The Last Sunday After Pentecost: The Reign of Christ, rcl yr c, 2022
JEREMIAH 23:1-6; LUKE 1:68-79; COLOSSIANS 1:11-20; LUKE 23:33-43
let him save himself
Julian thought she was dying. In fact, everyone in her household thought she was dying. And so they sent for the priest. And when the priest arrived, he too thought she was dying, and so he gave her last rites, and held a crucifix over her, so that the last thing she would see was her dying Lord.
Julian, however, did not die. Instead she was given fifteen visions of the crucifixion of Jesus. The visions did end with joy. But the visions began, in Julian’s eyes, with the crucifix being held over her starting to bleed.
It’s hard for many of us to relate to a medieval mystic like Julian. But I wonder some days (though not on all of them) if my own occasional“let’s skip over the bad stuff to get to the good stuff already” theology—ie., who needs the cross, really, when you’ve got the resurrection—some days I wonder, especially when I read Julian, if the resurrection can sometimes come between me and what I actually need to see, and that’s the cross.
And to be sure, medieval fascinations with suffering are often set against the fullness of Christian doctrine. That’s not to say that Julian doesn’t go full-on body horror as she recounts her visions; David Cronenberg has nothing on her. Julian, though, doesn’t quickly move forward to the resurrection as she gazes upon her dying Lord, so much as she looks backward to the incarnation to make best sense of the crucifixion of Jesus.
Instead of making the crucifixion but a whistle-stop on the train-ride to the promised land, she makes it a long layover, a layover worth the stop because of what it says to her about what we share with God: and that’s a created, limited, and fragile body. It’s the incarnation, for Julian, that makes most sense of the crucifixion, because it is in the incarnation that God in Christ declares that he has thrown in with us completely, sharing with us a fragile human life at its most dependent and broken. The cross is where the fragility of the bodies we share with God in Christ, our being made one with God, that is our atonement with God, is most clearly seen.
And what else could that be, than good news; that on the cross we most clearly see that our pain is also God’s pain in Christ.
Luke’s Gospel shares some things with Julian as it describes the cross. Sure, Luke doesn’t take the time to describe Jesus’s blood like Julian does. But there is a clear reluctance to unnecessarily foreshorten the crucifixion.
There’s a bit of a callback here in our reading to the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, when the devil tempts Jesus to call upon the angels to carry him down gently from the pinnacle of the temple; but now it is the leaders, and the soldiers, and one of the criminals crucified with him that tempts Jesus to save himself: “He saved others; let him save himself,” they said; and just like we imagined that Jesus could indeed have called upon the angels to carry him down gently from the pinnacle of the temple, we are to imagine that Jesus could call down the angels even now to pluck the nails out of the wood and to let him down gently from the cross.
But unlike Jesus resisting temptation in the wilderness, where we might say “yeah, Jesus, don’t abuse your power,” we might think now, “c’mon Jesus, if you can end this suffering early you should most certainly do so!” But Jesus is as concerned with ending his suffering as he is with our discomfort. That is, not that much.
And we, sitting at the foot of the cross and seeing this, are not released from what we are gazing upon: the Word made flesh, suffering, but not suffering alone; but rather the Word made flesh suffering with, and for, the suffering.
Meditation on the cross of Jesus was part of Franciscan piety too, where gazing upon the cross was a way a person could grow in virtue. In Franciscan spirituality, it was not in passing over the cross that led to the “promise of glory,” but rather in looking upon it. This, from the Franciscan manual Meditations on the Life of Christ, makes it clear: “If the [cross and Passion] were considered with complete regard of mind, they would, I think, lead the meditator to a new spiritual state. To [the one] who searches for it from the bottom of the heart and with the marrow of [their] being, many unhoped-for steps would take place by which [the meditator] would receive new compassion, new love, new solace, and then a new condition of sweetness that would seem to [them] a promise of glory.”
Now we may, nevertheless, disagree with Julian in her contention that it is in meditation on the cross that we would see most clearly God’s oneness to us in Christ, and his sharing with us the fragility of life to the point of sharing the depth of our pain; and perhaps we might find it equally objectionable to say with the Franciscans that in the meditation on the cross we would grow in compassion, love, solace, and even the sweetness of the promise of glory.
But to do so would be to find ourselves at some variance with the proclamation made in Luke’s Gospel, too. Because Luke’s Gospel is drawing our eyes not to a resurrection glory that bypasses the crucifixion, but first to the crucifixion itself, and a crucifixion that Jesus would not choose to foreshorten. Rather, Luke’s Gospel would have us see that it is from the cross that Jesus would forgive all those who were in the very act of crucifying him, inviting us to kneel before a king whose kingdom is one of forgiveness; how sweet is that? Luke’s Gospel would have us see that it is from this cross that Jesus would invite a humble criminal into paradise, inviting us to kneel before a king whose kingdom is one of extraordinary welcome; how compassionate is that? Luke’s Gospel would have us see that it is on the cross that we would find the suffering one whose kingdom is the kingdom of the suffering; how lovely is that.
Our king is not only the word made flesh, but the word made flesh experiencing the most difficult aspects of this fragile bodily life; the king above all kings who would welcome, forgive, and suffer for and with each one of us, inviting us into a life of compassion, love, solace, and a condition of sweetness, from the cross, that would seem to us a promise of glory.
The Revd Dr Preston Parsons