PASSION
A church down south was hosting a passion play during Lent several years ago. The director wanted it to be powerful and dramatic,realistic and haunting –sort of a Passion of the Christ before Mel Gibson had thought to do it.
And he had succeeded.It was as graphic and gruesome as any stage production can be.The audience watched in silent horror as the good-looking young man chosen to play Jesus appeared to be beaten, battered, and bloodied before them.
The sense of anguish in the room was palpable. When the actor sighed from the cross, “it is finished,” and bowed his head,one particular woman in the audience rushed up on stage,with heavy tears falling from her eyes.
You see, she had never heard the story before. And so, when the handsome young Jesus appeared to die, she ran up on stage, grabbed the actor’s feet,and through her unrestrained tears,wailed to him and to the congregation, "He can’t have died. A man this good cannot have died like this. Jesus cannot be dead!”
Now, the woman playing Mary the mother of Jesus,in an effort to comfort the nearly hysterical woman, blurted out, “oh, it’s okay, honey; he don’t stay that way for long!”
It is tempting to say that, isn’t it?
We stare at the cross …
We behold Christ’s suffering ...
and just when we feel tears start to burn tracks down our faces, we say to ourselves: “oh, it’s okay, honey!” It’s tempting …
And not just for us as individuals … but for the church as a whole.
The Oberammergau Passion Play … one of the oldest and perhaps the most famous passion play in the world … has announced that they are shifting their focus away from the Passion … more to the teachings of Jesus, … more Resurrection, less Crucifixion! Why? The Passion is too hard.
Here in our churches, more often than not, we skip from Palm Sunday to Easter,leap from “Hosanna” to “Alleluia,”parade from celebration to celebration with perhaps a nod in the direction of Calvary – but only a nod.
The first Good Friday service I ever preached, I walked into the church that Friday night, and there was a bunny on the altar and jelly beans and Easter grass lining the chancel rail.
“It’s okay, honey; he don’t stay that way for long.”
But, the judgment of Lamentations thunders over us: "Is it nothing to you, all who pass by?”
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But, you … you have spent a day lingering, refusing to rush ahead; you have stayed this day beneath the cross of Jesus.
You have taken your place – next to His Mother and Her sister. Next to His friend John. Next to Mary Magdalene. Next to Mary the wife of Clopas. There you are. Beneath the cross.
Your theme for this day, Passion, gives all of us the chance to pause, and to let Christ’s Passion fill our imaginations -- to let the sounds and sights and smells of a Friday in ancient Palestine fill our senses this day and this night -- to let it have its way with us.
Passion invites us into an upper room,
as Jesus takes bread, blesses and breaks it, and calls it his Body.
Passion invites us to a Garden to eavesdrop
As, through tears of blood, he prays for another way.
Passion invites us to hear
the steady dirge of soldier footfall
down the garden path.
Passion invites us to feel the lips of Judas touch our own cheeks.
Passion invites us to fear
in the ruckus that ensues as Jesus is arrested and
Peter strikes back.
Passion invites us to chase after
as our Lord is drug
from palace to courtroom to palace to courtyard.
Passion invites us to watch
as disciples betray by abandoning,
and betray by deceiving.
Passion invites us to behold our Lord
interrogated and condemned
by the testimony of false witnesses against him.
Passion invites us to hear the judgment of the Roman governor
and then to feel the splash of water as Pilate washes his hands of Jesus.
Passion invites us to watch
as Christ trudges under the weight of the cross to Calvary.
Passion invites us to hear the thud of hammers,
the crack of bone, the squish of flesh,
the scream of agony.
Passion invites us to hold his mother
and cry with her as she watches her baby struggle for breath,
as she sings once again
that sweet lullaby she once sang to put him to bed at night.
Passion invites us to see a spear be thrust in his side,
And to feel the spray of water and blood from his heart.
Passion demands we not avert our gaze from his suffering,
“for he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities.”
God – who was as near to us in Christ as God was in the Garden at the beginning –
now retreats from us a bit more with each labored, dying breath.
Passion invites us to feel the absence of God in the world.
(which, incidentally, is why we don’t come to the Table tonight …
In the place where we celebrate Christ’s real presence, Passion invites us to know the real absence of Christ in our midst.)
Beneath the cross of Jesus, it is not okay, honey.
The world has gone mad.
The earth trembles at what is happening.
Darkness closes in.
For this day, death reigns.
Hope is destroyed.
Love is murdered.
God dies.
Good Lord, no wonder we hurry on by.
No wonder we rush toward Easter –
When angels comfort, stones move, tombs are empty.
On Sunday, we are surrounded by bunnies and bonnets and baskets
and each in their own way reassures: “It’s okay, honey.”
But, today, on this Friday, beneath the cross of Jesus,
It’s not okay … not just yet.
For tonight, the words of Charles Wesley come to mind –
“’tis mystery all! th’Immortal dies.
Who can explain his strange design?”[1]
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Which makes me ask …
Why would anyone...why would anyone choose to linger beneath the cross of Jesus? Why, on a Friday night in June in Durham, North Carolina, would we come to the cross? Most Friday nights on this campus, the cross is the last place people stop. So, why would we?
There is only one reason to take our place here,
To sit and wait and watch, to feel the Passion in its fullness,
To enter into the suffering of the Master,
To feel the dis-ease that comes from knowing that God could suffer like this.
Love. As the thirteenth century mystic said, “love is the hammer that nails us to the cross.”[2]
It is love that makes us come to the cross, and it is love that makes us stay here.
Friends, we come and linger because here we behold the love of God.
Here, we experience the depth of divine compassion.
Here, we meet the Lord who says to Julian of Norwich,
“If I could have suffered more, I would have suffered more.”
“If I could have died once for each, I would have died once for each.”
And here, from the foot of the cross, from this vantage,
in response to His Suffering and in response to His Love,
we can turn back to the world and its suffering –
and risk loving our neighbor by entering their suffering, too.
We can risk stretching out our arms
To embrace the world that Christ died to save.
Friends, if we just rushed ahead …
If we just nodded in this direction …
If we hurried on toward Sunday as if Friday never happened …
How would we ever learn to love?
For tonight, it’s not okay just yet, honey.
But, I have a feeling …
That if this suffering can teach us to love,
That Love itself can raise the dead. Amen. 
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