Five days before, he had entered the Holy City in triumph. The masses hooted and hollered and paved his way with palm branches and threw their dirty and torn robes into the street. “Son of David!” “Messiah!” “King of the Jews,” they called him. He humbles his enemies, disrupts worship in the temple – all preparing the way for the coming of the great and glorious King!
Behold the King, high and lifted up!
Crucified.
His title now became his accusation. Guilty. The crime - being King of the Jews. The real king of the Jews, Herod, found their first face-to-face encounter the night before disappointing. This Messiah was not nearly so entertaining as the last one, that Baptist fellow whose head he had to give up. Even more removed, the real king of kings, the real ruler of the Jews, Tiberius Caesar, didn’t even know this crucified peasant king existed. He had provincial governors and other bureaucrats to deal with these sorts of petty insurgencies. If a Caesar ever had to take such matters into his own hands, you could bet there would be no more Holy City, and no more talk of Messiahs.
Those who fancied themselves the spiritual kings of the Jews rejoiced in the punishment for this blasphemer, and mocked him, quoting from one of their psalms. “He saved others – he can’t save himself! He is the ‘King of Israel’, let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. ‘He trusts in God – let God rescue him.’”
And the crucified King says nothing. Except – another quote, from the same psalm his enemies quoted. One last debate about the meaning of the scriptures between the priests and the prophet – the last word on the meaning of the life – and death – of the Son of Man. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” He didn’t even say it in Hebrew. His last words a soul-wrenching exclamation in the common tongue.
G.K. Chesterton, in “Orthodoxy:”
“That a good man might have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point – and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach.
But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this is what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man; and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped from heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay, (the matter grows too difficult for human speech) but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”
The last word – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Except…
There is the small matter of Sunday morning, and a certain empty tomb…
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