A Long Sermon for Holy Week

Extract

I think the best way to begin is to ask why Christ died on the cross. That we can give some kind of answer to this question in terms of the meaning and purpose of the life of Jesus is presupposed by the Christian activity of ‘preaching Christ crucified’ two thousand years after the event. For our purposes, then, we can rule out the idea that it was all a tragic misunderstanding which need never have happened ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do’, said Jesus of his executioners; but even if this means that they misunderstood him, the misunderstanding was not fortuitous. It was a misunderstanding that was in some way to be expected. In the gospels Jesus is presented not, indeed, as seeking his death or courting it but as realising that it was unavoidable. It is this unavoidability that we shall be looking at here, in Part Two of this ‘long sermon’.

Scholars dispute about the circumstances of the death of Jesus but two facts seem fairly well established: Jesus was executed by the Romans because they found him a threat to the precarious stability of their colony; and they were encouraged to do this because Jesus was rejected by the leaders of his own people. I think that, in the end, the reason why he was thus rejected was that he claimed to ‘speak with authority’; that is, he regarded attachment to his own person as more significant even than belonging in the ordinary way to the People of God in accordance with the Law.