safe from the demands and intrusions of other people yet also in a way cut off like a prisoner from the companionship of other people. But in another sense, the phrase ‘self-centered’ describes us all, not so much that we’re selfish in these ways but simply that we make ourselves the center of our own lives.

We look at the world with our own two eyes from the place where we ourselves are standing, which is right in the center, and we see the good things and the bad things of the world, out there on the circumference, primarily in terms of the way they affect us. We may deeply sympathize with other people when bad things happen to them, but very often the bad things that happen that are entirely real to us are the things that happen to us. We may be glad when good things happen to other people, but very often the good things that really make the heart sing are the good things that happen to us. All of this gives us as selves a kind of partial invulnerability.

For instance, the 230 thousand people killed in the Indonesian tsunami or the discovery of a cure for a terrible disease, even the horrors and the marvels that happen to people known to us, may move us very deeply for a while but they don’t really hit us where we live for the reason precisely that where we live is not out there on the circumference where such things happen, but right here on dead center, so that the only way life can really get at us is by scoring a bullseye.

To that extent the self-centered person is invulnerable, and with invulnerability comes a measure of independence because you can move around through the world not very much or for very long weighed down by anybody’s problems but your own. And make no mistake, there’s much to be said for such a life and you don’t give it up easily, and you do well to think twice before you do, and there are many worse selves that a person can be than self-centered in this way. However. When the woman bore her child that was just the part of her self that died as surely as her body might have. I mean that quite literally. The person she had been before simply and quite literally ceased to exist.

It’s not sentimental claptrap to say that when you bear a child as this woman did, or when as a man you become the father of a child, you just cannot be the center of your own life in the same old way any longer because now there is your child at the center with you. No longer is it true that the only things that can hit you where you live are the things that happen to you directly because you live also in the child now and whatever hits her for good or ill hits you also, so you’re vulnerable on not just one front any more but on two. And by the same token, it’s not just your own welfare that’s at stake any more as you blunder your way around the world, but it’s also the welfare of this other self, too.

In this sense, then, the woman’s dream was true because her self as the center of her own life did die and not without pain, as she brought her child into the world. From that time onward it became her destiny to die again each time the child moved out into new worlds of its own to risk dangers and defeats which would also be in some way hers.

In Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son we have not a baby coming into the world but a young man going out into the world, not the pain of the mother in her labor but the pain of the old man when his son decided to leave home and strike out on his own. If you consider how the old man rejoiced when his son finally came back, you can imagine something of what it must have cost to let him go in the first place, and how much he would have given to have had him stay. But just as in her dream the woman knew that she would have to die in order to give her baby life, the old man also knew that a part of him would have to die if his son was to have the chance for a life on his own. For the father it was the self-centered self that crucified itself in an act of love and let the boy go. And you might think twice about life on your own just as you might think twice about that word crucified.

The deepest and darkest part of the woman’s dream had to do with God’s dying in the act of creation. This was the part that haunted her for so long afterward. It’s this same idea that haunts the world still in what was called the Death of God theology. It’s a vision with a lot of terror in it and a lot of loneliness in it, and to try to fathom this vision’s meaning if it has any meaning at all is to move out beyond the reach of human thought. But I can’t help wondering if the same idea I’ve been trying to express in terms of the woman herself and Jesus’s tale of the prodigal doesn’t perhaps provide a kind of possible clue.

The ancient Hebrews spoke of God in God’s ineffability or holiness — God as the deus absconditus, the hidden God to look upon whom is to die and before whom even the angels veil their faces, the God who existed before existence itself existed, before the great “Let there be light” was ever spoken and before time and space themselves were brought into being. The Greek philosophers spoke of the Unmoved Mover, perfect and unchanging, whose nature it was to contemplate itself eternally. The Hindus have their idea of Brahman-Atman or the Void or Pure Being which can be described only by the Sanskrit phrase “neti … neti” which means “neither this nor that” — in other words that this Pure Being so far transcends our understanding that nothing we can say of it can be true.

In other words, it would appear that nearly every age and every culture has pointed with its own symbols to something like a God centered in and totally sufficient unto Godself. And then as widespread as that idea is the idea of creation, of the Ultimate Reality however you want to name it, as stirring in something like the labor of childbirth and bringing forth … light, water, earth, human beings, as another reality over against itself. This extraordinary vision of a God who exists beyond all pain and all joy sacrificing perfect invulnerability for the sake of giving life to a world and then leaving that world free even to deny him as the source of its life — a God who leaves the world free to suffer the consequences of its own actions and then suffers with it and for it.

To love another — a child, a friend, a neighbor — is to place your self at the mercy of the other and as a self sufficient unto yourself to die. So it is with God and all the prodigals who are all of us, and whom in love and at unspeakable cost the Most High gave life to, and whom in love and at unspeakable cost the Most High leaves free because though in freedom we can forsake God, only in freedom can we really love Him.

It was G. K. Chesterton who wrote, “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to say there,” but there are few if any of us in this age of revolt from the past who choose that way. Even if we do, even if like the elder brother we stay at home and play it safe, going about our business at God’s house, it can happen even there of all places that we’re far from God because we don’t notice how smug and self-serving we are, how loveless and cynical. If God is someone we can find anywhere, God is also someone we have learned to lose track of anywhere.

If God is dead in the sense that he has willingly died, if God is far away because he has drawn far away so we can have room to be ourselves — then God is also dead and far away because we have so willed him to be, and the darkness of our world is a darkness we have made for ourselves as in a thousand ways and every day each of us flees God into countries just as far as the one where the prodigal went to try his luck until finally his hunger drove him back home again. God is dead for us because we’ve shaken the dust of him off our feet and have struck out on our own with faith in ourselves.

But even at his worst the prodigal remembers the life he once had — we have God’s breath in our lungs and the memory of God somewhere deep in our bowels, and unless we know God’s presence as a blessing we are doomed to feel God’s absence as a reproach, an emptiness, a hunger. Unless we live with God we are destined to die without him as in so many ways we have died already, a death of the spirit, a death of the heart. In so many ways we have died already that if I thought I could, I’d try to start a Death of Us theology to replace the Death of God one. It is just when the prodigal sees that he’s wasted everything not least himself, that he sees there is only one risk left to take, and that was to take his chances back home. Having squandered his inheritance, he can’t go back as a child but maybe he can get back in business as a hired hand.

This is the part of the story that is as moving as anything in any literature. He’s tried his luck only to find that his luck didn’t hold very long and he stinks of the sty and he’s lost everything, so finally he decides to go back home. And with the pathetic cunning of the panhandler he figures out that the best way to do it is by crawling back on his belly like a worm. So he works out ahead of time a rather mealy-mouthed little speech about how sorry he is for what he’s done and how he’s willing to be treated as one of the hired servants if the father will only take him back again. Only it’s a speech he never gets to make the way he planned to because before he finds a chance to make it the old man sees him coming up the road and rushes out to meet him and throws his arms around him, and to the scandal of all who prefer justice to mercy, speaks the great words, “Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry for this my son was dead and is alive again.”

The whole truth of it is even more than that, for it isn’t just the son but the father too who comes alive again because he has the son back home. The real truth is not that God is dead but that to turn to God in whatever half-hearted and half-baked way we choose — a confession, a clumsy prayer, one little act of compassion done for Christ’s sake and in his name — is to find what at its richest and most profound life really is, both God’s life and our own. The very source of life chooses to enter into death in order to give us life as we were meant to live it. Jesus’s death calls on us to die to our own self-centeredness that we would live not for ourselves any longer but for him who dies and for those God dies to welcome and give life to, with tears and embracing and gladness and a Feast.

He learned she was gone on his way to her room. At the Georgetown University Medical Center, he stopped at the ICU nurses station where the names of patients are written on a white board next to their room number. He had been used to seeing Scholz written next to Room 3011. But on that Wednesday morning 14 October, 1998, her name had been erased. He was staring at the place where her name had been when a nurse said, “She’s gone, Father.” The nurse’s name was Tina. She told him that Ruth had died earlier that morning. She was gone.

He did not know Ruth Scholz until the cancer that would finally take her life had made it impossible for her to speak. He knew her only as she lay dying. He held her hands and prayed for her. He could feel in her fingers the strong pulse of her heart, the hands that stroked the hair of her daughters Constanze and Charlotte, the hands that wiped the tears from their eyes. He never heard her voice. He imagined her singing to her girls wiegenlieder.

He had told her he was a priest and Constanze’s religion teacher. He sang “Jesus Loves Me” to her as she slept. He anointed her head with oil. And once, when he said to her, “Constanze ist eine besondere mädchen,” she smiled. Even with all the medicines and the morphine, despite the terrible affliction that ravaged her, she was made glad at the sound of Constanze’s name. She and Charlotte were a source of joy and comfort to her mother to the end of her days.

At her bedside a week before she died he asked her husband Wolfgang how the two of them met. He said that a mutual friend introduced them to each other at a feast in a castle in Germany. There was this feast, he said, his face lighting up at the memory of it, a great feast, and it was in this beautiful castle.

One of the last things Jesus said were the words he spoke to someone he did not know until the man was dying. “Today, thou shalt be with me in paradise.” If you stop to think of where Jesus says these words and to whom he says them, it’s no wonder that Sanhedrin piety and Roman politics wanted to kill him. Reduced to dying on a cross, he speaks as if he were a king, presuming that paradise of all places is where he’s going and promising a thief of all people that he’ll take him there. There was just the dying left to do.

Paradise. We left it, left it so far behind and so long ago that we’ve squandered all but our vaguest memory of it. If Jesus has in his death the power to save us, it’s not surprising that these would be among his last words.

In Room 3011 two days before Ruth died he prayed with Wolfgang this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer: “Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world; In the Name of God the Father Almighty who created you; In the Name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you; In the Name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you. May your rest be this day in peace, and your dwelling place in the Paradise of God.”

From today’s YDN

Volf’s upbringing on the cultural margins helped him develop the ability to find points of convergence in conflicting viewpoints, making Volf the unconventional and creative scholar he is widely considered today, research assistant Neil Arner DIV ’07 said. With a professional portfolio that includes over 150 editorials and articles and 11 books, Volf has been called “one of the most celebrated theologians of our day” by Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams.

“I was a total outsider,” Volf said of his childhood during the 1960s in Communist-controlled Yugoslavia, where his father was a pastor.

As a religious person in Communist Yugoslavia as well as a practitioner of a marginal religion, Pentecostalism, within Croatia’s small religious community of Roman Catholics, Volf was actually an outsider twice over, Arner said.

Volf, now a member of the Episcopal Church, said he formally affirmed his Christian faith at the age of 16. From then on, Volf recalls being sent to the principal’s office multiple times during high school for wearing a cross or openly discussing his religious beliefs.

“For me, it was matter of personal religious faith,” Volf said, “but it was perceived by the totalitarian state as a subversive act.”

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Read the whole thing but come back to the pull quote. Miroslav is a serious Christian and a fine theologian. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him that while wearing the cross was “for [him] a matter of personal religious faith”, the totalitarian state’s perception is accurate that his doing so was “a subversive act.” But witting or not, the article gives the impression that for Miroslav the cross is a matter merely of personal religious faith and not subversive at all. That mistakes him and it mistakes the cross.

The cross has never been a personal objet d’ art. It was a capital punishment Rome reserved not for everyday brigands but for insurrectionists, thus it has always been associated with political subversion. It wasn’t Dali or Rubens who inspired the Roman governor Varius to execute two thousand men at once on separate crosses a few years before the angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night. The Roman general Titus wasn’t moved by Georgia O’Keefe or David Yurman to crucify 500 Jews daily outside the walls in plain view of the citizens of Jerusalem. The cross was to Rome a public service announcement. Six thousand men crucified every 130 feet on the Appian Way from Rome to ancient Capua advertises WHO’S IN CHARGE on a linear scale that even Madison Avenue couldn’t dream up. It is not for his aesthetics—his taste for clean lines—that the name Pilate has been on the lips of Christians every Sunday for nearly two millenia.

Ever since Rome crucified him people who’ve trusted Jesus with their lives have said JESUS IS LORD. They haven’t shut up about it even when the state persecuted and killed them for it. No one ever responds to the cross tout court.

It is with the Servant, and the theology of the whole of Isaiah 40-55, that we find the explanation for the otherwise bizarre idea of one person standing in for the many (which, as Dr John says, we might otherwise find incomprehensible and deeply offensive). The sense which penal substitution makes it does not make, in the last analysis, within the narrative of feudal systems of honour and shame. It certainly does not make the sense it makes within the world of some arbitrary lawcourt. It makes the sense it makes within the biblical world, the Old Testament world, within which the creator God, faced with a world in rebellion, chose Israel - Abraham and his family - as the means of putting everything right, and, when Israel itself had rebelled, promised to set that right as well and so to complete the purpose of putting humans right and thus setting the whole created order back the right way up. And the long-promised way by which this purpose would be achieved was, as hints and guesses in the Psalms and prophets indicate, that Israel’s representative, the anointed king, would be the one through whom this would be accomplished. Like David facing Goliath, he would stand alone to do for his people what they could not do for themselves. It is because Jesus, as Israel’s representative Messiah, was therefore the representative of the whole human race, that he could appropriately become its substitute. That is how Paul’s logic works. ‘One died for all, therefore all died,’ he wrote in 2 Corinthians 5.14; and thus, seven verses later, ‘God made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin,’ he concluded seven verses later, ‘so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (5.21). And it is within that argument that we find the still deeper truth, which is again rooted in the dark hints and guesses of the Old Testament: that the Messiah through whom all this would be accomplished would be the very embodiment of YHWH himself. ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Corinthians 5.19).

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The Rt. Rev. Dr. Thomas Wright, Bishop of Durham, the entirety of which is at Fulcrum.

The first question Pilate asked Jesus when he was brought before him was, “Are you the king of the Jews?”

Consider the history of monarchy to the Jews. It wasn’t long after they’d entered the Promised Land that they started lobbying the Most High for a king. They wanted the PR value. The neighboring nations had kings and they liked the caché. They kept putting in requests with Yahweh for a king they could call their own. At one point, God said (and I paraphrase), What do you need a king for? Who do you think I am!

It went right over their heads. They wanted royal dragoons and beefeaters, the gilded accoutrements of a monarch, all which Yahweh knew they needed like a hole in the head. Stubborn as mules, they kept kvetching for a king until finally the One who alone was to be their king let them have what they wished for. With a couple exceptions to prove the rule, the experiment proved to be a disaster.

And one day a man came riding an ass into Jerusalem as if he were the king Israel was meant to have all along. Among things peculiar about him was that he referred to himself as I Am.

Forgiveness is like other gifts. It must be received as well as given to be complete. If someone forgives me for being a fool, unless I not only am a fool but also know that I am, his forgiveness is without effect. I don’t appropriate his forgiveness, I don’t let it take root in my heart where it can grow and eventually choke out in me the folly that it is forgiveness of. It would appear that we cannot be forgiven for what we do not know we do or are.

Yet this is what Jesus on the cross prays for on our behalf — that we be forgiven something whose significance we do not or cannot fully understand. We understand some of it. As Christians we have two thousand years of preaching to remind us that we are all guilty of the death of Christ. We have it on good authority that we crucify him each time we add directly or indirectly to the world’s alienation. Jesus himself makes this clear in those words that have more terror in them than any in the Gospels: “Inasmuch as ye have done it … did it not … unto one of the least of these …”

All this we know. But Jesus asks God to forgive us for something apparently deeper that we do not know. Maybe it is not simply what we have done or left undone or are, but what we are not and yet might have been.

In Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory the fugitive priest, slipshod and semi-alcoholic, father of a bastard child, awaits in a Mexican prison his death the next morning before a firing squad. In the absence of a confessor, he tries to confess himself and pronounce his own absolution. It does not work very well, and suddenly

tears poured down his face: he was not at that moment afraid of damnation — even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to be a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted — to be a saint.

Perhaps this is at least a part of what Jesus means. Forgive them not just for their halfhearted complicity in killing me but for the halfheartedness that has kept them from being saints.

We are not given to know the might-have-been of our lives, but from his cross, Jesus gives us a glimpse. To see his pain is to see the pain that might have been our own. Not the suffering of death, but the suffering of love that says My Life for Yours, which is at the heart of a life lived fully. He forgives us for not being the saints that we do not know we have it in us to become. It breaks the heart, breaks it upon him the way a woman once broke open an alabaster jar of costly perfume upon him and bathed his feet with her tears.

The notion of Christ as a young warrior entering the battle on our behalf is one that occurs frequently in Old and Middle English literature. One well-known example of it is in the fourteenth century poem called The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Ploughman by William Langland. Here is how the poet visualizes Jesus coming to Jerusalem and the Cross:

A man came riding along barefoot on an ass, unarmed and without spurs. He looked like the Good Samaritan — or was it Piers the Ploughman? He was young and lusty, like a squire coming to be dubbed knight and receive his golden spurs and cut-away shoes. Then Faith, who was standing at a window, cried out, “See! The Son of David!” — like a herald proclaiming a knight who comes to the tournament… .

So I asked Faith the meaning of all this stir. “Who was going to joust in Jerusalem?”

“Jesus,” he said, “to win back Piers’ fruit, which the Devil has claimed.”

“Is Piers in this city?” I asked.

He looked at me keenly and answered, “Jesus, out of chivalry, will joust in Piers’ coat-of-arms, and wear His Helmet and mail, Human Nature; He will ride in Piers’ doublet, that no one here may know Him as Almighty God. For whatever blows He receives, they cannot wound Him in his Divine Nature.”

This is a picture of Christ’s work on the Cross. It has warrant in the promise in Eden of the One who would bruise the head of the serpent and himself be wounded. What is going on in the Cross is close quarters combat. Piers the Ploughman writes about it in his commonplace book. And Piers the Ploughman is reading it.

What does the Cross and Jesus bar-Joseph dying on it mean among so many crosses in history? Crucifixion was nothing new in the Roman Empire. Crosses with men dying in agony upon them in public places and along well-traveled roads were familiar sights. In 4 BC when there had been a rebellion in Syria, the Roman governor Varius led his legions to restore, as they say, the peace. To show that he meant business, Varius ordered the execution of two thousand men at once on separate crosses. Fast-forward to the Jewish Wars of 66 – 70 AD, after which Jerusalem fell again to the Romans. The Roman general Titus, to show his mettle, crucified as many as five hundred Jews daily outside the walls in plain view of the citizens of Jerusalem.

But if you want truly spectacular cinema, go back to 68 BC. The gladiator Spartacus was leading one hundred thousand slaves against Roman authority. When the legions eventually put down the uprising, the authorities crucified six thousand rebels. To amplify the horror, they put crosses alongside the Appian Way, one every 116 feet for 132 miles from Rome to ancient Capua. To imagine the sheer linear scale of that message, imagine a trip from where you sit here at Saint Francis to my brother Sean’s house in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Take River Road to the Beltway/495 North to 95 North up past Baltimore and past Wilmington. Follow US 202/the Concord Pike north to PA Route 322 East. Take the left fork onto East Strasbourg Road, turning left on Ellis Lane. Turn right onto his long driveway. From where you are now to his door: 132 miles, all of that marked by a crucifixion every 116 feet.