Following is the link for The Passion Narrative according to Luke. The link is provided given the great length of the narrative.
http://www.oremus.org/liturgy/lhwe/luke.html
Reflection The church was an ultramodern building nestled in a sumptuous Marin County residential setting. Passing through lush gardens, mesmerized by a stone fountain’s water music mingled with the fragrance of perennial blossoms I was stopped dead in my tracks as I passed through the sanctuary doors and came face to face with a twenty foot contemporary painted wood sculpture of a Mexican/Spanish styled Jesus nailed to a cross, hanging high above the altar. Thankfully no one else was present as my gasp was audible.
“Oh dear. How can I be in this place? How can I gaze at this enormous dead Jesus every week?” And so began my first parish field education assignment as a brand new seminarian.
It took several months before I screwed up the courage to ask Mark, the rector, how he could live with the daunting sculpture of dead Jesus reigning above his head? He paused before responding. “Hanging there above us is a constant reminder of what we humans are capable of at our worst. We should never forget our potential for evil, how every day we destroy innocents by our actions and inactions.” Something raw and ignoble clicked inside me. My mind and my heart beat a quick about face.
We are not worshipping the institution’s graven image of the mangled body of Jesus and thereby violating the first commandment given to us in the Hebrew Scripture, “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” (Ex 20.4) The crucifix is radical social commentary. We contemplate the unsettling sculpture of an innocent man nailed to a cross to remind ourselves how easily we turn away from good, misuse our position, power or privilege, then willfully or unwittingly execute evil and elevate our actions to regal heights.
It is no wonder we resist looking at the vexing sculpture of an innocent man nailed to a cross. It brings us face to face with this inconvenient truth. We are among the crowds of people who follow Jesus, religious leaders, public officials and ordinary folks who ever so swiftly are swept into the emotion of the moment. Forgetting who and whose we are we turn away from good to execute even the most innocent among us.
This week, this Holy Week, let us look at the image of an innocent man hanging on a cross and admit all the ways in which we am culpable for pounding nails into the hands and hope of humanity by our actions… and inaction. Let us look at the crucifix and see the homeless man we drove past without stopping to encourage, babes in the arms of their migrant mothers with no place to lay them down, terror in the eyes of a pregnant teenager, a single mother’s distress as she leaves her sick child home alone to go to work and not lose her job, destitute people lined up at food banks, social security offices and border crossings, buildings and bodies senselessly shattered from the US Capital to Ukraine. This week let us admit we are all part of the crowd at Jesus’ trial before Pilate shouting, “Crucify him. Crucify him.”
If you find this post to be meaningful please share by clicking on icons below. Thank you.
