The Path Jesus Walked

Good Friday, April 10, 2009
Rev. Amy Sens
Tenebrae Service

The word tenebrae, which is the name for the service we are holding tonight, means shadows. And in the readings and hymns we’ll hear and sing, we remember the shadows that fell on Jesus’ path as he faced his death on the cross. Each candle, as it goes out, is a symbol of the burden Jesus carries growing heavier and heavier.

There are theologians who argue that Jesus’ death on the cross was not a way of appeasing God, or somehow satisfying a heavenly judgment. I am inclined to agree with them, even though I know that’s not the usual approach. God did not plan or cause Jesus’ death as a way of totaling up the heavenly accounting, to make the balance sheets come out right. Instead, Jesus’ sacrifice in death in the Gospels, is both something that must not be, and something that is necessary and unavoidable. By dying on the cross, Jesus becomes the final necessary sacrifice, and his sacrifice is only necessary because it is the only way to bring about the end of sacrifice.

There are plenty of people who have walked the path Jesus walked – whose lives were demanded of them for the sake of ideology and fear, for the peace and the comfort of the powerful. We can think of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Cesar Chavez, who were assassinated, for example. Or the hundreds of thousands and millions who lost their lives to brutal ideology and unscrupulous powers in the Holocaust, and in the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur.

In Guantanamo Bay today, there are 17 Chinese Muslims who have been held in detention for seven years. They cannot be returned to China, because they might be tortured there, but politically, they can’t live in the US, either. So they’ve lived in no-man’s land for seven years, in a prisoner’s camp halfway across the world from home, and have watched their lives drain away slowly. They are caught in the cogs of the state machinery.

Jesus wasn’t a triumphant war god, like the Romans’ Mars or like Caesar, whom they worshipped. He was powerless by the usual standards of wealth or political influence, and so when he inconvenienced the powers-that-be, it was very easy for them to catch him up in the cogs of the state machinery, and spit him out again like so much refuse on the horrifying, humiliating cross.

But the Romans didn’t crucify some lowly insurrectionist. They crucified God. And suddenly everything is in question. How could the greatest political power on earth be set against God’s own self? How is it even possible for God to be crucified? And what does that say about all the other people we’ve crucified?
Jesus’ death brings to light all the other cruel deaths suffered by poor and powerless people, and peels away the sheen of legitimacy that power can sometimes use to paint over brutality and killing.

Jesus walked the path he walked, not to please God, not as a way of paying God back for all our mistakes, but to turn our world inside out. Jesus came in love, proclaiming a new kingdom unlike any the world had ever seen, and it was too much. The path he walked led to his death. Tonight we remember that path and the shadows cast on it, and we are mourners, witnesses and culprits. The path Jesus walked brings into relief our own faults as people and as a community. Let us walk this holy path with fear and trembling, and let us trust Jesus to walk the lonesome valley with us. Amen.