Last weekend, a church group fell foul of Easter Eve shoppers and the police by staging what the Age reported as “a bloody Crucifixion re-enactment in the heart of Geelong”. Apparently the realism of a real person hanging from the cross and smeared with fake blood led to a number of complaints from members of the public on the grounds that the tableau constituted offensive behaviour. The ‘actor’ who portrayed Jesus said he “had been on the cross to remind people of what Easter was all about.”

 I think that it is important not to get hooked on the violence of the crucifixion.

The cross is undeniably an instrument of torture, but it is first and last about the persistence of God’s love of us.  It is not for us to wallow in the terrible things we do to God, at Calvary and every single day.  Yes, we crucify the Lord of glory continually, and the cross with all its blood and guts is ever present in human affairs.  We only need open our eyes to see how Jesus dies again and again in the most dreadful ways imaginable, and each time we die with him, losing a little more of our humanity on every single occasion.  At Easter we are certainly given a picture of ourselves as crucifiers, as those who cause pain and transmit it to others. 

The gospel will never tell us that we are innocent, but it does tell us that we are loved.  In asking us to receive and consent to that love, it asks us to identify with, and to make our own, love’s comprehensive vision of all we are and all we have been.  This is the transformation of desire as it affects our own selves.  The world cannot be unmade, but it can be transformed.  We can never again be a blank canvas, like a new-born baby, but we can be redeemed.  We see this in the way the betrayers Judas and Peter are treated in the gospel.  Neither is written off.  There is hope for both, and there is hope for us all.  Good Friday is not just about what happens to Jesus, but also about what happens to his friends, including us.   Likewise, the total Christ who is raised to life at Easter is not simply the dead Jesus mysteriously resuscitated, as we look on from afar, a bunch of goggling spectators.  As one English Bishop rightly said a few years back, the resurrection, whatever it is, is not a conjuring trick with bones!  The raised Christ, the total Christ, includes all of us who are now his body in the world. 

Everything that happens to Jesus happens to us.  His passover from death to life is ours as well.

If the crucified Jesus is alive, no shadow of death can touch us.  We are forever set free, unbound from our grave-clothes.  Like the first disciples, we are ourselves evidence of the resurrection rather than gatherers of evidence 

Christ is risen! Alleluia!

 Archdeacon Tony White,

Anglican Parish of Kyneton