The Man Murdered on a Tree

Good Friday Sermon 4-2-21

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Christ our rock and our redeemer. Amen

Last night, Jesus broke bread with his disciples in his last meal before his death. In Gethsemane, he prayed in agitation and dread of this very day. His closest friends could not keep awake with him, and later deserted him altogether. Judas, one of his hand-chosen twelve, betrayed him to the religious leaders who sought his death. These chief priests and scribes, in turn, handed him over to their Roman oppressors, who in the end were all too willing to put him on a cross.

Here was a man, cut off from every imaginable means of support. Here was a man, abandoned by his people, abandoned by the rule of law, abandoned by his own friends, abandoned seemingly even by his God.

Many of us, especially in the past year, have felt what it’s like to cry out to God by day and night, but receive not answer. Our friends betray us, our family abandons us, and God seems nowhere to be found.  We have been living in year-long-Good Friday.

This year we witnessed the deaths of more than half a million people in our own country by Covid-19, sacrificed on the altar of the economy. This year we witnessed the known and unknown deaths of African American people, handed over and betrayed by a nation who forced their ancestors into bondage. Then there have been the recent deaths from gun violence.  This year, we witnessed so much trauma, so much death.  

But really, is this year any different than other years, expect for the order of magnitude? The first victims of the coronavirus were the elderly, who in my experience are often sequestered in care facilities, out of sight, by their families who rarely visit, already isolated and cut off before the cruel realities of quarantine. And before the pandemic, mass shootings were scarily commonplace.

And while we do not have crucifixions dotting the landscape as the Romans did thousands of years ago, we still live in a nation where capital punishment has not been outlaw across the country. There is progress – the state of Virginia very recently made the death penalty illegal – the first state of the former Confederacy to do so. However, we are still burdened by a criminal justice system that is laughably unjust, especially for many of our fellow citizens.

And while this nation never executed someone on a cross, we have our own version of murder on a tree glaringly in our history, which really was not all that long ago, in living memory still. There may not have been nails involved, the there was a tree, and some rope, a jeering crowd, and more often than not, an innocent victim of an oppressed race of people, executed for the crime of simply being at the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jesus was also the victim of senseless, state-sponsored violence. In his ground-breaking book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” theologian James Cone reminds us that, in a similar way “… Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence,” and this is not all that different from what happened at the hands of white mobs in “in the name of God and in defense of segregation… and white supremacy…”

The cross was a humiliating torture reserved for slaves, criminals, and insurrectionists. The cross, along with the lynching tree, sends a clear message: fear, intimidation, as a deterrent, a sign that speaks without words: “This is what happens when you step out of line.”

This is the symbol we decorate our churches with and wear around our necks as jewelry. As Cone writes, “one has to be a little kind of mad… to find salvation in the cross, victory in defeat, and life in death.” (25)

The cross was not always one of them most recognized symbols of our faith. As we read about what state-sponsored violence did to Jesus, we remember that this era in our own history is not over. As we hear about Jesus being murdered on a tree, we remember, Jesus told us that what we do to the least of these, we do to Jesus.

When we behold the cross, we behold the wounds of Jesus, but also all the wounds of the least of these who are disempowered – those on death row, the wrongly accused and unfairly imprisoned, those who can’t get access to the vaccine yet are dying record numbers, those denied adequate medical care, the harassed and the raped, the homeless, all those who’s suffering we’ve minimized, denied, or looked away from in discomfort. It is only by seeing their wounds in the wounds of Jesus that we can see the true revelation of the good news – Jesus chose to be found THERE. On the crosses of our own construction.

Theologians Duo John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg reflect that it is Jesus’s passion that caused his death. “[Jesus] was filled with passion – his passion was spreading the message of the kingdom of God, and God’s justice. His passion led to his ‘passion’.”

Behold Jesus’ passion, and his passion – us. When Jesus told his disciples to deny themselves, to take up their crosses to follow him, those were not just idle words. And so, to show us the way, he went first, alone, taking up his own cross. He cleared the path that he calls us to follow.

Tonight, we remember that we worship this suffering God, and we follow this man murdered on a tree. Jesus shows us that God is willing to take on the worst the world has to offer, and Jesus is willing to take on the worst that WE have to offer – our selfishness, our fear, the broken mess we’ve made of our lives and the lives of our fellow human beings – to transform that too into something beautiful and precious and to be repurposed as beloved by God.

Though we are tangled up in the fraught history that is being a Christian in the United States, all Christians tonight are bound by a common faith and a common hope: that Our “beauty is more enduring than our brutality,” and that Jesus’s death shows us death is not the end.

The cross is not an end. It is a beginning. Because the cross is empty, just as the tomb will be. Just as death and everything the leads to death in our lives is empty of their ultimate victory over us.

Good Friday was a long time ago, but it is also today and every day. It takes courage to see the cross and to follow where it leads … but we have what it takes. Jesus is already there. Jesus makes a way from no way, even in a year of Good Fridays. Thanks be to God. Amen.