This morning I stood in the congregation at Coventry Cathedral’s Good Friday Passion Service as members of the cathedral clergy enacted a dramatised form of Matthew’s account of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. As Pilate questioned Jesus and the priestly caste lobbied for his death, the congregation was asked to take on the role of the crowd:
Crucify him!
Like most Christians, I’m pretty familiar with the events surrounding Jesus’ death. I’ve often pondered about the people in the crowd who bayed for his blood, and I’ve written before about how quick they were to pivot from Hosanna! to Have him strung up!
But it’s one thing to muse dispassionately about other people’s attitudes and intentions, especially when those people are separated from you by two thousand years of history and a yawning cultural chasm; it’s quite another to suddenly find yourself standing with them clamouring for blood, even if only as part of a dramatic re-enactment.
Crucify him!
Even as I hear myself shouting these words, my head wants to resist, to detach from the story and recognise that this is not real, this is just a part I’m playing for the sake of liturgical form. But my heart knows that to do so would be to evade an essential truth: that if I had been in Jerusalem on that fateful day, I might well have found myself condemning Love incarnate.
Even if I hadn’t been with the crowd shouting for the death penalty, let’s be honest: the alternatives aren’t much more appealing. Perhaps I’d prefer to think of myself as one of Jesus’ closest disciples… just about all of whom (save John, who in the fourth Gospel stands at the foot of the cross as Jesus breathes his last) appear to have deserted him, too terrified even to admit they’d ever had anything to do with him.
Or perhaps I’d rather be cast as a religious leader, someone the people looked up to for theological insight and guidance. Yet it was those very leaders who conspired to have Jesus brought before Pilate and condemned to death. And it was precisely their moral “virtue” and religious insight that allowed them to believe they were absolutely righteous in their judgment – that they were, in fact, doing God’s work.
Crucify him!
I’m forced to conclude that, whichever way you slice it, had I played any part at all in Jerusalem that day, I would not have come out smelling of roses. The chances that I would have been chanting Justice for Jesus! or Let the Nazarene go! are precisely zero. Whatever motivations and justifications I might marshal in my defence, the truth is that I would have been complicit in the death of God.
And I must also conclude that, whenever I self-righteously but ignorantly condemn someone for their purported crimes – however scandalous those crimes may appear, and however morally justified my outrage may feel – I am once again joining myself to the crowd that roared for Jesus’ death.
This is the power of liturgy.
And this is, I think, an appropriate posture for Good Friday: to recognise that, however good and virtuous we think we are, however much others may look up to us and admire us, we have blood on our hands. Blood whose stain we cannot ourselves wash off.
[Image: Pixabay]
