Thursday, April 1, 2010

John 19:19-22

Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews." 20 Many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. 21 Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, "Do not write, 'The King of the Jews,' but, 'This man said, I am King of the Jews.'" 22 Pilate answered, "What I have written I have written." (NRSV)

Cross Purposes

Pilate thought:

That sign was a sweet move, if I do say so myself. A good old tradition, turning challengers to Rome into object lessons. So I served up a little political humor notched in three major tongues so nobody missed the joke. Only fair after those priests played the “Are you really a friend of Caesar?” card. That was embarrassing. Personal. Which made it all the sweeter when those swine came back demanding I prefix it “The man said”. I smiled all over them my best imperial “oh well” smile. Heavens. Does this offend your tender sensibilities? Just another case of unintended consequences. Shucks.

Pilate's Broken Sign

Good Friday is breakage. It is, after all, apocalypse, replete with stock-in-trade ruptures: earthquakes, voices sheering the boundaries of the heavens, earth, sheol, spilling of darkness into the day, interrupted planetary cycles, resurrections snapping the boundaries between the dead and the living. The fabric of the curtain that veils the Holy of Holies is rent, registering another boundary violation. Along with cosmic ruptures are the usual day-to-day breeches: the failure of (Roman) law; the failure of (Jewish) piety. Betrayals. Denials. And, here and there, a few unexpected acts of kindness. Which raises the possibility that all this breakage is not necessarily a bad thing. 

In the middle of this shambles the life in the body of Jesus of Nazareth is spilling out. He never aspired to the letters notched over his head as a joke. Pilate knew that when he set them there. Hence, the truth itself is violated in the signage of the cross. But what else could we expect from the governor for whom truth is only a rhetorical question. Not even, we may presume, a real one.

But apocalypse is not just breakage. Not just another blockbuster out of Hollywood reveling in flames, ally sex, and decaying civilizations. Nor is it merely a nihilistic expresssion of a Nitschean will-to-power. Deep from within the broken structures of apocalypse something is revealed. Something appears that changes our understanding of planetary events, but refuses to be reduced to mere "history". The crumbling life of Jesus unveils something new in the universe. Scriptural apocalypse is breakage in the hands of the Creator. It is creation. Hence, the ruptures of Good Friday have more in common with birth than dissolution – ultimately. That does not lessen the horror of the moment. We are left, like the women, beholding the losses. Carrying the pain. The terms of apocalypse are endlessly symbolic, and thus, hope feels maddeningly abstract. Bizarre. The very existence of a benevolent God feels absurd. Standing at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, we do not know the concrete outcomes of the present horrors. This translates too easily into our own headlines. Our own biographies. Millenial predictors of one persuasion or another would offer us formulaic sops, whether it be the magisterial ecclesiastical eschatology of Augustine of Hippo, or some version of dispensationalists standing in a meadow waiting for a cosmic lift to the sky. Then there is that christological sop, the premier perhaps of them all, told as the story of the Raging Father bound by blood law greater than Himself who must be paid off by the Son who substitutes his life as the atoning sacrifice. That devise has it's place, mind you, as attested by scripture - as long as it is demythologized. Not that Christ's death was not sacrificial. It certainly was - in the extreme. But there is something deeper going on this Friday than the logic of an accountant. The books themselves are broken. The bottom lines that keep us poor and malnourished are being ground to powder. So goes, along with it, our fanciful meritocracy.

Good Friday leaves us stripped to the skin. Open to the sky. If there is hope, it is cruel medicine. Medicine that will break the state. The governor refused, in his little ploy, to acknowledge who said that Jesus of Nazareth was king of the Jews. He had no idea what leaving that question unanswered would mean to his empire. His intentions didn't really matter. As he said, “what I have written I have written.” It was out of his hands. The sign was broken in its inception - a joke told by tampering with the evidence. That truth business. Like everything else, Pilate's coded pronouncement was giving way to a new world where other sign-makers would rearrange the marks.

© 2010 Andy Gay