Today’s find: Cacophony

There’s nothing sacred about a crucifixion.

You get a real sense for that when you walk the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, as we had occasion to do in the spring of 2019.

For our pilgrimage group, it was a solemn time … a prayerful moment … as we took turns bearing a wholly inadequate replica of the dreadful crossbeam. Light in weight, insubstantial – the cross we carried could never have supported the weight of an adult human body, much less the sins of the world. Even so, it filled our hearts with wonder and woe to take part in this re-enactment along the Way.

We did our best, we latter-day Simons of Cyrene, to elevate our steps and paces into a sacred ritual. But the world – Jersusalem – was having none of it. T-shirt vendors barked, perfume sellers bellowed, auto horns blared, punctuating our every step with disruption.

Firmly planted at the center of my universe, I at first found the whole thing rude, and really rather annoying: Couldn’t these local yokels see that we were trying to pray here?

But a hundred or so steps in, an unexpected grace began to penetrate my spirit: The cacophony was not distraction, but reality. It’s likely how Jesus would have experienced his own trek toward Golgotha – a brutal journey made still more raw by the little local world’s cruelty, or its utter indifference.

Crucifixion was no sacred rite in Jesus’ day. It was blood sport. Spectacle.

The cross we now venerate … was despised and dishonored by his contemporaries, friend and foe alike.

So, where’s the grace to be found in such an insight?

Perhaps it’s this: a chance to see the Unknowable at work. To pause in silent contemplation before words such as these:

…so shall he startle many nations, because of him kings shall stand speechless…

They were given by the Unknowable to the prophet Isaiah, six or seven centuries before Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem. Those words, and more:

…there was in him no stately bearing to make us look at him,
nor appearance that would attract us to him.
He was spurned and avoided by people, a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity,
one of those from whom people hide their faces, spurned, and we held him in no esteem.

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured, while we thought of him as stricken, as one smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins;
upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole…

…by his stripes we were healed.

None of this makes sense in the eyes of the world. None of it follows the accepted plan. But we have learned, we now know, that there is power in the cross. There is power in Jesus, power to turn blood sport into salvation … defeat into victory.

And so we pray: Blessed be Jesus, the Name that is above every other name.

Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.

IHS