Good Friday's Double Exposure:

Behold the man — Behold your God

Sermon preached in St. Martin's Church, Houston,

by the Very Rev'd Dr. Titus Presler, Dean & President, Professor of Mission & World Christianity, Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, Austin,

on Good Friday, 9 April 2004

Readings: Suffering Servant Song of Isaiah 53; the Passion according to John

Behold the man — Behold your God.

That's a double exposure: two pictures blended together. 

You know double exposures from photography, though they're harder to come by with digital cameras:

            with older cameras you could actually design double exposures;

            more often they were mistakes, and sometimes the mistakes revealed a truth:

                        for instance, a picture of my mother-in-law and my father-in-law at home near Plymouth Harbor,

                        but in the background a boat picture from one of their sailing trips:

                        the truth? they would, in fact, always rather be sailing!

Double exposure is the gift of the story we hear today,

            and we're drawn to the story by the double exposure:

            Behold the man, as Pilate puts it.

            Behold your God, as John wants us to understand that man.

Humanity and God met together

            not in exalted grandeur on a mountaintop

            but in betrayal, mockery, torture, bloodlust and death.

Lest we take that for granted, do recall that many of the 1.2 billion Muslims throughout the world who honor Jesus as a prophet

            consider the notion of such a prophet being crucified so scandalous that they actually change the story so that Jesus is not crucified but rather dies an honorable death.   

“Behold the man,” says Pilate.

Here is the exposure of humanity.

Pilate’s declaration is partly scorn —

            Jesus has just been scourged close to dying,

            he's been scornfully arrayed in the purple robes of a monarch,

            with a painful crown of thorns on his head.

Those of you who have seen Mel Gibson's controversial but, in my view, essentially  faithful film The Passion of the Christ

            will have realized with horror the extent of the violence visited on Jesus. 

“Behold this pathetic creature,” Pilate is saying, “and you fear that

                        enough to want that executed?!”

Jesus is literally exposed in all this:

            he is stripped of his clothes,

            soldiers tease him with the royal purple,

            he is crucified naked on a cross.

The crowd also believes that Jesus has been politically exposed as a fraud:

            he's been betrayed by one who shared his table,

            his claim to be a messiah seems to be absurd in his apparent powerlessness,

            his pretension to a special relationship with God is by this victimization proved false.

Here is exposed Jesus’ humanity.

Here is exposed all humanity,

            and the humanity of us all.

Exposed is the vulnerability of all to the ill will of our fellow human beings,

            the way any of us can be made powerless,

            subject to the whims of others who receive or seize power

                        and use it to subjugate others.

People’s inhumanity to one another is everywhere obvious.

This week is the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide,

            when in that tiny country in central Africa 800,000 people were slaughtered by their neighbors.

By and large, both the killers and the killed were Christians,

            and the Christians of today in Rwanda still struggle with that —

            "How did we so misunderstand the faith?" they wonder,

            "Can the gospel of Jesus truly reconcile and save?"

The New Hope Dance Group from Rwanda that will be here in the Diocese of Texas later this month consists of Hutu and Tutsi young people committed to working and ministering together after the devastation.  

In the past two weeks we've been shocked by pictures of boys in Iraq laughing in glee

            as they hung body parts of their enemies from bridges and over power lines —

            and the shock was shared worldwide regardless of people's views of the war in Iraq.

One of this year's Pulitzer prizes went to a newspaper in Toledo that chronicled the heinous exploits of an American military unit in Vietnam.

Exposed as fraudulent before Pilate is not the identity of Jesus, as the crowd thought,

            but the illusion that, left to our own devices,

                        we will act decently and in order,

                        that, really, we’re all basically good

                        and that when things go awry, it’s simply a misunderstanding. 

In fact, untold millions have suffered worse conditions in life than Jesus suffered,

            untold millions have suffered worse tortures in death.

What makes the exposure of Jesus’ humanity unique is the double exposure:

            “Behold the man,” mocks Pilate,

            “Behold your God,” is the proclamation of John's gospel.

We, with John, behold the man with fascination,

            for in this pathetic sight we see our God exposed,

                        God vulnerable to being cornered,

                        God wounded with insults,

                        God gaping at the prospect of death.

The double exposure we see today is the same double exposure

                        we celebrated at the Christmas manger —

            a vulnerable infant of whom it could be said and was said:

            “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us . . .

            And you shall call his name Emmanuel, which means ‘God with us.’”

God has joined the human story,      

            only now we behold the cost of that joining.

So as we behold this human being’s suffering, we know finally with a conviction

                        that might have seemed more potential than real at Christmas

            that Jesus truly is Emmanuel, God with us,

            with us in the depths as well as in the heights of the human story,

            those depths where the good, the true and the beautiful are trampled

                        by those consumed with greed for power and position.

So we know that when a someone is cornered in Houston or Baghdad,

            when a woman or a child suffers domestic violence in Dallas or Karachi,

            when an entire population is under siege in Sudan or Sri Lanka —

            we know that Jesus is there because Jesus can be there,

                        and Jesus can be there because Jesus was there.

Jesus being there means everything because he was there just the way you and I are where we are —

            as an ordinary human struggling to be faithful,

            with all the limitations any of has in knowledge or capacity.

I stress this because many Christians disempower the faith in the name of a piety that sees Jesus as a super-human person by virtue of his divine nature.

People think, “Jesus was a person, but he was also God,

            so he really knew just how things were going to turn out,

            and, in fact, it was all planned that way by God.”

It is this kind of faith that makes the world yawn at the gospel, and rightly so,

            for if it had to turn out the way it did,

            the way it turned out has very little relevance to how your life and mine might turn out.

For we certainly have to make real and risky decisions, not knowing how things will turn out,

            and, in fact, we risk a great deal in a family decisions and professional decisions,

            health care decisions and business decisions.

Jesus was indeed the word made flesh,

            the one in whom, as the writer to the Colossians says, the fullness of deity was pleased to dwell. 

Yet as Paul emphasized to the Philippians,

            Christ emptied himself of the divine attributes in becoming a human being, not counting equality with God a thing to be exploited.

I think all would accept that Jesus was physically and geographically limited to his body 

            — just as you and I are —

Well, that limitation is a clue to the other limitations God undertook in Jesus:

                        Jesus did not know the future,

                        Jesus did not have superhuman strength,

                        Jesus did not have magical powers,

                        Jesus did not have immunity from sinning.

His life and ministry were thoroughly remarkable.

What he did, though, was not a function of his deity —

            he was divine, God with us, but in Jesus God had emptied God's self of the special abilities we often associate with God —

What Jesus did he did through being simply faithful —

            by deeply and consistently attending to the presence of God in his life,

            by being open to the Spirit's moving in his life and the life of the world.  

Jesus healed — not because he was God but because he was faithful.

Jesus cast out demons — not because he was God but because he was faithful.

Jesus taught with authority — not because he was God but because he was faithful.

Jesus was sinless — not because he was God but because he was faithful. 

God risked all — including the very nature of God as good —

            in becoming a vulnerable, limited human being.

God risked all on the simple faithfulness of that one human being. 

Those were the stakes in the drama on the Friday we call Good —

            that is why the drams is so mesmerizing. 

Behold the man!  Behold your God!

In Good Friday’s double exposure both images are full images,

            not partial or obscured.

The human is fully human.

The god is fully God. 

In the cross of Christ we see the full exposure of Emmanuel, God with us,

            in all the tender compassion of God for the world and for each one of us.

In the cross of Christ we see the full exposure of what it means to be human,

            what it means to be fully human in suffering,

            what it means to be perfectly human in faithfulness.

We see both the human face of God and the godly face of humanity.  

 Communities all over the world are united in this drama today —

            Pentecostal Christians in Russia,

            Roman Catholic Christians in Latin America

            Protestant Christians in India,

            Anglican Christians in Britain,

            Indigenous Church Christians in Africa,

            and, quite unusually, this year Orthodox Christians the world over share with us the dates of Good Friday and Easter. 

All of us, as St. John suggests, look on him whom we have pierced.

In so looking,we are pierced, and we mourn.

Yet as we look on this one, we know that we are saved.