On a Hill Far Away: John 19:16-22 - Palm Sunday

Whenever I’m in the Uniontown area, I always make it a point to look for the large white cross that stands at the summit of Camp Jumonville. This has been one of my favorite places to visit in the Laurel Highlands because it is a deeply spiritual experience to hike the steep three-quarter mile trail to the top and stand beneath the enormous cross looking out over Southwestern Pennsylvania. 

Crosses have been erected on mountaintops all throughout the world, most famously in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. There’s a cross that stands atop Gosser Hill as well as one that stands at the end of my street in Lower Burrell, which can be seen driving up the Tarentum Bridge. 

These crosses stand as beautiful reminders of God’s presence in our communities and world.

Photo by Matteo del Piano on Unsplash

However, there was a hill outside Jerusalem where crosses were raised, not to comfort and encourage people, but to terrorize them.

Golgotha, or Calvary, was where Rome asserted its dominance over the Jewish people as they entered Jerusalem. It was Rome’s way of telling everyone Jerusalem was under Roman jurisdiction, if you mess with Rome, this is what will happen to you.

In today’s Scripture, Jesus is crucified with two others on that hill. The chief priests are arguing with Pilate over a sign he placed above Jesus’s head which read “Jesus of Nazareth king of the Jews.” Meanwhile, the soldiers are casting lots to claim Jesus’s garment, like a trophy. All the while, Jesus’s mother, Jesus’s aunt, and the two Mary’s look on in horror at what they’ve done to Jesus. 

Crucifixion was the most brutal form of capital punishment ever devised until the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags. This is humanity at its most depraved.

We see this same depravity in ambitious dictators who wage war to restore ancient empires. We see it in terrorist governments and terrorist movements who wage wars for God. We see it in the drug cartels bringing entire nations to their needs, all the while exporting misery for tremendous profit. We see it in the exploitation of human labor for maximum profit. 

The miracle of the passion is that Jesus, the Son of God, does not spare himself from the depravity of humankind or from the agony of death. No other god has ever done such a thing. And that shows us how God has chosen to work in the world: not by avoiding suffering or taking up arms against evil, but by taking on the flesh of the helpless and the innocent and suffering as one of them.

That means, when you look at our world today, and you see the images the bombs exploding, refugees, and starving children, you are seeing the helplessness of God. You see it in hospitals and hospices, orphanages, slums, asylums, and even prisons, addiction recovery centers, and domestic violence shelters. Where human suffering is at its greatest, where human evil is at its worst, where spirits are broken, Jesus is there. 

It’s not enough just to believe this truth. We must live this truth. 

This is why the Church must pray fervently for our troubled world. This is why the Church cannot stay within the comfort of our buildings while all these terrible things happen. This is why we cannot stay silent in the face of injustice or turn a blind eye to human suffering. If we do, we’re reducing the cross to something sentimental. 

The cross that destroys death and evil challenges all aspects of how we think, how we speak, and how we live. The cross calls us to repentance. Repentance begins with a prayerful examination of how your enjoyment of privilege and comfort might inadvertently be contributing to the suffering and injustice in our world. Who’s harvesting your food, sewing your clothing, mining the rare earth materials for your electronics? What about all the food we waste, and all the pollution we generate?

To deny our need to change is to reject the new life Christ died to give you.

For Rome, crucifixion bore witness to its brutality. We are the people of the cross. We are the Church. What will our witness be? That’s the key question here when we consider every crisis in our world, along with every conflict and controversy that divides us. 

We often forget that faith is a public thing, not a private thing to be kept within the confines of our minds. The cross stands not only on a hill far away at a time long ago, but right here, in our communities, in the cities, and anywhere people suffer. 

Bearing witness is not a one-way street. I honestly believe that the people God has led me to serve were greater witnesses to me than I was to them, and that their witness changed me more than I could have changed them. It’s impossible to volunteer at the Clothing Closet, the Food Bank, the Pot Love Meals, Vacation Bible School, or the mission trips, and not come back transformed. That’s the power of the cross.

That shouldn’t surprise us when you remember the criminal who confessed Jesus, and Jesus said to him, “today, you will be with me in paradise.” That shouldn’t surprise us when you remember how the centurion confessed that Jesus was God’s Son after he witnessed Jesus forgiving the soldiers who crucified him. Why should we expect anything less when we who are baptized in Christ show up to the least and the lost? At the cross, Jesus took the fullness of human suffering and human depravity and turned it into salvation. Christ is crucified, Christ is risen, but the ministry of the cross continues.