The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
March 29, 2002

Life and Love Redefined
John 19:1-37 

We have four Gospels, not because the Gospels are identical and thus prove what a faithful record we have of past events. We have four Gospels because the early church found that the four Gospels, when read together, give the most complete picture of the events in Jesus’ life. But our tendency is to drop the Gospels into a blender, mixing the four accounts until we get one homogenized view of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. However, I feel that we can benefit at times from taking a hard look at one Gospel’s way of portraying an event. 

The Good Friday Gospel is John’s Gospel. John, who emphasizes love throughout his writings, gives us a unique picture of Jesus’ passion in which we believers are marked as God’s own people as Jesus redefines life and love through his words and actions. 

John makes it crystal clear that Jesus had a choice on that violent Friday we now call Good. Listen to Jesus words to Pilate, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.” John makes it clear that Jesus’ powerlessness is a choice.  

John also underscores the timing of these events. Pilate is warned by those working behind the scenes to get Jesus crucified that if he lets Jesus live he is no friend of the emperor. At just that moment, Pilate steps out to the judgment seat at Gabbatha, the stone pavement. John notes that it is the sixth hour on the 14^th day of Nisan. This little detail lets us know what is happening not so far away in the Temple. The sixth hour is noon and at noon on the Day of Preparation, the Temple priests begin to slaughter the Passover lambs.[1]  

This is where it is easy to misunderstand the significance of what John is telling us. To our modern ears, when we hear of a priest slaying a lamb, our first association is that of a Temple sacrifice. However, Passover lambs were not a sin offering. Passover lambs meant in Jesus’ lifetime what they had meant in Moses’ lifetime. The Passover lamb marked the households of the children of Israel as God’s own people.  

What John is showing us is at the very moment when the Temple leadership needs to be preparing for this covenant festival, which recalls allegiance to God, they are declaring that Jesus should be crucified. The Temple leadership’s final and fatal declaration that Jesus is not the Messiah comes as they declare they have no king but the emperor.   

John’s Gospel emphasizes Jesus’ kingship. This taps into a deep vein of Jewish theology. In the book of Judges and in First Samuel, the people of Israel proclaimed they had no king but God. Then with Saul and David, Israel’s kings were God’s hand picked men, who God adopted as his own son (according to the language of the Psalms). The only true king of God’s people could be the one raised up by God.  

The Romans could no more raise up a true king for Israel, than could the Persian or Syrians who had also ruled Israel through their own puppet kings. The Gospels give us an example of this problem as all four accounts make it clear that the puppet King Herod does not act like a true King of Israel. This problem of suffering under false kings is why the Prophet Isaiah cried out “O Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but your name alone we acknowledge” (Isaiah 26:13).[2]  

At the very point when the leadership should acknowledge God’s name alone, they proclaim their allegiance to the Roman Emperor. This was politically expedient to be sure and the safest way to get what they wanted. We should not particularly single out this particular group of religious leaders as the most corrupt of all time. There is always a tendency among those in power to say and do the things that will get them what they want.  

Pilate too is playing his own games in naming Jesus as King. We know Pilate through both Jewish and Roman history to be a ruthless governor. Knowing that, we see how Pilate uses Jesus’ trial to poke fun at the nationalist hopes of the Jews. Pilate’s soldiers fashion Jesus as a King of the Jews for the singular pleasure of then beating him up.  

The soldiers vent their anger at this backwater province by using Jesus as a punching bag. Then Pilate has Jesus crucified with a sign over his head proclaiming in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek that this one who is dying on the cross is the King of the Jews. Pilate is saying, “This is what Rome will do to any who dare to raise the nationalist hopes of Israel.” 

Of course, John is playing off the irony of these events. The Messiah is the true King of Israel. The very thing that Pilate says of Jesus in order to humiliate him is the deeper truth of this passion story. Jesus is fulfilling his destiny as the Messiah in his death. John gives his greatest concentration of scriptural quotations and allusions here in the crucifixion account, as he wants to make us see that the prophets predicted all that is happening.  

Jesus remains in control in John’s passion story. As he is dying, Jesus tells the disciple whom he loves that he is to take Jesus’ mother Mary as his own mother and she is to take him as her son. Still the one in control he declares I am thirsty, which John makes sure we also know is so that he might fulfill scripture by having those who kill him offer him wine to drink. With his task on earth complete, Jesus willingly offers up his life declaring, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. 

With his life willingly given up, the scene continues as the Roman soldiers continue unwittingly to fulfill scripture. The scene is now beyond Jesus’ control and yet the events taking place are just as the prophets had foretold. Though no one would ever have guessed that the suffering servant of Isaiah would be the Messiah, the signs had been there for hundreds of years. Jesus suffered and died as God had told the prophets he would. 

John makes it clear that Jesus has willingly given up his life because of love. John has been setting up the readers of his Gospel all along to make sure we gain the deeper understanding of Jesus’ death and resurrection. John teaches throughout his Gospel what is meant by the Greek word agape. Agape is a form of self-giving love. John uses the word Agape 27 times, each time adding to our understanding of the self-giving love Jesus has for all creation.  

Listen to what Jesus has already told us about self-giving love before we get to this passion story. He said: 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

“For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.” (John 10:17)

“Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:25)

 “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35)

Then on his last evening with his disciples, Jesus explains how they too are to love as he has loved, saying, 

 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” (John 15:12-15)

Then, as John tells the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, he makes it clear that Jesus is in control on the cross. By showing that Jesus remains in control in his death, John emphasizes that Jesus’ life is not taken but given. Jesus makes his life a gift of love. The one thing we humans want to hold on to the most, our own lives, Jesus offers willingly.  

Loving the world as God loves the world is what got Jesus in to trouble to start with. Jesus loved the unlovable and in so doing, he broke down barriers between people. Clean and unclean, sinner and saint, were categories that seemed to mean nothing to Jesus. Jesus saw everyone as a child of God. Breaking down the barriers between people threatened the status quo, the way the world had always worked.

The people he ministered among were no more ready for the love of God to be shared so freely among their society’s outcasts and enemies any more than we are. By living among us, acting as God acts among people, Jesus upset people. Jesus was enough of a threat to the way of the world that it got him killed. It was probably inevitable. God did not have to work behind the scenes to get people to kill Jesus. Jesus just needed to go live out the meaning of agape, self-giving love and before long someone would want him to die. 

John connects Jesus death to the Passover lamb as the Passover lamb marked the people of Israel as God’s people. Jesus as the perfect Passover lamb marks those who share in his death as God’s people.  

This was the early Christian teaching on baptism. Paul wrote, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:3-4) 

Jesus’ death defines our lives as through it we are taught to love as God loves. To say that God is love is not merely some trite flowery phrase. God is love because God loves no matter what the cost. If we are to love as God loves then we will have to live our lives as Jesus lived. Jesus was not willing to give up on the love of God for all people no matter what the cost. When the cost became a shameful death on a Roman cross then Jesus willingly died a shameful death on a Roman cross.  

Jesus commanded his disciples to love one another. He told them that the mark of a child of God was to share freely the love of God. Saying “Love one another” must have sounded nice and cozy, safe and warm that evening in the upper room. But by the next afternoon, Jesus had shown how far the love of God could go and does go.  

Those of us who want to follow Jesus must redefine our own concepts of life and love. Life becomes the way to show love and love that is willing to be faithful unto death is the means of life. It is only by giving over our own lives to living out the love God has for all creation that we can gain our lives. For “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” 

Amen.