The Holy Weak
Note: The text below is from a sermon delivered at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for a Good Friday liturgy. An audio version is above.
The Roman practice of crucifixion was part humiliation, part propaganda, part plain old contempt. Crosses were not merely torture devices. Because of their elevation above the crowds and the sheer spectacle, you could think of them as a particularly gruesome kind of messaging.
We’ve heard the story of Jesus crucified today, but there are others. In 4 BCE, right around the time of Jesus’ birth, a Roman general took up a counterinsurgency effort that sent part of the “army into the villages… [to punish] them. The number of those that were crucified on this account was 2,000.”1 The historian Josephus writes of another mass-crucifixion event in 70 CE, “so great was their number that space could not be found for the crosses, nor crosses for the bodies.”2
The crucified were aliens to the State. This is the way it worked:
Rome moved in.
They saw your neighborhood as a development opportunity,
A way to expand their real estate portfolio and their tax base.
After a quick and efficient military operation, they installed a base full of centurions and soldiers
And a civilian government stocked with bureaucrats
Using existing civil, political, and religious structures to accomplish their agenda.
By putting pressure on the whole system, they forced everyone to make a choice:
Caesar or nothing. Empire or death.
The cross is an alienating place.
Close enough to be seen. Close enough to hear. Not close enough to help. And if you did try to help, or make a fuss, or even grieve in the wrong ways—there was Rome. Fully armed. Ready to put you in line.
It is therefore all the more compelling that someone would choose it. To opt into humiliation and contempt. To yield to defeat. To know that one’s very body will be used as propaganda—and to allow it.
Jesus did this, of course. And over time, so did several of his disciples. And the Jewish rebels of 70 CE.
These stories and images brand themselves into the minds of the Gospel writers: The courageous acts of not being strong enough.
The Holy Weak.
The crucifixions continue.
They take different forms over time. This generation has lynchings. This other one has chattel slavery. An internment camp. An ethnic cleansing. The disappearing of people.
Just as God chose to enter the crucifixion story, God chooses to enter the suffering of this world with every new moment, every new terrible idea, every second where we forget our shared humanity.
So, too, as the Body of Christ may we choose to enter those stories.
To join up with the forces that aren’t forces at all.
To willingly take the loss.
Though rare, there are moments where even the agents of the state will look upon the cross and be transformed—like the centurion who at last recognizes the Son of God right in front of his eyes.
And if that unlikely thing can happen, imagine what else is possible.
After all, it’s only Friday.
Josephus – Antiquities of the Jews 17.10.10
Josephus – The Jewish War 5.11.1 (or 5.451 in Loeb numbering)