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It isn’t over

Kenneth L. Gibble

“They crucified Him. . . . ”

With those three short words from John’s Gospel (John 19:18), we have reached the climax of the story. The story I mean, of course, is the story of our faith, yours and mine and every Christian’s. It’s the story of salvation. It’s the story of love so amazing that, although two millennia of Good Fridays have come and gone, we are no nearer to understanding it, grasping it, than were the believers who have gone before us.

“They crucified Him. . . . ”

With those three short words, the Christian faith makes a radical departure from every other world religion. Christianity alone dares to proclaim a crucified God. No other religion proclaims a Saviour who died a criminal’s death on a gallows.

“They crucified Him. . . . ”

And that, they thought, was that.

Who thought it? Everybody thought it: those responsible for it and those who simply wished him dead, those who didn’t care much one way or the other and even those, especially those, who had desperately hoped it would not come to this – His disciples, His friends, His loved ones. Each of them. All of them. When they saw Him hanging on that cross, saw Him nailed there, stretched out between the earth and the sky, they thought it was over. Done.

What Pilate thought

Pilate thought so. Pilate, the Roman governor, who had ordered and witnessed crucifixions aplenty. Did he ever feel sorry for his victims, I wonder? Did he give any thought to the physical agony of the ones he crucified? Maybe, maybe not. But whether he did or not, whether or not he even thought of it as a nasty business, Pilate was sure that somebody had to do it, and that he was that somebody. And, in the case of this man called Jesus, Pilate added a touch of humour to the event.

Humour? Yes, but not the kind of humour that we call a saving grace, not the kind that brings happy laughter. Instead it was dark humour; gallows humour, we sometimes call it. It was the same kind of sadistic humour that the Nazis forced upon those they herded into “shower rooms” before turning on the deadly gas. It was humour that mocks the ones who are about to die, shames them, and so compounds the horror.

Pilate, the would-be humorist, had an inscription written and put on the cross. The inscription read: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” It’s a joke – a sick joke, to be sure, but a joke nonetheless. Get it? This pathetic, beaten, bruised human creature hanging on the cross is, of all things, a king. Isn’t that wild? Look at him; he’s the king of the Jews. Do you get the joke? You beaten-down, pathetic people who have been conquered by Caesar’s armies, here is your king. Look at him! This is what happens to anyone who forgets who the real king is around here. This is Pilate’s joke. And to make sure everybody got the punch line, Pilate took the trouble to have it written in Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

Not surprisingly, the religious leaders didn’t appreciate the joke. They got it, all right, but they were offended. They urged Pilate to do some editing. Pilate, couldn’t you make a slight change and have the inscription read: “This man claimed to be king of the Jews”?

No way. That’s not a joke at all. It may be the truth, but it isn’t clever, it isn’t funny. Pilate’s answer was terse, authoritative: “What I have written, I have written” (John 19:22).

What had Pilate written? Did he have any clue, the slightest inkling, that eventually the joke would be on him? Because Pilate didn’t think big enough. If only he had had a greater imagination, he would have created a better, a truer joke. He would have had an inscription placed on the cross that read: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of Kings.”

The truth is that Pilate’s attempt at humour backfired. He was wrong. Just as all the so-called powerful ones in history have done, he thought he would have the last word. He would show this “king” who really was in charge.

The one Pilate condemned to death was indeed a king, a King who once said, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself” (John 12:32). Now He was indeed being lifted up. His throne was a most unlikely one – two rough pieces of wood planted in the ground. This dying Jesus was a most unlikely king, but He is a King nonetheless. His kingdom is an eternal one. This King makes all the kings, all the Caesars, who have ever lived look like little boys playing silly childhood games. Two thousand years later, what Pilate thought was over, has in reality only just begun.

What Mary thought

Hanging on the cross, the crucified One looked down and saw his mother standing there, next to a disciple He loved. He said to His mother, “Woman, here is your son.” He said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.”

Jesus’ mother also thought it was over.

The Fourth Gospel records only two appearances of Jesus’ mother. She was there at the beginning for the first miracle Jesus performed, at the wedding at Cana, and she was there at the end, when another kind of miracle altogether was unfolding.

What had Mary been thinking and feeling as she watched Jesus go about His ministry of healing and teaching? Had she been apprehensive? Had she worried that He was getting in over His head? Had she heard the rumours that His enemies were out to get Him?

Yes, surely. And now she had to stand and watch as the child she had once nursed, once rocked to sleep, the child whose boyhood bumps and bruises she had kissed to make them all better, this child, her son, was soon to draw His last breath. The agony of Jesus on the cross is hard to imagine. It is equally hard to imagine the agony of His mother who saw the suffering of her son, who thought that all her prayers and tears on His behalf had come to this – a cruel ending to her son’s life.

What she didn’t realize is that her dying son was offering her the gift of consolation. By entrusting her to the care of one he loved, Jesus was giving His mother a prelude to the resurrection, just as every act of solace and comfort to grieving ones becomes, by God’s grace, a priceless gift, a step forward to a new reality. “In the midst of life we are in death” run the words to the service for the dead. It is equally true that in the midst of death we are in life, the kind of life Jesus meant when He said “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in Me will never die” (John 11:25-26).

What the disciples thought

And the disciple Jesus loved . . . in fact, all of His disciples, John, James, Andrew, Peter and the rest? They thought it was over too. All their hopes, their dreams of glory, were shattered. Gone were the opportunities they had had to listen to Jesus as He spoke to the crowds, as He walked the road with them, always teaching, constantly showing them signs of the Kingdom. Never again would they see Him reach out and touch a blind man’s eyes and give him sight, break a few simple loaves into a meal for a multitude, calm an angry sea.

For Peter, especially, such an ending was nearly impossible to bear. He who had promised to stand shoulder to shoulder with Jesus when the testing time came, he whom Jesus had called a “rock”, was devastated by his failure, his denial. Like the other disciples, he had turned tail and run away. Now that Jesus was dead, there was no possibility ever to ask for His forgiveness, no chance for the precious, yet broken relationship to be restored.

As he contemplated what the cross meant, Peter simply could not imagine that it wasn’t over. He could not conceive the possibility of resurrection. Peter is anyone, even you and me, who faces the kind of desolation that is not able to see beyond the immediacy of pain. Our sin, our guilt, our grief, can become so intense, so all-consuming, that it takes over completely. We may get to the point of feeling dead inside.

It isn’t over

Like everyone who was present on the day Jesus was crucified, you and I may think it is indeed over.

What is my response, your response? Is it tears? Perhaps. Tears for His agony. Tears for our complicity in His suffering. Tears for all the sorrows that assail us in this often grief-stricken existence of ours that some have called “a vale of tears”. Tears are understandable. Tears are appropriate. But tears are not enough. And tears are not the last word.

Resurrection is the last word. The tears of Good Friday lead to the gladness of Easter morning.

Something is over, all right. For people of the resurrection, what’s over is the long night of despair. What’s over is the fear that immobilizes our wills, the guilt that cripples our relationships with God and with others, the self-hatred that blocks us from becoming the liberated, joyous people God longs for us to be. Resurrection means that all the ills that plague us, even death itself, are swallowed up in the ending that God makes possible: eternal life.

Resurrection also means that we are set free to give our lives in service to the world that God so loves. Resurrection people know their lives have meaning, have purpose. “Feed My sheep,” the risen Jesus said to Peter, who had wept bitter, bitter tears (John 21:17). He says it still, the Risen One. He says to you, to me: “As you look at the cross, are you weeping for Me, are you weeping for yourselves? I understand. But then, after the weeping, dry your tears and go, feed My sheep.”

Kenneth L. Gibble is a writer from Greencastle, Pa.

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Last modified March 14, 2002.

© 2002 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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