YONGE HAELETH, OR, A YOUNG HERO

In a further pondering on the Passion, I was suddenly struck by a curious doubleness. On the one hand, of course, Yeshua suffers: he undergoes, he is the victim. Yet on the other hand, I’m fascinated by the way he commands the situation. At every point, the initiative, the essential action, is his. Admittedly, it doesn’t, at first, seem so; yet once you regard the whole event as something he had foreseen, and foreseen as necessary, the whole perspective changes.

First of all, he initiates the event himself. He knows that in declaring himself to be the new Temple (which, if destroyed, he will rebuild in three days), and in declaring himself to be (the son of) God, he will push the Jewish authorities over the edge. So we have to assume that when he does this, he has chosen his moment, in full consciousness of the consequences. He acts: they re-act.

Next, he stands before Pilate. the Roman governor, doubtless with some irony, asks him if he is the King of the Jews. He stands there, silent. Finally, he replies, also with some irony, “It’s you who says it.”

Next, he is crucified. Apart from the excruciating pain, it’s demeaning: the death penalty for runaway slaves. Yet no slave he. ‘He nothing common did or mean/Upon that memorable scene [i.e. stage].’ He utters two quotations from the Psalms, his lifelong prayer-book. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Ps. 22) is a cry of grief and pain, but not one of despair: the Psalm ends in praise, and in trust that future generations will serve the Lord. ‘Into your hands I commit my spirit’ (Ps. 31) moves beyond the pain and grief to the completion of what his whole life has been: a returning of the Father’s gift into the Father’s hands. And finally: ‘It is finished’: in the Gospel’s Greek tetelestai, which was used in accounting to mean ‘complete, paid in full’.

Throughout, in spite of the pain, he is command of the situation. This is what he knew had to be done, and he is doing it. He is the Meshiach, in the Isaian sense: he is saving Israel and the world by being the Paschal sacrifice.

It is not just courage: it’s authority.

Looked at this way, the Passion becomes even more awesome. Yes, the Dream of the Rood was right: he is the ‘young hero’, and in the deepest sense: the hero is one whose acts go well beyond what the ordinary person is capable of, and whose acts, moreover, are always done for the sake of, for the delivery of, ordinary people.