It has become a powerful Good Friday tradition in many church communities to end the Lenten journey with reflections upon the “seven last words Christ.”  Jesus’ final fragmented statements have offered comfort, challenge, insight, inspiration and hope to weary Holy Week pilgrims nearing their paschal destination, and are considered to be all the more important for having been borne to us upon the winds of Our Savior’s final breaths.

And yet, on this day Jesus is not the only one whose dying speaks.  This is also the day when Sin, in beholding the Crucified One, is confronted by his condemnation.  This is the day Death dies.  And yet, these forces refuse to go silently into the night.  The Old Man hurls protests of His own against the New Humanity that confronts him from the cross.  Many of our churches recognize this voice in their practice of collectively reading the Passion narrative on Palm Sundays.  When the congregation reads together the words of the angry crowd, we participate in giving voice to the “last words of the Old Humanity.”

In his Homiletics, Karl Barth claimed that, “certainly something has to be said about human sins and errors.   Yet it ought to be from the perspective of sin forgiven and error removed.  Sin undoubtedly has to be taken seriously, but forgiveness even more seriously…Sin must be spoken about only as the sin which is taken away by the Lamb of God.”  It is in this Spirit and with this intent that we offer these six meditations on the “Last Words of the Old Humanity,” not to obsess over our brokenness, but rather to more clearly envision the Gospel of this gift of grace granted in the dying of Jesus Christ on this Good Friday.  To Him be the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever.  Amen.

I. “Away with him!  Release for us Barabbas!” (Luke 23:18) by Carole Baker
II. “But they kept shouting, ‘Crucify him, crucify him!’” (Luke 23:21, ESV) by Tyler Atkinson
III. “Hail, King of the Jews!” (Mark 15:18) by Tyler Garrard
IV. “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross!” (Mark 15:29) by Margaret McWilliams
V. “He saved others; he cannot save himself…He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to.” (Matthew 27:42) by Maria Swearingen
VI. “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come and take him down!” (Mark 15:36) by Matthew Nickoloff

Note: These “last words” are taken from the Synoptic Gospels, and by no means exhaust all of the possible selections.  We envision these reflections as an open invitation for readers to discover other “last words” and to make their own meditations as we together contemplate the paschal mysteries.

I. “Away with him!  Release for us Barabbas!” (Luke 23:18)

by Carole Baker

Peer pressure-it isn’t something we leave behind when we walk across the stage to receive our high school diploma. It may be a phrase adults use with a hint of nostalgia, but even as adults we continue to face it–and give into it– every day. We want, just like we did in high school, to appear relevant and savvy. Maybe it’s less these days about wearing the right clothes, or hanging out at the right Starbucks, but we’re still trying to say the right things, read the right books, drop the right names, etc. It takes more than an informed conscience to resist the crescendo of collective assent. The wave picks us up and before we know it we’re on top, having no where to look but down. Like those swept up by the growing call for the release of Barabbas, rather than the man who had no charge against him, we too would rather embrace camaraderie than jeopardize our good standing among peers. I imagine, however, that though the prevailing voices calling for Barabbas’ release won out, they were not the only voices in the crowd. I imagine Jesus stood there able to hear some voices crying out for him. But who would be so bold, so brave, as to throw themselves against the wave-risking their reputation and possibly even their life?  Who would speak out, not for the self-satisfaction of intellectual dissent, but purely out of the conviction that Christ is who he said he is? Who would love this man so deeply that their desire for self-protection would be consumed by their love of truth? And how on earth could such a love be possible?

We are incapable of resisting the crowd until something bigger takes over us. When this happens it’s nothing short of a miracle–something only God can do. And he did. Indeed, the love that enabled the few voices to cry out for him that day when Christ was handed over is the same love that raised him from the dead. Only this love can overcome the fears that ensure we’re beholden to the crowd. And only this love is big enough to keep us from drowning when the wave of assent comes crashing down as quickly as it was built.

Carole Baker is a Research Associate at Duke Divinity School.

II. “But they kept shouting, ‘Crucify him, crucify him!’” (Luke 23:21, ESV)

by Tyler Atkinson

I am struck by the repetitious nature of the crowd’s cry, “Crucify him!”  It reminds me of a recent trip to Target, in which I heard a young boy screaming to his mother, “Toy, toy, toy!”  The constant screams and roars were agonizing.  Having heard the cries first, upon seeing him I realized the boy was cute and appeared harmless.  How could such a cute child rage with such fury?  While in the checkout line, I responded to my wife with the kind of indignation to which we all can relate: “That boy has not stopped screaming for the last half hour,” which means, “I wish she would take him out of the store!  We’re trying to shop in peace here!”  Only after the damage to the membranes in the ear canal was assured, the mother gave the boy what he wanted.

It is easy to read over the Passion narratives without pausing to dwell on the durative force of the crowd’s cries.  Like the mother in the store, only after the constant screaming of the crowd does Pilate assuage their rage.  When we “enter into the narrative,” we are forced to reckon with the reality that we do not stop screaming until we see Jesus on the cross.  We are like angry children not getting our way, except with all the nastiness that grown-ups are able to muster after years of practice.  But, we are quick to think we are beyond begging to put Jesus on the cross.  Like the little boy, we appear harmless. It is easy for us to cover the nastiness of our sin, especially when we are taking theology classes and preparing for ordination.  We are tempted to abstract our sin to passive rejection rather than the aggressive pursuit of execution.

When we read that the crowds keep on yelling for Pilate to crucify Jesus, we want to progress quickly that we might make it to the resurrection.  Like my agitation at the boy’s screaming and the mother’s not sparing us the racket, it pains us to feel the weight of the yells.  It is hard to picture our selves in the midst of the crowd with our fists in the air and our teeth grinding away, stomping around like an angry three-year-old.  Yet, Luke forces us to dwell there for a moment.  In a world where we so desperately want to be spared the noise of unsatisfied children, we must listen to the constant yells, “Crucify him, crucify him!”  I am thankful for the screaming child in Target, for his temper tantrum was but a smattering of my own scowls at the Son of God; and I am reminded even more of the radical mercy of God in Jesus Christ in converting my “hell no’s” to Pilate’s suggestion to release Jesus into a joyful “yes” to the Gospel.  God’s forgiveness in Jesus has overtaken not only my rejection of the Son of God, but even my plea to execute him on a Roman cross… “Grace that is greater than all my sin!”

-Tyler Atkinson is a second year M.Div. student at Duke Divinity School

III. “Hail, King of the Jews!” (Mark 15:18)

by Tyler Garrard

“Hail, King of the Jews!”  Frederick Buechner says we should translate it, “Head Jew,” just to make sure everybody gets the joke.  The soldier’s cry against Jesus is our cry too.  Embarrassed by his humility, we loudly proclaim him King without ever considering what it meant for him, or for ourselves, to wear such a crown.  For Jesus, to be King meant to subject his body to the will of those who, only a few days before, half-heartedly cheered and placed branches at his feet.  It meant being beaten and whipped.  It meant giving up the existence he knew for one he did not, relinquishing the last breath of a life that had given so much life to others.  It meant death on a cross, abandoned by his friends and his family.  What does it mean for us?

For most, living a cruciform life will never involve bearing the shame Jesus bore.  I would, however, like to think Jesus’ question, “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” means more to us than simply talking about the need for social justice and occasionally purchasing a cup of fairly traded coffee.  But, at the same time, Jesus, the Christ, saves us from this expectation.  He meets us where we are and says, “You do not have to do this.  I have done everything.  My grace is sufficient.  It is finished.”  Those are comforting words that pierce the heart of a broken world where, more often than not, the goal is thought to be to be the best, the brightest, the richest, the smartest.  Christ saves us from this, from ourselves.  He meets us in the midst of great fear and heartache and brokenness, and shows us what it means to be King in the Kingdom of God.   He becomes the King that we do not want to be, the King we cannot be.  Thanks be to God.

Tyler Garrard is a second year M.Div student at Duke Divinity School.

IV. “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross!” (Mark 15:29)

by Margaret McWilliams

Good Friday is a good day for silence.  It’s the day, more than any other on the liturgical calendar, when I want to sit in sackcloth and ash.  The grey smudge imposed upon my forehead six weeks ago won’t quite cut it on this side of Lent.  And this isn’t because I suddenly remember how I didn’t pray enough or give alms or deny myself like a pious devotee.  All those things are true about many of our Lenten experiences.  And those things probably remind us of ways we build “temples” to secure ourselves to keep a safe distance from Jesus.  Lent isn’t about failing or succeeding to keep a kind of New Year’s Resolution.  We know this deep down…even if Easter can get lost in the ecstatic return to old comforts (like eating dessert on a daily basis, which I’m the last person to argue against).

Today isn’t about you or me.  Yet this Lenten journey has been about us in an important way.  We have been preparing for this Passiontide.  Somehow, with sighs too deep for words, the Spirit within us has been forming our hearts to receive a God-forsaken God.  As we reach the cross in Mark’s Gospel, the unbearable blow of divine abandonment courses through Jesus’ veins; yet He is the One whose majesty, according to Karl Barth, is His lowliness.   Perhaps we shake our heads in horror at this whole scene, at the restless groans of God-crucified, hanging beaten and blasphemed, mocked and misunderstood by the flesh of His flesh.  But before Mark lets us bolt for the nearest exit, he reminds us that head-shaking is exactly what the derisive passers-by did at the cross and in David’s lament quoted by our Lord in His darkest hour.  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?…All who see me mock at me, they make mouths at me, they shake their heads. Have we no part in today’s taunts and tragedy?  We would shake all the ash off our heads and hate this Jesus who disrupts our temple enterprises, who challenges our idols of security and power.  Friends, Good Friday is good because God doesn’t abandon us to the temples we construct.  Christ Crucified is the temple; He is the shape of our new life together.  God doesn’t seek to destroy us.  He longs to lavish us with the REAL thing, the REAL relationship, which involves REAL flesh-and-blood participation in His hallowed humility.  Have mercy on us, O Lord, in our intemperate love of worldly comfort and impatient longing.  When we are quick to save you and move from the cross in our rush to Easter, we misunderstand your majesty.  Make us temples shaped into your beloved image that our lowliness might be transformed into Yours.  Amen.

Margaret McWilliams is a second year M.Div student at Duke Divinity School.

V. “He saved others; he cannot save himself…He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to.” (Matthew 27:42)

by Maria Swearingen

Deliverance.

Freedom.

Liberation.

Salvation.

These are words we long for.  Even those of us who have never had chains on our hands or whips to our backs.  They are words we believe in.  They are words we profess with zeal.  They are the mortar of our castles, the yeast in our bread, the mission statements of our constitutions and institutions.

We cherish them, feed them, coddle them, adorn them, wave them like palm branches.

But, when DELIVERANCE is raised before us, bound and beaten and whipped, we quietly wonder if it will be strong enough to crawl through our grip of security, of order, of confinement.  We anxiously gawk at it in anticipation waiting for a holy spectacle, hoping that our front row seat near the cross will be worth it this time.  Inwardly, we question what we’ve approved, what we’ve done to this man, but outwardly, we proclaim our consent.

“He saved others; he cannot save himself!.”

Will he save himself?  Was he truly our DELIVERANCE?  Did we strike FREEDOM?  Did we batter LIBERATION?  Did we crucify SALVATION?

“Let God deliver him now.”

Are these words of malice?  Are they words of sorrow?  Are they words of skepticism?  Regardless, when sitting on the pages of our Bibles and our hearts, they are contusive.  They are cutting.  And they are terribly ironic.

Was Jesus delivered on this strange day, where powers and principalities licked their chops and the Holy of Holies bled like me?  Did God deliver this one who knew, like a lover knows the rhythmic breath of her beloved, the One who sent him?

Will he SAVE himself?  Will God DELIVER him?

We are too angry, too bothered, too concerned with our own definitions of those words to even care.  We are too tired, too confused, too afraid to FREE him from our inability to taste the things of God.

We are too blind, too deaf, too slathered in the shades our own constructs to live beyond them.  And this man writhes in anguish as we toss our thoughts, our concerns, our questions his way.

“He trusts in God.”

In God we Trust.  Unless he hangs before us, twisted and torn.  Broken and breathless.  Terrifying and small.

And so our mission statements are leather-bound and pocket-sized…catalogued in the pits of our own making.  Lost to themselves.  Bound by our power to kill FREEDOM.

How shall we be saved when SALVATION is stained with blood?  How shall will be saved when DELIVERANCE is bound by our ropes and nails?

We wait at the foot of the cross.

Maria Swearingen is a second year M.Div at Duke Divinity School.

VI.  ”Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come and take him down!” (Mark 15:36)

by Matthew Nickoloff

Before us, a human being rages against the coming of the night; his primal scream of anguished abandonment and nascent nihilism echoes against the leaden sky.  Death crouches at the door, TS Eliot’s “yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-pains,” preparing him to “prepare a face to meet the faces” he will meet, to lift and “drop a question on your plate,” the final, heart-rending question that secretly lurks within us all:  eloi eloi lemah sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Baffled by the infinite depths of mystery, the crowd responds as only people who have no answer can respond: with hermeneutical explanation.  Such authentic grief, such heart-rending honesty momentarily unmasks the gleeful savagery with which we had so mindlessly suffered our murderous rage.  Such a cry of dereliction exposes all our derelictions as cowardly and empty.  All of our projects and pursuits are revealed as nothingness.  What is this fresh account, this new narration, this strange perspective?  It does not fit into the disciplines we have known, does not readily parse with our scientias, does not submit to the violence of our intellectual rigors!  It must be explained.

We cannot tolerate so intimate an engagement, an appeal over our heads to the God we would rather forget.  And so we follow, with J. Alfred Prufrock, down “Streets that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent/To lead you to an overwhelming question:” “perhaps he is calling for Elijah!”  Yes, this strange lunatic stretched before us upon the canvas of the cross, he seems to be contextualizing himself into the Old Testament narrative!  Fascinating!  Let us continue to look upon his pain, his intriguing interpretation of his situation, let us see if Elijah will come!  A fine dissertation topic, a brilliant sermon illustration, a story to tell to the boys down at the bar!  Finally, something real, prophetic, actual!

How often have I stood before the sick and dying during a hospital visit, caught the tears of a suffering loved one, read the account of an injustice or a torture, and sought to fix for myself the dilemma in which I find myself being confronted with that which refuses explanation by offering such “reasons why?”  Do I not, in the process, make a spectacle of the suffering, a fetish of torturous injustice, a project out of paradox?  How deeply I desire for something to happen without the commitment entailed by that happening to enter the happening myself!  Does the mere invocation of a prophet’s name or tradition or subversion serve anything other than to buffer me from the disaster of a direct confrontation with the Living God?   Is it enough to speak of “the poor,” to read “Dr. King,” to look for Elijah in places where I refuse to enter and suffer myself?  Easier to stand back and interpret, to await the spectacle, to speculate as an armchair prophet, and forget the nails and hammer in my hands.

True grief refuses to be contained by the answers of naïve seminarians; as I have too often been forced to learn and accept, my well-intended efforts are not enough.  Christ hangs before us upon the wood of distanced nuances, refusing to be made a spectacle, defying classification, exposing the absurdities of educated explanations.  The cross is the ultimate resistance to all such foolishness, inviting me instead to take the risk of stepping forth from the noisy mob to sit in the ashes, within the echo-chamber of the derelictive cry, to listen to the voice of another, however strange and inexplicable it may seem.  The spectacle of Jesus tears me forth from the spectacle in which I am participating, and bids me come and die, that I might discover with Him, in the depths of His death, the life which lives beyond all explanation.

Matthew Nickoloff is a second year M.Div. student and co-editor of Confessio’s Dispatches from the Front.