Good Friday: April 6th 2012St Anne’s Church, Dublin
Address given by the Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Revd Dr Michael Jackson
FOURTH TALK
And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. St John 19:2.
Maybe the sound-bites and the clichés of Holy Week are so familiar to us that we do not think so much about them any more. Of course there has to be a crown of thorns; of course Jesus has to be dressed in a purple robe. There is no Good Friday without this sort of show, as there is no Easter Day without the rabbits and the eggs. But within the spectrum and the context of a Holy Lent, there is the terrifying fulfilment in reverse - at the point and in the timeframe of crucifixion itself – of the temptations, as I say in reverse. Let us just refresh our memories about The Temptations: that Jesus turn stones into bread, thereby satisfying physical needs by distorting the order of creation; that Jesus test God’s gift of humanity to him by throwing himself down from the height of the temple in Jerusalem and hoping that the angels will catch and uphold him, a further distortion of another created order and of God’s hope and purpose for humanity – and of the need for death within the whole scheme of things; the kingship of this world over against the kingship and kingdom of God, that by worshipping Satan, Jesus become the heir of all the kingdoms of this world.
With the perspective of hindsight, always so vital in our understanding of the Gospel of John, we can see how these Temptations are set out in the Crucifixion. The soldiers mock Jesus, as is often the case, in terms which they have picked up in the air around them, the sort of things people are talking about in pubs and pizzerias, at bus-stops in the barber’s, and they use these insights, if we can grace them with such a term, the basis of making him a spectacle. As the going gets more and more rough for Pilate, he seeks to pull rank and to counter the silence of Jesus by saying something like this: But are you simply not aware that I have authority to release you, and authority to crucify you? It is at this point that the authority given by God to Jesus in the human birth in Bethlehem, the incarnation, comes into play: You would have no authority at all over me if it had not been granted you from above. These words: from above we have met before, in the Prologue, in the encounter with Nicodemus – you must be born from above –and now in relation to Pilate. It relativizes, it puts in perspective, the relationship which often fascinates me, that is the relationship between power and authority. Pilate may have the power but whatever makes his action authoritative in fact has nothing to do with him. The kingship and the humanity of Jesus are mocked but not conquered.
This sort of interchange still has a lot to say to us in a context where the personality cult of the individual has come to dominate, and everyone is a glossy celebrity in her or his own eyes. It is well embedded in the context of government and in the exercise of power in the world in which we live in the effective stalemate of Western democracy. When we move to the Epistle to the Romans, it is the same type of argument that St Paul uses to induce obedience to the secular authorities and powers on the part of Christian citizens of the Roman Empire. As citizens they have the need to comply with the law, as Christians they have the need to be focused on God and God’s kingdom, to be in a real sense in heaven while still on earth. In those days the main focus was on pacifism on the partof Christians and its detrimental effects on the security of the Roman Empire; in our days it seems to be on civil partnerships and on the possibility of marriage of homosexual persons. But the response from the Chief Priests is equally important as the now iconic figure of Christ the King holds the skyline: We have no king but Caesar. It is they, we remember, who had the scruple about entering the Praetorium of Pilate in order to avoid ritual defilement ahead of the Passover. Now they are quite at ease in speaking outside the Praetorium and to have the Roman powers crucify Jesus, the King of the Jews.
The centrality of kingship and purity in this argument is very important. The important thing for us to consider is the real possibility that the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70 has already happened by the time John puts pen to paper. As early as chapter 2 of St John’s Gospel, Jesus has become the Temple through the overturning of the tables and the casting out of the exchangers of money; and effectively the Temple is gone from the theological argument of the Gospel. The price of success, whether today we see it as rank and gratuitous anti-Semitism or not, is, therefore, the razing of the Temple to the ground. Ever since the Holocaust – and in so many, many ways rightly – it has become impossible to criticize Judaism in any way. It is entirely appropriate not to criticize inappropriately. There is not, nor can there ever be, an avoidance or an evasion of the Holocaust. Standing back from the Scriptural narrative and taking it as just that, a narrative, the bigger question which confronts and, I would have to say, affronts us is: What accommodation other than fraught tension can there be between secular and religious agendas when they combine and inevitably clash? Across the world, it is a very live question.