Disciple Bible Study 22, Gospel of John part VII

Well for me, I I think you go through through the church year and you just you know maybe doing the readings and but when you come to Ash Wednesday, it's re it's really um your attention is refocused.

Um and that's what it does for me.

Uh it's just a refocusing and remembering really something and I don't want to some point here.

But because you tend to forget, you just go around your life and all that stuff, but then you see that you listen to him and and you know, even though he is kind of a god guy at the same time, just coming back, all the reading, all of this bringing you back to center yourself.

That's maybe seems like I don't know, but that's what it does for me.

That's your question.

Thank you.

But when it comes back around, it's all new to the fresh it.

Thank you.

And it's kind of sanitized.

If that makes sense, yeah.

Yeah.

And then when you really think about it and really think about what happened, it's so much more horrifying.

It's amazing to me the stories we teach our children and that we normalize them, because to be honest, they're really gross stories.

We do um or or we have, I'm not, I don't know if we still do or not at the stations of the cross.

We do it during Holy Week.

We don't do it with the children.

We don't I'll tell you why.

I'll tell you about the stations of the cross.

Well, well, and and I'm interested to hear that because I will tell you, we did it for years.

And there would be at least one one child that would come out, come to me afterwards, and they were just absolutely traumatized by the whole, and and it really shook their.

I don't think we did it with kids below first grade.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, because it was just too much, but it really shook their whole view of the way humanity treats humanity and and what they, you know, there was something about it that made it so real for them.

I mean, they're kids, they're growing up, they've heard about war, they've heard about this, they've heard about that.

But doing the stations and across, and I remember thinking, watching these kids, I remember a kid watcher, like I watch, and thinking, I could almost peg who was uh who I would be talking to afterwards.

Yeah.

Because it was and I and I remember thinking, and talking, I think I don't remember who it was, but it was a uh what do they call it?

Intermediate priest we had here.

I want to say it was Ken.

Interim.

Interim.

Saying, you know, I'm thinking maybe this is might be a little much, yeah, you know, for for not that we want to make it a clean, happy story, but at the same time, and I realized I wasn't just talking about the kids.

Yeah.

You know, I was I was, you know, I love hearing it and I hate hearing it at the same time.

You know, growing up Catholic, every Catholic church, you know, back in the 30s and 40s, it has the stations.

And some.

So part of what you did as a child growing up in any church, you went to and you saw them.

And and sometimes they were gruesome.

They were pretty powerful.

And I went to Catholic school, and the nuns never had us do the stations.

We knew they were there, but we didn't do the stations until we were older.

Yeah.

Because but you knew they were there, and you got you got an idea, uh, and you didn't have to be very smart to figure out you know, this is the story of what happened to Jesus.

Um it is, there's no doubt, and as an adult though, it does bring you back to wow, you know, this man came to Earth and did this for us, and for us to truly recognize who we are.

I know it's it's nowadays, but when I was one, it was very bananic.

Yeah, there was no detail.

He died on the cross for us, and that was that.

And so it wasn't until I got older that it became clearer.

And I think in the Catholic churches because the stations were there, and then you you walk, you see, you see, I mean, they can't see the churches too.

We have I don't have them.

I've never seen them.

I've seen them in a lot of churches.

They're in our sanctuary right now.

Those little now I'll tell you those brass ones are hard to see, which is why we're replacing them all.

Uh because they're not, first of all, they're not artistic, they're not compelling in any way, and you can barely even see them.

But you know, there's that icon, and then there's two other ones.

There's Jesus with some cuts and it's backlit, and then there's like a hand with a nail in it.

That's station 11.

Jesus is nailed to the cross.

So eventually we'll have 14 different media, all different types, including there'll be a big X-ray film.

Oh, cool, like a negative, huge negative that'll be backlit, and there'll be a stained glass one, and there'll be a fabric one.

In fact, you're invited, if you um remember to do this, you don't have to, but the artisan has asked for a scrap of fabric from as many people as want to bring them to make the veil of Veronica, that's station seven.

If we get it by Sunday, she'll use our fabric, our old fabric, to make something, I think, compelling and beautiful.

And I think that's the only the difference in the Catholic Church, they never really, they were there, and they were pretty pretty powerful, they were pretty raw.

They've always, and no matter where you went, um, you saw them.

And sometimes I think that after a while it became well, yeah.

It wasn't until you were much older, and you maybe think, God, that you can't get it.

That's what happened.

But you don't really think about that.

Yeah.

What you can do is uh this is just the Old Testament stories.

My childhood was beautifully illustrated.

I never read it to the kids because it was so boring.

Yeah, yeah.

But but the other thing about the stations and the cross, the churches don't have anything like that, do they?

It depends, but in general, no, we shy away from that.

Um have I talked to you about crucifixion?

I just can't remember.

I'm like I'm a junior having a junior moment.

You said you're gonna come in this week, but you know, this one's like.

And they're all sort of mean different things.

And I want to do a quick explanation of that as I walk through what crucifixion was actually like, not really what we think of as all at all.

Okay?

So in general, we use this symbol, and I want you to know this is completely fictitious and and wrong.

Um crosses in general are shaped like this.

This is called a tau cross.

That's the Greek letter for T.

It's a capital T, not a lower T.

The way the cross sort of worked is you're you gotta remember that cities are very small, walled cities are very small.

Most people live outside of the wall where the farms are and where they keep their sheep.

So this is an agrarian society.

It's not like New York City at all.

In fact, um, Jerusalem, even at the time of Jesus, four city blocks, 40,000 people, 40,000 people lived in the city of Jerusalem.

That's regular.

Curiously, when uh when it was Passover week, there were upwards of this many people in the city.

So you're thinking about a hundredfold increase in population for eight days.

It was crazy.

Talk about standing room only.

A city that housed 40,000 swelled to four million people.

Which is exactly why there were all kinds of guards there that one week.

Because you put that many people together, whether it's in Watts, Oakland, or Jerusalem, and you add some religious festivities, and people are rife for riots.

Now, crucifixion was actually a Persian, a Persian punishment, capital punishment that the Romans got from the Persians.

The Persians used this.

We call this the cross of Saint Andrew's.

It's on the episcopal shield.

It's on the shield.

If you know that the shield is shaped like this, and then there's a cross made of little crosses in the X shape.

The reason we use that is because legend says that Saint Andrew was crucified in this manner in Scotland.

The Episcopal Church uses the Scottish Rite, that is the Scottish Eucharist.

We went to England after the Revolution and said, Will you make an American bishop?

And they said, No, colonists.

So Samuel Seabury went to Scotland and they said, We'll consecrate you a bishop if you'll use the Scottish rite, which is about sacrifice and altar, instead of the English rite, which is about meal and table.

So we resemble Catholicism more than the Anglican Eucharist rite because we came from Scotland, not from England.

This is really important, and that's that's that.

The memorial of our redemption.

The Anglican rite is about sharing a meal at God's table, not remembering the sacrifice of Jesus.

It's very different.

It's about an inclusive meal at a table, not a sacrifice at an altar.

See, if you're Roman Catholic, every time the Eucharist is celebrated, you're sacrificing Jesus again.

The Anglican rite says it happened one time forever.

So we don't need to do that again.

What we need to do is remember the meal.

I'll tell you more about that when we talk about the Passover lamb, because I'm going to do two things with this today.

Back to this bit.

There's 40,000 people that live in the city at the most, and there's a lot of people that live in the countryside.

And you know, when you've got a walled city that's for invaders, you really don't have more than four gates, and that's if you're at a major trade crossroads.

But in general, there might only be two gates to a city because you know the gates are the weakest part of the wall.

They're made out of something like wood.

So you want as few gates as possible.

And what happens in the ancient world is that essentially, even if you're doing all of your growing and all of your shearing and all of your uh raising out here, you go into town to do your commerce.

And particularly, you see it in Jerusalem on this map.

This is the mall of the Americas.

I mean, this is ginormous, huge.

And everybody's going to come in.

Very few people come in this way.

Most people come in this way because the money changers are down here.

And you can't use regular coins up there.

You have to use just faceless silver coins.

It's some kind of drachman, I can't remember, but it's a special coin.

You've got to trade up and come in here.

So when you're coming into the city, this is exactly what the cross was used for that Rome took on.

This was the billboard in the ancient world.

You crucified people right here by the city gates, not inside.

You don't want blood and guts and gore in your city.

You want it out here because everyone has to come in and out that way, and they're going to pass the cross.

The cross is the ancient billboard.

This is what happens when you mess with Rome.

Now, we've grown up thinking Jesus is crucified next to two bandits.

That is a terrible translation.

He is crucified next to two insurrectionists.

If you steal, you lose your thumb or your hand.

You don't lose your life.

He is not crucified by thieves.

He's crucified by guerrilla warfare fighters, freedom fighters, Al-Qaeda, the American gorillas, whatever you want to think of.

This is it.

And they're nailed up there to show people you mess with us, this is what you get.

Now, you've seen, no doubt, pictures of Jesus carrying this big old cross.

There is no way, if you've ever picked up a railroad tie or you've tried, it's a fool's errand.

I mean, they weigh 220 plus pounds.

There's no way that a Palestinian peasant who's on the edge of being malnourished could carry one of those things any distance.

No way.

And in fact, they didn't do it.

What happened was there was a pole in the ground about five foot six inches tall.

Because that's the average height of a person.

I didn't get that number out of a phone book.

That's it.

And in that pole was cut a slot, like a tenant, like a mortise and tenon joint.

So it looked like that.

Someone who was crucified carried this piece of wood, which was essentially a two by four.

Any one of you could carry a two by four that's three feet long.

You see.

That's what carrying your cross meant, putting a two by four.

When you got from the judgment seat, which was very near the gate here, that's like a hundred yards or less.

It's not miles and miles.

If you go to the Via Dola Rosa in Jerusalem today, the way of suffering, where the stations of the cross are, it's really long, and that's because buildings have been built there since this time.

And that city that you're looking at right there.

Let me see if I can show you the way of the cross here.

Here's the temple, and here's the fortress here.

This is called the Antonio, and you see this wall right here.

That's the wall of the time of Jesus.

You're trying here and you walk right out there.

Do you see?

It's a very short, it's it's actually fewer than 50 yards that you carry that little 2x4.

What happens when you get there?

Well, a nail won't hold your body weight.

It won't.

So a nail is something just to be cruel, but people are tied to that two by four in ropes.

That may have happened back there in the city center that they lashed your arms to this two by four.

And then, don't you see?

You only need two soldiers to pick that thing up and set it right in that crevice.

Two.

You don't need ladders, you don't need ropes.

I'm sure you've seen movies where Jesus gets tied to this and then they pick it up and drop it in a hole.

That would break, you would fall right off.

Dropping down in a hole would completely break your body.

And Romans don't want to break your body.

The point of all this business is that when you're suspended like this, your lungs have so much weight on them that they can't open.

Most of you know this part.

In order to breathe, you have to physically pull yourself up to give your room, your lungs, room to expand.

There's two ways you die on the cross.

One is that your body goes into shock and you die in about five hours.

That's what happened to Jesus.

The other is that your body doesn't go into shock, and it takes you three, five, seven days before you run out of strength and you suffocate.

Romans want you to do that.

And if you read the story, they offered Jesus wine mixed with myrrh, and he declines.

That's a mild sedative.

They didn't give that to be humane, they give that to you to avoid going into shock so that you will die over five days, not over five hours.

Now you may be looking at this and thinking, Mike, surely there were people taller than five, six.

There were.

So how is it they hung?

Well, they just bent their legs up.

And you know, not everybody's crucified like this.

We've got evidence that they did whatever they wanted to do with your arms.

They wrapped them around, they put them upside down, they broke them.

I mean, whatever they wanted to do, that's what they did.

Takes two soldiers to do this.

Now, there is a tradition Jesus is nailed to the cross.

It doesn't matter where you put the nails because they're not holding you.

So you could put it through the palm, that definitely won't hold you.

You could put it through the wrist.

I don't care what you've heard, that won't hold you.

You've got to have the rope as well.

And that's just an additional cruelty.

You can put the nail anywhere you want, because the nail in your foot is going to shatter your leg bones.

I mean, it's just we're not talking about little framing nails, we're talking about railroad spikes, right?

And we got evidence of that.

Again, that's just for cruelty.

So I want you to hear when someone's crucified and you hear the Pharisees mocking them and spitting on them, that's eye to eye.

That's not way up there.

And you could even smack people in the face, right?

So this is much lower.

And imagine, all you've got to do is just step down, and the ground is an inch under your feet, not ten feet away.

So when you see a symbol that looks like this, that's a theological picture, not a historical one.

Does that make sense?

So the titleist could have been hanged like so, right?

Here lies Jesus, King of the Jews.

And do you hear then?

That's absolute mockery.

This is what we do to your kings, because there is no king but Caesar.

Here's your king on a cross.

Take that.

I mean, that's really the deal going on.

This is the Orthodox one, you know, and you'll see it's based on this.

Here's the template.

One bandit goes to hell, the other is repentant and goes to heaven.

That's that.

This is the Maltese cross or the cross of St.

John.

And really what it's showing you is that there's eight different countries or langs that make up the order of the knighthood.

I used to live in Malta, that's the deal.

But no wood cross was ornate like that.

They were cheap.

These were electric chairs.

And sure enough, when you talk about violence and gore, children had to see this all the time.

And think about in medieval Europe.

When someone was hanged, it was a public execution.

Everybody had to go.

I'm actually pretty sure that if we wanted to get rid of the death penalty, we would make it, we would interrupt your regularly scheduled program to watch somebody get electrocuted.

Because if you saw that, and if your kids saw that, you would say, not again.

When I was in Saudi Arabia, they would have public execution.

Absolutely.

And they would take off people's hands and so forth on Friday.

And everyone has to go.

Because that's them doing the big deterrent of the capital punishment.

See, we say capital crimes are we We execute people because it's a deterrent, and of course, every study says not.

When you have to watch it, maybe more so, but I think from a human rights standpoint, when you see it, you're much more prone to resist it as a punishment.

And when you see somebody in the gas chamber, that's mustard gas.

Vomit their lungs out.

You don't want to see that again.

And it's so cruel and inhumane that if we had to see it, I think we'd probably fight the capital capital crime.

Couple other bits to tell you.

People are crucified completely naked.

See, that little rag we give Jesus is for our sake.

But you need to know if you're Jewish, that's completely humiliating to be up there naked, right?

I mean, these are people for whom modesty is part of the Torah, and there they are being naked.

This is also why you hear in Deuteronomy, cursed is anyone hanged on a tree.

Jesus is accursed.

I mean, that's the problem with making him the Messiah.

He's hanged on a tree.

He's not lynched in the well, I mean he is.

He's lynched in the Roman way, not the Jewish way.

Um, there is evidence, by the way, of people getting off the cross and surviving.

So their loved ones come out at dark and they sneak them away.

You cut the ropes.

Uh you know, you can recover from a spike if you can get your body off of it.

You know, I didn't want to be macabre, but that's the deal.

Uh, the other thing that happens outside of city walls is there's wild animals, and sure enough, there's evidence that people get eaten while they're out there and they're still alive.

I mean, this is really sort of awful, awful bits.

Um, I don't know if I skipped anything.

Sometimes I'll tell you, um, there's all this bit about Jesus got flogged, and if you've seen the Passion of the Christ, which I would tell you is not only wrong but pornographic.

It's pornographically wrong.

Jesus gets killed about nine times in that movie.

There is no way you flog somebody that hard and severe when you want them to die over five days.

You're guaranteeing they're gonna die in an hour.

This is not about being swift, this is about being cruel and taking a long, long time.

And you'll remember that uh if you've heard of Spartacus, that's a that's a gladiator revolt that ends up getting other slaves.

Well, they crucified a slave every mile on the road from Rome to Sicily, every mile, so that, and they didn't ever take those bodies down.

So when you went on Interstate 45 for years to come, you saw crucified skeletons telling you, hey, slave, you're thinking about revolting, this is how you will end up.

So you'd better rethink that.

That's how it functions.

It's a Roman penalty, so Jewish people can't do it.

That's why they take them to Pilate.

Jewish people were allowed to stone people to death.

That's a lynching.

They don't need Rome's permission to do that, but only Romans can do this means of execution.

I hope that makes sense to you.

When you read Acts, Stephen gets stoned, and they don't seem to be too worried about the legality of that.

In Alabama, people got lynched.

Of course, we know that's wrong, but they don't really worry about what judges were going to do.

They took the law into their own hands.

At this time, there's no police anyway.

No police force.

There's just soldiers in a town, and all arrests are citizens' arrests.

That's where that comes from in our legal system.

The citizens' arrest was the only arrest there was.

I think I covered everything I know about crucifixion.

Anything?

Any questions about it?

I'm gonna read it at Ash Wednesday at 12 o'clock mass.

I'm just the readings are the readings are relevant.

But this this is like, oh my goodness.

Um, the readings aren't actually bad.

No, they're not, no, no, it's just asking people to pay attention.

Yeah, the readings are bad.

I I want to tell you, there is a couple of things that have happened since I was a kid, and the passion of the Christ is one of them.

The passion of the Christ is made so that you will feel ashamed of yourself.

It's not made so you'll feel guilty about your decisions, it's so that you'll feel bad because you killed Jesus.

You did that.

Not your bad decision did, you did.

That's why the people at the end of the movie look at you accusing you of having done that to Jesus.

And I grew up hearing every time you sin, you've nailed Jesus to the cross again.

So you should feel not guilty, ashamed.

And when you think about the pain he went through, that should make you feel more ashamed.

But then I want to remind you, the gospels are very clear.

Jesus didn't have to do this, he chose to.

He chose it.

He's sitting in the garden and he says, I'd rather not, God, but all right.

So if we come to the cross and shame, friends, I think that's the worst way we can approach it.

If we come saying, this is a sign and a memory of God's love for us, and man, there are some ways in my life I hope to improve on, ways, not all of me, decisions I'm making, then I think we've made a healthier approach.

It may interest you to know, because you said this, that if you're Christian in general, sometimes you think what's wrong with us is original sin.

If you're Muslim, the wrong, the thing that's wrong with people is that we forget.

We forget.

Which is why we've got to pray five times a day.

We've got to do it so that we do what you said.

We remember.

That's why we do Lent and Ash Wednesday over and over again, to remember.

Not because we forget.

We need to reattach something that's been severed from us, reattach the story.

And this becomes really important when we read John and we talk about the Passover.

See, when you celebrate the Passover and you're Jewish, you have to tell the story.

You must.

You all know it, but you have to do it every year.

And you don't say, our ancestors were slaves in Egypt and God delivered them.

You must say, we were slaves in Egypt and God delivered us.

You don't remember a fact that happened in the past.

You reattach yourself to the story of God's deliverance from the pharaohs in your life every single year.

That thing that happens in Passover, it's called the Hagada, and it happens at the Seder meal if you've ever been to one of those.

I'll just let you know if you haven't.

They'll advertise these in the paper.

You can go to one.

You just have to pay the meal fee.

And we've done them here.

Uh, you pretty much tell the story.

You could be at a senior citizen's home.

The youngest person in the room, who might be 97, has to ask the following questions.

Why is this night different from other nights?

Why is it that normally we eat leavened bread, but this night we eat flat bread, matzah?

Why do we do that?

And the oldest person in the room who can still speak, like it'd be 117, says, Because there wasn't time for the bread to rise.

This is really important to remember the Passover story because John's putting Jesus in the Passover story in a different place.

And he said that in the video.

Jesus doesn't have the Passover meal at the Last Supper.

He does in the in the other Gospels, we think, but Jesus is killed when the lambs are, because Jesus is the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.

But you need to know something about Passover.

They didn't kill that sheep to wash away their sin.

They didn't do it.

Because normally the priest is the one who does the slaughtering.

At the Passover meal, you kill your own sheep.

It's the one time of year you kill your own animal.

Otherwise, the priests of the butchers and the meat packers and the slaughterers, you do it yourself.

And why?

Because before the night's over, you're gonna be on the highway.

You don't have time for the ritual.

You do it yourself.

Why do you kill the sheep?

You get meat two or three times a year.

You're getting ready to walk about 400 miles.

Your body's gonna need some extra energy.

You need the calories.

The sheep doesn't take away your sin, it is strength for your journey.

From slavery into freedom.

Strength for the journey.

That's the Lamb.

Well, what on earth is the blood about?

We got to read that again.

It's very clear when you read Leviticus 17.

The blood of the animal is its life.

Well, no, it isn't.

The heartbeat and the brain waves of the animal are its life.

But you know, in a certain sense, it's true.

When your blood stops moving, you're dead.

The life of the animal is in moving blood.

If you're Jewish, you see, I think we've talked about this, you can never drink or eat the blood of an animal.

Because the life of the animal never belonged to you.

You pour it out on the ground because it is God's life, not yours.

You can have the meat, but you can't have the life.

Now, this is true.

I had a friend, a student, actually, uh, who lived in China, and we hosted him for a couple of years at our home when he was in high school.

And this is gonna maybe sound strange to you.

This is definitely true in Native American culture as well, but they ate animals to get their powers.

Now, this is really maybe it's gonna sound gross, but uh they would put a living monkey under the table and open up its head and eat its brains while it was alive to get the powers of the monkey.

And you know, when you're a Native American and you make the kill, you take the heart out of the animal and you eat the heart of the animal to get its powers.

I know that sounds strange, not its mutant powers, but you kinda absorb its qi, not just its calories, but like its spiritual life force.

If you're Jewish, you cannot do that.

Because that stuff doesn't belong to you.

So when you think about, hey, this wine is my blood, you could take that literally, but really, this is my life.

So may my life strengthen you for your journey from slavery to freedom.

May my life give you the energy to walk the Exodus.

That's where the Anglicans come out at table and meal instead of altar and sacrifice.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

I think the communion is the Angus.

Well, that's because you've already made it to the Episcopal Church.

Because if you are a true Roman Catholic, that is the blood of Jesus that washes your sins off.

Now, that's not a very good analogy because we all know if we do laundry, the hardest thing to get out of clothes is blood.

So, how can that wash you?

No, it is the life of Jesus, the life that connects us to God, not the death.

I know I'm being a little bit challenging here, but that's the only way all this makes sense.

So look what the people do before their journey, before they take their Passover.

They kill this lamb to have its energy, and they're putting the life of the lamb around their door as a way of showing this life belongs to you, not to us.

They're making their own billboard about to whom life belongs.

Belongs to God, and we've marked our doors with it instead of downing it.

We tried to pass over with a Jewish family, and we took a Jewish family.

Yeah.

And what I was modern, this is just a few years back.

The two families argued, the men argued about what was why you had the salt and why you did this.

Okay, I didn't understand.

That took me to, you know, I was like, I remember, and it was like, odd, why wouldn't they, they're Jewish?

But yet they argued about it, well, my father said this, so what is that?

That's because to be Jewish is to argue.

And I want to tell you that's true because when you read uh Jewish scripture, like from the Talmud or the Mishnah, there are four columns on the page at the same time.

There's the Bible, there's the rabbinic commentary about the Bible, there's the commentary about the commentary, and then there's something called the Midrash.

And guess what?

These things often disagree with each other about what that means.

This is actually a really cool thing about Judaism.

They're very committed to disagreeing with one another and coming back next week.

Christianity, we've decided if you disagree, I don't want to see you again.

This is the way they read the holy book.

They disagree about it all the time.

And that's why, by the way, uh, I don't think I mentioned this to you, the the scriptures originally are Hebrew.

No one reads that anymore, so they go to Aramaic and then they go to Greek, and there's this miracle that seventy rabbis translate the scriptures from Aramaic to Greek, and they all agree.

And it's a true miracle because two rabbis don't ever agree about anything.

So if you've got 70 of them and it all agrees, it's a miracle from God.

So the Greek ones are better than the Hebrew ones.

That's the story.

That's the LXX or the Septuagint.

Our New Testament authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Hebrews, they don't read these.

They didn't know how.

They only knew how to read those.

And those are the ones they quote from.

Unless you've experienced that, and I was in shock.

I'm kind of in shock, but you know, it's like, my gosh.

But you see why they're doing that, and in some ways it's very cool, is that they're really arguing about how they're reattaching themselves to the story.

And they're not saying you're wrong, they're saying, here's where I am with the salt.

Where are you with the salt?

And it doesn't seem cordial that way, but it's an opportunity to say, here's what the good news means to me.

I mean, they're they're good friends, and one was spending the whole week with them at the dinner table at Passover and arguing about it.

Again, it's uncomfortable for us here in the United States because we don't know how to disagree with each one another and still respect each other.

I think it's pretty cool that they do that, though.

I just want to say.

Um, see, here's the deal about Passover, and listen, you may say, well, well, Mike, I don't know if that's convincing because I still think the blood of Jesus as a sacrifice is important.

I'm not trying to take that away from you, but I do want you to hear that Passover is really about strength for the journey, more than it is about an animal wiping your sins away.

Because remember, the most important sacrifice does not happen on Passover.

It does not.

It happens on this day, Yom Kippur.

And there's two, right?

The one that takes your sins away is actually the scapegoat.

The priest lays their hands on the head of that animal and says, We're giving you all of our crap.

And you don't dare kill that animal.

You drive it away.

You send it into exile, and it will never be welcome again because you're sending your sins into exile.

There's something really interesting about Socrates.

He gets accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, right?

He has two choices.

I don't know if you know this.

He can either leave the city forever, he can be in exile, or he can drink the hemlock and die.

He prefers to die in Athenian than lose his identity and live in exile.

Exile is worse than death.

Because at least you die part of something.

We're in exile, you're part of nothing.

And that's where your sins go.

They're part of nothing anymore.

There's another one that you kill.

This is called the Holocaust.

This is the one you totally burn up and you throw the blood on the people, right?

They don't drink it.

And the cleansing of their sin already happened there.

Okay, um, any questions about Passover?

So Jesus is the Passover lamb who takes away the sin of the world because he gives you the life you need to go from out from Pharaoh into new life.

Yeah.

It's about death.

It's about meal and table.

Now, I do think this is really interesting because in some ways you can't have a meal without a sacrifice.

You know?

You can't.

Um, but I think it matters how we primarily approach the Lord's table.

Is Jesus dying again because I did something bad?

Or was Jesus willing to lay his life down for us so that we could make the journey out from Pharaoh into new and bigger life?

That's a small nuance, but I think it means a great deal because, quite honestly, I think it's the difference between this and that.

And I'll tell you, I think God has that much interest in that.

This is about I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy.

The whole point of it is you are worthy.

You're worthy because whether you feel like it or not, God felt like it, and God felt like it enough to do that.

And this is maybe a good point as we think about the cross to think about what on earth it means, and this is the word we usually use, right?

And I'll tell you, there's a couple of these ideas.

This is the most dominant one.

Atonement.

What does the cross mean for us?

Well, since, and this is um comes from Saint Anselm, we've really ratcheted it up.

Anselm was a lawyer.

You know, back on the old university day, there were two disciplines, theology and law.

That was it.

What about being a doctor?

That involved leeches and bleeding.

Um so Anselm is a lawyer, and he said, Listen, God's justice is so great that he cannot tolerate any infraction.

Zero.

It's so perfect that if you get one thing wrong, God throws the book at you.

So here's what we need: we need somebody, because everybody sinned, we need someone to take our place.

So if you've ever read the book The Whipping Boy, which I read in the fifth grade, essentially it says, we all deserve death, we've all sinned, and Jesus is the whipping boy.

He takes your place.

So God punishes Jesus instead of you.

Um, if it helps you understand God's love, great, but in general, we've made that so literal that God has to spank somebody, and if God doesn't punish somebody, God can't forgive anybody.

Well, that doesn't make any sense.

If God's all-powerful, why does God have to punish anybody?

I don't have to punish somebody when my kid does something wrong in order to forgive them.

I can just do it.

Nobody needs spanking, really.

But this is exactly what I grew up hearing the cross means.

Now, listen, there's probably some truth in it.

When you think about sacrifice, if I told you that firefighters sacrifice themselves all the time, do they have to die to do that?

Or is the fact that they choose a dangerous occupation sacrifice enough?

Do you get what I'm saying?

So, listen, Jesus is willing to lay his life down like a firefighter is, but it doesn't mean he has to die, and it doesn't mean you have to die either.

I sacrifice stuff for my daughter all the time.

I do it so she can have hopefully a bigger life.

But if I killed myself for my daughter, that would be the worst parenting possible because there'd be no one to protect her anymore.

I hope that makes sense, is what I'm saying.

So we we often approach sacrifice with something must die, which is not really it.

Sacrifice, I think, is really great.

In Elizabethan, England, the number one uh picture of this is a mother pelican poking herself in the chest and there's blood coming out for her little babies.

Pelicans don't do that, by the way, but they thought they did.

They thought when there was a famine, the mother would poke herself and feed her babies her life so they'd have more.

If she killed herself, they would certainly die.

She shares her life so others can live.

I think it could say that.

I mean, I do.

And in that sense, it's very valid.

But if that's all it does, if God has to give spankings, I just think that's a little bit yucky because I don't have to give spankings to forgive.

There's another one that we got, and it's called Christus Victor.

There's a Lutheran church with that name.

This comes from Gustav Aline.

He's like 1100 years later.

And here's what he says: He says there's like a big capture the flag game going on in the heavens, and the devil has stolen the earth from God.

So we all belong to the devil because of original sin and bits like that.

And Jesus comes to earth perfect, and he is going to be God's bait to beat the devil at his own game.

So the way that it goes is like this: if you sin, you deserve to go to hell.

Well, Jesus never sins.

The devil kills Jesus with this terrible, tragic, unjust death.

And because Satan has punished Jesus with death and puts him in hell, even though Jesus never sinned, that is how God busts hell open.

So the Christmas victor is this big, strong, swarthy Jesus, and he's the bait to snag Satan on a hook.

But you know, there's this question how did the devil get so powerful?

How does the devil own the world?

God made it.

God still, I don't think, owns it all.

So it's kind of a weird idea.

How the devil got to be so powerful.

I grew up with that idea, though.

Satan has a plan to destroy your life, and Jesus tricked the devil because he was sinless.

Maybe you've never heard it.

I hope not, because it's bizarre.

Um, it is bizarre.

There's another one that's called, I'm trying to think quite how you call it.

Um basically, it's a model for life.

This came from Peter Abelard, who was right around the time of Anselm, who says, hey, actually, the problem with us is we'd forgotten how to live.

So Jesus came to model how do we live.

We're not afraid of women and Samaritans, we're not afraid of people who have the cooties.

We choose to forgive.

We choose to live and love bigger.

So Jesus is about showing us how to live, not.

I mean, if it's all about his death, why did he need to grow up?

Just kill him when he's a baby and mission accomplished.

This is fine, but it doesn't really deal with the death of Jesus.

I will tell you, this is where a lot of um feminists park here, feminists who look at the cross, particularly, I'll tell you, womanists, I don't know if you know that term.

A womanist is an African-American feminist.

So it's a black woman who says, listen, um, there is nothing redemptive about Jesus' suffering, nothing, because there's nothing redemptive about our suffering.

Right?

Black women who were slaves and still today are made to suffer, and there is nothing good about that.

I think what they mean is there's nothing good about imposed suffering.

And we all know that when we choose to share our life with other people, that can hurt and that can be redemptive.

But there's nothing redemptive about somebody punishing you for no reason.

Does that make sense?

And that's why they have such a problem with this, because essentially the black woman's experience, especially in the United States, is forced subjugation.

Now, there's one other idea about this that I think is really big, and that's the idea.

This actually comes from a 1970s guy called Jürgen Moltmann, he's German.

Um, that the whole point of the cross is not to atone, but to become at one with us.

At one.

So, really, what the cross does is it takes almighty, transcendent, no-suffering, omnipotent, all-knowing God, and gives God a body, and God dies.

Which is impossible, but it happens so that God knows exactly what it's like to be us.

It sort of means that instead of uh God just hopping on the cross, the whole cross happens inside of God.

It reveals that part of God's eternal nature is suffering, but also rising again.

It sort of means when we die, no matter how isolated and what example and how suffering we are, we don't die by ourselves, we die inside of God.

So that we're never alone because God is at one with us.

I'm not sure that the Gospels tell you which one of these there are.

And I will tell you, if this one sounded weird, this also gets called ransom.

Jesus was a ransom for us.

I mean, you could take that literally, or you could say Jesus would pay any price for you.

Christ the Good Shepherd would go to any length to bring back a lamb that strayed, because that's what shepherds do.

We could take it so literally we forget to take it seriously, or we could take it so seriously that we refuse to take it literally.

Does that make sense?

What I'm saying.

Like I say, if my seven-year-old gets taken captive and I lay my life down for her, great, I got around, and who's gonna raise her?

So we always have to think about this.

How do we give life to other people?

Will we share ours and to what level do we do it?

Right?

If there's an attacker, I like to think I would lay my life down literally.

I do.

Um, but if it's my my daughter's elementary school tuition, I'm not going to die for that.

Because then who would she have?

I mean, these are these are different bits to think about.

I'm being very lectury today, I'm sorry.

Is this a any any other thoughts on this?

No, the only thought I I think on some of this, like the womaness, for example.

Yeah.

Um you also have the side, there's a side of the black woman, the black woman on any in any family and grandma, they're in charge.

They're the person, they might do the work and all that.

But but there's a lot, there's some writings too about women that they are the really the ones that shape the family.

They're the ones that are the models.

They're, you know, you don't you don't say no to your black mom.

Yeah.

And at the same time, a black man with my education will get 90% of my wage, a black woman will get 60%.

Right.

And if you go to the black church where no one doubts who runs that church, it's the women, it's very unlikely they'll ever be a pastor because men are still the titular authority in the black tradition.

So it's this weird line that happens, right?

Like you said, I used to teach reading lessons, speed reading and comprehension.

And if I had a problem with the kid, I went to mom.

But at the end of the day, black dad, who could have been very absent, his word was final, even though mom ran that house.

You know, when you have in your city kids, you have light kids, if the mom comes to see the principal, you know, you know that all you need to do is talk with her, and especially if you're a woman too.

Oh, all you ever do is talk to the mom, that's all you do.

You can take you things can get taken care of.

That things will be taken care of.

I think that's right.

But I also think that's a crisis because we've created a society in which dads aren't expected to stay around.

We have done that nationally.

And and and all the interstitial, the whole interstitial, which is a very sad situation.

And and all that is to say, right, that every group, whether you're, I mean, the the the theological word for the Latino woman is called the Muharista.

The muharista has a different spin on all of these as well.

And there's a there's an LBGTQ theology of the cross that really says, based on our contextual experience, here's what it might mean for us.

I hope this was not too boring.

And again, I do I want you to know you'll probably find threads for all of these in the scriptures because I think they're trying to do something like explain the unexplainable.

And if we say, oh, that's the one, I think we've missed the fact that the cup is very big and there's other flavors in it.

I think it's just wonderful in some ways that that all of this goes back to that the life and death of Jesus.

You know, that's pretty, pretty amazing.

That's pretty awesome.

Well, there's one last bit maybe to share with you, and it's about the stations of the cross.

Because we talked about that.

You know, people made that up completely.

There's actually no stations of the cross, not really.

Um people made it up in the 1100s when the crusaders came into Jerusalem and they took it over.

And by the way, they took it over in the worst possible way, right?

They killed everybody and they said, kill them all, God will recognize God's own.

So men, women, and children, Christians, Muslims, Jews killed everybody in the city.

The Crusader knights were in blood up to their knees, says the story.

I mean, they weren't.

There's drainage, you know, but uh that's the story.

Well, when they got there, they'd come all the way from Europe and they were in the holy land, and they realized there are these holy places.

And actually, it's Constantine's mother Helena who went in the early 300s and established pilgrimage sites, like the tomb of the Holy Sepulchre.

That's where Jesus allegedly was condemned, crucified, and buried, all right there in that one church.

She went there, and and there's stories about how she knew it was the right place and made that a pilgrimage site.

And pilgrimage became really important, it's always really been important.

If you were Jewish, you went on pilgrimage.

During Passover, you went to Jerusalem.

That's where you went.

That's why the numbers did that.

It's happened in Buddhism.

You go to the place, you go to the Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha sat under that banyan tree and became enlightened.

You go there so that you can remember the story.

You can connect.

That's why Christian pilgrimage is a big deal.

Because you go and you don't just say, Oh, it could have like this.

You say, Oh, this is where the story unfolded.

I can now imagine it and put myself here.

That's why people still do this.

Well, these people came great distance.

There's no airplanes or trains.

I mean, it took them months, even a year to get from France and England to the Holy Land.

The ones who survived and went home thought this is so neat.

I wonder if we couldn't sort of go on a pilgrimage here.

And that's where the stations of the cross came from in the 1100s.

They said, Oh, look, we can travel around in our churches or in our villages and remember the story in these 14 movements.

And some of them get embellished.

Like station 7 is where a woman wipes Jesus' face, right?

If you're Russian, her name's Veronica.

And when she wipes his face with the cloth, his face stays on the cloth.

I don't mean like the shroud of Tureen that's like three-dimensional.

I mean like the painting of the face magically stays on the cloth.

We're gonna make one like that.

Here, out of our scrap fabric.

Reminder, if you bring a scrap, that's give it to me, and I'll give it to the artist by Sunday.

Well, I won't be I won't be here after today, but you can just sort of drop it off with Ellen and and and she'll get it because it's her granddaughter gonna do it.

Um never done stations, there's little books of your dot catally.

No, we're gonna make it we're and we're gonna do it here.

No, we've done it.

But you need to know it's totally made up.

In the Gospel of John, unlike the other ones, they tell you Jesus carried his own cross.

Simon of Cyrene didn't do anything.

I mean, John disagrees with the other writers.

And you know the reason he's doing that is he's saying Jesus didn't need any help to do this, he did all that by himself.

I hope you find that interesting that the Gospels patently disagree about how all this worked out.

Listen, they never say Jesus fell.

Not once.

We made that up so that we can make the story dramatic, not just because we love drama, but so that we'd have emotion and imagination, so that we could remember the story.

And he falls three times, right?

I think he falls, does he fall three times?

But again, in the Gospels, he falls none times.

None.

Well, and there's there's three nails.

I mean, there's there's how they use the numerology is interesting.

And again, it's all made up.

So I would tell you here, I I thought about making new stations of the cross.

I really want to have station zero, where Mary looks at the baby Jesus eye to eye, lovingly, because that's where it all starts.

And I love to have Station of the Cross 15, where the wolf lies down with the lamb and the lion with the calf, because that's where it ends.

It does not end at the tomb, it ends with the resurrection, and not just of a body, but reconciliation of things that were in all of the other bits.

And I'll tell you why I'm allowed to make it up because the whole thing's made up anyway.

Right.

So eventually we're gonna do it.

We're gonna make that up.

I think that again, you know, I also think I love you because you remember.

And Ash Wednesday is the time to remember.

I just thought I've been remembering why we how did God hear it?

And and I think we remember it well when we don't make it about the gore and the suffering, but quite honestly, one of the interesting things about the Bible and those gritty stories is that they happen every day.

I don't know if you've seen The Last King of Scotland.

It's about Robert Mugabe.

It is filthy and gross and true about what he did to people in Africa that helped him in power.

The cross is a story about that.

And it's not just something that happened a long time ago.

It's about Hitler and Stalin, it's about Robert Mugabe, it's about um Assad and Saddam Hussein.

The cross happens every day of our lives somewhere in the world.

It's about power crushing people because life is cheap.

And in that sense it's true.

But when do you teach your children that?

I don't know the answer.

When you're teaching that the people from Belgium and who spent time in Africa, what those people from Belgium came down and did to the Africans too.

You're talking about the Afrikaners, yeah, sure.

And we celebrate these people, right?

You've heard of the Rhodes Scholars, right?

The Rhodes Scholars is named after Cecil Cecil Rhodes, the founder of imperialism, who said black lives are worth less than half of white lives.

I would I would go back to uh talking about how the land.

Yes.

Well, nobody washes in the blood of anything.

We've made that bit up.

What can wash away my sin?

Nothing but wait a minute.

I would get blood stains if I was washed in the blood of Jesus.

I'd be dirtier than I am now.

You would not be white as stone.

And there's no like fountain of blood that we're going to frolic in.

Like that's just yucky.

So again, I think the truth is, if you think about the symbol, what can take you away from sin, which means separation from God?

The life of Jesus.

Right?

The life force, the larger than life of Jesus.

And John is not saying this happens when we die.

God wants you to be realize God's present, God's at one moment with us right now.

You know, we we looked up Jordan's yesterday.

I watched the 40 minutes of walking.

I am so excited.

I hope you're excited.

See again, we're going on pilgrimage to remember the story.

Yeah, yeah, we're going Friday.

We leave on Friday.

You're both going, right?

Yeah, yeah.

You're going.

I'm going to go.

anybody else in this group going?

No.

Four of us have already gone.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll have a we'll have actually I hope we put a photographic installation in the hallway of the last two pilgrimages and we can walk the stations of the pilgrimage together sometime.

We come back Sunday the 17th.

I'll tell you though, don't skip church this Sunday because Bob Flick's gonna be here and he is such a cool guy.

Uh, you really will enjoy him.

Okay, back to the text for like five minutes before we run out of time.

I mean, Jesus says, My kingdom's not of this world.

And that's important to remember, it's not ordinary, it's extraordinary.

We're talking about a family, a family of humanity, and that's not ordinary.

That's extraordinary.

Please know that Pilate, he seems like he really wants to take care of Jesus.

He seems like a tragic figure.

He's a cruel, twisted man.

Uh, as most tyrants are.

Governors like Pilate were given authority to do whatever it took to get taxes and keep the peace.

And we know Pilate is a nasty guy who doesn't care anything about Jewish people because he sneaks in images of the emperor into the Temple Mount one night, and then the next day, something like 5,000 Jewish people lay down in protest, and he says, You can leave or I'll kill you all, and they do this.

And he he has to back down because if he kills 5,000 of his subjects, the Caesar's going to remove him because that's going to affect the tax base, you see.

Not because they worry about the violence.

Right.

Pilate killed a couple pretend messiahs, and actually he gets removed in the year 36 because there's a man called Judas the Galilean who goes on a pilgrimage to Mount Gerizim.

That's where the Samaritans worship, and they don't have any weapons, they're all on donkeys, and he kills every one of them, kills their families, kills their donkeys, and it affects the tax base, and he gets yanked.

But this is not a nice guy.

The other thing he didn't do, he never released a captive.

Not once.

Well, Mike, it's in the Gospels, and I want you to know what's in the Gospels is who the people pick.

You know his name?

Bar Mitzvah.

Son in Aramaic.

Right?

You know this word.

Who's your Abba?

And you see, they pick the son of the father instead of the son of the father.

I'm not saying it didn't happen, but it's really unlikely.

Why would you ever release George Washington when you're the Brits in the middle of the Revolutionary War?

He's your general.

The man's proven he's going to try to overthrow you.

Why would you let that person go?

No, this is about who we pick.

We pick the wrong son of the father.

Instead of picking the son, we pick this little ordinary business.

I mean, again, it could have happened, but most scholars doubt it.

What does it mean, though?

It means we'll pick somebody who will resort to violence to make God's kingdom come instead of somebody who's got a bigger way than that.

You notice that only John is the one who has Jesus getting punctured in the side.

Does not happen in the other gospels.

And blood and water come out, right?

Which is a baptismal symbol.

That's the reason we put that little drop of water in the chalice on Sunday.

I insist it's only a drop, so you don't water down the alcohol, which kills germs.

But that's that's the reason we do that.

Curiously enough, the lance that pierced Jesus in the side, now that's that's completely made up.

People didn't have lances back then.

They didn't ride, they didn't go jousting.

That's a medieval thing.

They would have used a spear or a Roman sword because the guy is at eye level.

Don't you see?

What happened was artists came back and they were drawing this.

So if you're gonna get the guy up there, you need you need one of those lances.

But supposedly that that's in Armenia for what it's worth, the first Christian kingdom.

The lance itself got preserved.

And this is why the Pope does that.

There's five, the Pope does this.

There's five wounds, there's the Trinity, and there's the two natures.

Right?

So everything's supposed to be symbolic.

The five wounds.

There's five wounds of Jesus the the wrists, the feet, and the side.

So five total.

This is three Father, Son, And Holy Spirit, three different but one, and these are the two natures of Jesus, human and divine.

So this is not a peace sign.

When the Pope does it, this is the Nicene Creed and a gesture.

If that makes sense.

You don't do this if you're Armenian.

No, no, if you're Ethiopic.

Because I don't believe Jesus had two natures.

You might just do that.

What is the the triangle?

Is there anything?

Well, nobody, yeah, that's weird to do.

Some people do this.

Uh but the triangle would be the Trinity, too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that I I I I put on my triangle because whenever I travel, I always wear it.

And I do I just I I see the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

So whenever I travel, I have to take them.

I'm still excited.

It's pretty exciting.

Um you notice the disciple Jesus loves one of the videos, people said they thought that that was a woman.

Well, it can't be, because in the story, Jesus says, Here's your son, and here's your mother, right?

Um did you notice that in Matthew, Jesus wears a scarlet robe, and in John they put a purple robe on him?

Let me tell you, John can't be right.

No soldier owned a scrap of purple unless they were in the equestrian class.

You aren't even allowed to own purple unless you were a noble.

You would have been hit with impersonating an officer.

Even if you were wealthy, and some centurions made some okay money, but centurions are like enlisted people.

They may have more authority than their officers.

This is true in the Army Navy, by the way.

The chief master sergeant, people respect that person way more than the lieutenants.

I want you to know that.

That's somebody who has worked their way up.

But, and you may know this, the lowest paid officer makes more than the highest paid enlisted.

This is sort of how it goes today in the modern military.

But purple was worth gold prices.

And not only could you not afford it, if you weren't a noble, you couldn't wear it.

So those soldiers did not have anything purple.

Don't you see?

They're trying to tell you not a fact, they're trying to tell you a truth.

They're dressing him as the king of the Jews and mocking him.

I love her.

So I had this, I had to wash this today and dry it because it's the only purple shirt I have.

I wanted to wear a purple today.

Well, see, this is an interesting thing, right?

Matthew probably gets it more historically right.

You could have put him in a scarlet rope, and if you know anything about Spartans, they all wore scarlet togas.

Do you know why?

If they got stabbed, you'd never know it.

Because their blood was the same color as their clothes.

So they seemed to be immortal people.

You'd stab them and have no blood.

So that maybe would make sense that you'd put a scarlet robe on a guy that could have been bleeding, but you never would put a$10,000 garment on a commoner whose buddy you'd ruin the robe.

And they didn't have one anyway.

So again, these are telling us theological things, I think, more than they're telling us um factual ones.

I mean, interestingly enough, in Mark, Jesus wears purple as well, but in Matthew it's it's scarlet.

So again, they they they disagree with each other.

Um you notice in Luke when Peter denies Jesus a third time, they make eye contact.

That doesn't happen in the other gospels.

They they look right in the eye at the denial.

I mean, the drama of the scent of the scene is sort of heightened.

Um, I don't know.

I think we're probably out of time.

One other thing that's maybe interesting.

When I always say um evangelical, there was a radio show that we talk about the physician's report of what happened to Jesus.

So these were like doctors who described what happened at the crucifixion.

They always said Jesus sweated his blood in the garden.

I don't know if you've heard that.

That only happens in Luke, but it's completely wrong.

Luke says his sweat was like blood, it doesn't say it was blood.

They've made up a medical condition called hemohydrosis that only Jesus has.

But but he's not like us if that's true.

I'm pretty sure the guy was sweating.

They say Jesus dies from a broken heart because when they pierce him, water comes out.

But but but friends, if we take it so literally, I think we might forget to take it seriously.

Jesus didn't die in a way no one else dies.

It seems like he died from shock, which was pretty normal.

And the water coming out, that's not even in the other gospels, it's in John, is trying to tell you that his life, Jesus' life, is what we're to be washed in at baptism.

And John uses this the branch of the hyssop or the hyssop?

The hyssop, yeah, like a high priest would use.

Oh, okay.

It's like, I mean, it's a it's like a weed that grows in Israel and it's white, and it's like that's what we fling stuff with sometimes.

That's what the high priest would fling with.

Oh, okay, okay.

I I really overfunctioned today, sorry.

I'll be quieter next time.

I'll let you know that we are.