John 18:1-19:42

Today we remember Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and burial.

We remember those who suffered the shock and agony of Jesus’ execution by the Roman government, the devastating loss of their teacher, their friend, and their hope.

They are the predecessors of those who are crushed by systemic/organized/state violence who live on in the shadow of that trauma.

In the passion of Jesus Christ, as recorded in the gospels, that pain is present, that trauma visible, but that shock and grief has been reread and understood anew.

The devastated followers of Jesus experienced a shock on Easter morning, and in the days that followed. They looked back together on Jesus’ life and teaching and on his final days in light of holy scripture and the divine presence among them, keeping them alive.

This is the remembering we have paid attention to in these reflections in Holy Week.

So, we come to the reading of the Passion according to St. John.

Having heard these words and acted them out with students and …. for many, many years, I can attest that it is not possible to take in all the elements of the passion narrative in one hour.

You have let the words wash over you, the cacophony of horrifying events, and the reasons you know from Christian teaching and centuries of theologizing.

We know, you know, that for those who can see, for those who have faith, the details of Jesus’ passion speak of a truth beyond themselves.

The disciple whose memories are the origin of this fourth gospel and those around him remembered this terrible day, they saw patterns.

The Holy Spirit had spoken among them with new images and ways to understand this death.  We have explored these in the homilies in the past days.

In the passion according to St. John, there is agony, but it’s a highly theologized, retrospective agony.

That’s the puzzle – the tension between shock and foreknowledge, irrationality and reason, human evil and divine love.

Suspense when you already know the plot.

You see, in John, it’s death itself that is the saving thing. It’s the cross lifted up that is the glorifying thing, In the gospel of John, Good Friday is already Easter.

In the trial before Pilate, the evangelist brings into focus all that has been whispered or thundered throughout the gospel.

When Pilate brings him out with the royal purple clothes and crown of thorns, and declares, “here is the man – the human one – literally it is mockery… but for those with eyes to see, it is truth.

Jesus’ trial is Pilate’s trial- Pilate himself is judged by Jesus, and silenced by his testimony to the truth.

“You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

“You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.”

But it is this one luminous moment in John’s story of Jesus’ crucifixion on which I linger now:

“Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 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.”  Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

Jesus’ mother, his godmothers, and the friend he loved. Tradition read this literally, and you can go on pilgrimage and see the house where John kept Jesus’ mother in Ephesus.

But in the theological imagination of the fourth gospel, this is way more than practical accommodation, in this gospel it is the creation of a new family.

A better translation might be “from that hour the disciple took her as his own mother.”

It is a radical new relationship, reconstituted out of enmity and violence, coming into being through death. With the words, Son behold your mother, mother behold your son, Jesus births a new family…. our new family, the family of those who have become children of God, born not of blood or the will of the flesh or the will of man, but of God.”

In the gospel of John, Jesus is a rabbi who is a riddler. He is a prophet who is a poet. Jesus speaks with the voice of someone who comes from another place than here.

He told Nicodemus,

“No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above without being born again.”

He is not from here. But we all are here because of him. He came down, the dayspring from on high hath visited us.

He became human, he entered into the flawed world and the fragile flesh.

And many did not recognize him, for logic could not explain his coming.

The riddling rabbi, was there when the light met the darkness when the world was born.

When it went wrong, God the Creator would make the world right, would remake it.

In these three days, God the Creator is about to make the world right in a strange, awful, and illogical way.

The world will execute the rabbi, will heave up the cross from its place on the ground, straight up to vertical, lifting him up towards the place from which he came, high up, where all could see, and live.

One more riddle:

When Jesus’ body is taken down:

Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out. ³⁵ (He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.)

The waters of birth and the waters of creation flowed with blood from his pierced side, as from a women who is in labor: she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world.

Jesus dies so that new life might be born.

Even on this saddest of days, as we wait for resurrection, here in the gospel of John, we have it already, our birth from above, the creation of a new family of friends, a family of love whose hearts will rejoice and no one will take our joy from us.

Amen.