James T. Cleland - "The Centurion at the Cross" (October 15, 1967)
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| - | And forgive us our trespasses | 0:04 |
| as we forgive those who trespass against us, | 0:06 | |
| and lead us not into temptation, | 0:10 | |
| but deliver us from evil. | 0:13 | |
| For thine is the kingdom | 0:15 | |
| and the power and the glory forever. | 0:17 | |
| - | Grace to you and peace from God our Father | 0:42 |
| and the Lord Jesus Christ. | 0:46 | |
| Amen. | 0:49 | |
| Back in the summer of 1960, | 0:54 | |
| while on a mission with army chaplains in Europe, | 0:58 | |
| I visited the battlefield of Verdun, | 1:03 | |
| that bloody scene of endless carnage in World War I. | 1:07 | |
| An American Major acted as guide, | 1:15 | |
| and a good one, too. | 1:19 | |
| In the late afternoon, on the way back to our quarters, | 1:22 | |
| I casually asked this officer | 1:26 | |
| what he considered his most interesting experience | 1:28 | |
| in the armed forces. | 1:33 | |
| His answer was immediate, unhesitating, | 1:36 | |
| and unforgettable. | 1:41 | |
| He said just four words. | 1:44 | |
| "I saw Goring die. | 1:48 | |
| I saw Goring die." | 1:53 | |
| As a young Second Lieutenant, | 1:57 | |
| he had been in charge of escorting the prisoners | 1:59 | |
| from their cells to the gallows. | 2:02 | |
| 20 minutes before zero hour, | 2:06 | |
| Herman Goring had outwitted his executioners | 2:09 | |
| by committing suicide. | 2:13 | |
| Now, the memory of that incident | 2:17 | |
| is what triggered this sermon, | 2:20 | |
| because by association of ideas, | 2:24 | |
| I was reminded of another officer | 2:27 | |
| who saw a condemned prisoner die. | 2:30 | |
| We cannot talk with him, | 2:35 | |
| for his army service occurred over 1,900 years ago, | 2:38 | |
| but let us in imagination ask him the same question | 2:42 | |
| which was asked of the American Major at Verdun. | 2:46 | |
| What is the most interesting thing | 2:51 | |
| that it has happened to you in the army? | 2:53 | |
| Now, he might answer, notice it, he might answer, | 2:58 | |
| "I saw a Jew called Jesus of Nazareth die. | 3:03 | |
| I was the centurion in command of that crucifixion." | 3:09 | |
| Now, let's look further at this Roman officer | 3:16 | |
| on duty in Palestine in an army of occupation around 30 AD. | 3:18 | |
| Jesus the prophet of Nazareth was put to death | 3:26 | |
| during the governorship of Pontius Pilate, | 3:29 | |
| for high treason. | 3:34 | |
| So far as the Romans were concerned, | 3:36 | |
| probably for blasphemy | 3:39 | |
| in the eyes of the ruling Jewish ecclesiastics. | 3:42 | |
| The military detail selected | 3:46 | |
| to crucify three criminals that day | 3:48 | |
| was in charge of a centurion. | 3:51 | |
| He was what might be described as a non-commissioned officer | 3:55 | |
| with the power and responsibility of a captain. | 3:59 | |
| The centurions were the actual working officers, | 4:04 | |
| the best informed men in the service. | 4:08 | |
| The inculcation of Roman discipline and Roman spirit | 4:12 | |
| was in their hands. | 4:17 | |
| They held the army together. | 4:19 | |
| They were experienced, well paid, and in for 20 years. | 4:21 | |
| These men were professionals. | 4:28 | |
| Now, the fact which would interest us | 4:31 | |
| in a service of worship | 4:32 | |
| is what this top sergeant major said | 4:34 | |
| when Jesus died on the cross. | 4:38 | |
| "Truly, this man was a Son of God." | 4:42 | |
| Now, don't make too much of this affirmation. | 4:49 | |
| He didn't say, | 4:54 | |
| "This man is the second person of the blessed Trinity," | 4:55 | |
| but don't make too little of it. | 5:01 | |
| He didn't say, even in Latin, "What a guy." | 5:05 | |
| He used a phrase which was not uncommon in his day. | 5:10 | |
| "This dead convict was a son of God." | 5:15 | |
| Now, that means that the least, | 5:21 | |
| one cannot explain this crucified offender | 5:23 | |
| in everyday terms, | 5:27 | |
| in the kind of language used about ordinary folk. | 5:29 | |
| To the centurion, Jesus was unusual, unusually unusual. | 5:34 | |
| Now, why? | 5:41 | |
| What impressed him about Jesus? | 5:42 | |
| He didn't say. | 5:45 | |
| Neither did the Gospel writer. | 5:47 | |
| Was it Jesus' thoughtfulness for others, | 5:50 | |
| for one of the two criminals alongside him, | 5:54 | |
| for his mother standing there, watching him die? | 5:58 | |
| Was it his religious sensitivity, such a blending of doubt, | 6:04 | |
| "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" | 6:08 | |
| And of confidence, | 6:14 | |
| "Into thy hands, Father, I commit my spirit." | 6:16 | |
| Was it the great cry with which he died? | 6:21 | |
| Not a cry of despair, but the shout of a victor. | 6:25 | |
| We don't know, | 6:30 | |
| but that centurion made a comment about his dead prisoner, | 6:32 | |
| which suggests that he knew | 6:38 | |
| he was in the presence of more than human greatness. | 6:40 | |
| Now, the centurion disappears from the pages of scripture | 6:46 | |
| a few verses later, | 6:49 | |
| after officially reporting to Pontius Pilate | 6:51 | |
| that Jesus was dead. | 6:55 | |
| And so we lose sight of the officer who saw Jesus die. | 6:57 | |
| But the church has sweated blood down the centuries | 7:03 | |
| trying to understand, to explain, to interpret his comment, | 7:09 | |
| "Truly this man was a Son of God." | 7:16 | |
| There have been all kinds of explanations given | 7:21 | |
| to clarify the affirmation | 7:25 | |
| that Jesus stands in a unique relationship to God. | 7:27 | |
| The early explanation was that God adopted Jesus, | 7:33 | |
| adopted Jesus as his Son, | 7:39 | |
| when he saw the kind of person Jesus was | 7:42 | |
| at the baptism, at the crucifixion, | 7:45 | |
| or sometime in between these events. | 7:49 | |
| Paul called Jesus Lord. | 7:53 | |
| That is, one who reveals the unknown God. | 7:57 | |
| Lord is one of the names | 8:02 | |
| which the Roman soldiers gave Mithras, | 8:04 | |
| the sun god, | 8:08 | |
| the god of the military cult | 8:10 | |
| whose shrines can be found from Arabia to Scotland. | 8:14 | |
| The lord Mithras, as we'd say the Lord Jesus. | 8:20 | |
| Others said Jesus was born of a woman and God, | 8:27 | |
| something akin to the hero concept, | 8:30 | |
| a hero like Aeneas of Troy and Rome, | 8:33 | |
| and Hercules, and of course, Augustus Caesar. | 8:37 | |
| A hero was one who could be explained only in terms | 8:42 | |
| of one human parent and one divine parent. | 8:49 | |
| Now, time fails me, you'll be glad to know, | 8:56 | |
| to trace all the various ways of relating Jesus to God, | 8:58 | |
| until we end up with the exalted Credo affirmation, | 9:03 | |
| very God of very God. | 9:07 | |
| Now, what we should recognize is | 9:11 | |
| that these are various ways of saying the same basic thing, | 9:13 | |
| that there is a unique relationship between Jesus and God, | 9:19 | |
| that the hidden deity was made known in the man of Galilee. | 9:24 | |
| As someone has said, God is an empty picture frame. | 9:31 | |
| Everything depends on the picture we put in, | 9:36 | |
| and Christianity has affirmed that Jesus is the picture. | 9:41 | |
| For Western civilization has been haunted | 9:47 | |
| and daunted for 19 centuries | 9:50 | |
| by the desire to believe that the mysterious Word of God | 9:54 | |
| somehow became flesh in that Jewish prophet | 10:00 | |
| who was done to death on a hill outside Jerusalem. | 10:04 | |
| So what? | 10:14 | |
| How do we in this campus, not just we in the chapel, | 10:18 | |
| but the we which includes | 10:24 | |
| those other members of the community | 10:25 | |
| who go with us everywhere else, except chapel, | 10:28 | |
| how do we react when we are confronted | 10:32 | |
| with the centurion's statement? | 10:36 | |
| Some say with vehemence or with lethargy, | 10:39 | |
| "We've had enough of Jesus." | 10:42 | |
| Sunday school, the family pew, | 10:46 | |
| compulsory chapel at prep school. | 10:51 | |
| Just let us forget him. | 10:55 | |
| He isn't all that important. | 10:58 | |
| Why should we be so religiously centered on a dead Jew? | 11:01 | |
| Dead 1,900 years. | 11:06 | |
| Forget it. | 11:08 | |
| Anatole France, the French novelist, | 11:11 | |
| would agree with such a reaction. | 11:14 | |
| He wrote a short story called "The Procurator of Judea," | 11:18 | |
| telling of a friend visiting Pontius Pilate | 11:22 | |
| in his enforced retirement | 11:27 | |
| after Pilate was displaced as governor of Judea. | 11:30 | |
| And here are the last few sentences of the tale. | 11:34 | |
| The friend is speaking. | 11:39 | |
| "With what languorous grace they dance, those Syrian women. | 11:42 | |
| I knew a Jewess at Jerusalem | 11:49 | |
| who used to dance in a pokey little room, | 11:52 | |
| on a threadbare carpet, | 11:55 | |
| by the light of one smoky little lamp, | 11:58 | |
| waving her arms as she clanged her cymbals, | 12:02 | |
| her loins arched, her head thrown back, | 12:06 | |
| and as it were, | 12:09 | |
| dragged down by the weight of her heavy red hair, | 12:10 | |
| her eyes swimming with voluptuousness, | 12:13 | |
| eager, languishing, compliant. | 12:16 | |
| She would have made Cleopatra herself grow pale with envy. | 12:20 | |
| One day, however, she disappeared, and I saw her no more. | 12:26 | |
| Long did I seek her in disreputable alleys and taverns. | 12:31 | |
| Some months after I lost sight of her, | 12:37 | |
| I learned by chance that she had attached herself | 12:39 | |
| to a small company of men and women | 12:41 | |
| who were followers of a young Galilean thaumaturgist. | 12:44 | |
| His name was Jesus. | 12:50 | |
| He came from Nazareth. | 12:53 | |
| He was crucified for some crime. | 12:56 | |
| I don't quite know what. | 12:59 | |
| Pontius, do you remember anything about the man?" | 13:01 | |
| Pontius Pilate contracted his brows, | 13:09 | |
| and his hand rose to his forehead | 13:12 | |
| in the attitude of one who probes the deeps of memory. | 13:14 | |
| Then after a silence of some seconds, "Jesus?" he murmured. | 13:18 | |
| "Jesus of Nazareth? | 13:25 | |
| I cannot call him to mind." | 13:30 | |
| Now, he speaks for some of our academic community. | 13:36 | |
| Others of us reject Jesus as the revelation of God, | 13:42 | |
| but we do it with thoughtfulness, even with honor. | 13:45 | |
| He just doesn't fit into our kind of a world | 13:51 | |
| with its tensions and strife, | 13:55 | |
| and his emphasis on love of our fellows, | 13:58 | |
| even of our enemies. | 14:02 | |
| His Gospel doesn't make sense, even though we wish it did. | 14:03 | |
| Do you remember George Bernard Shaw's character, Ferrovius, | 14:10 | |
| that giant of a man, | 14:15 | |
| in the play "Androcles and the Lion." | 14:18 | |
| I must ask Bill Griffith to bring back the movie version | 14:23 | |
| to the Quadrangle Theater. | 14:27 | |
| Great play. | 14:29 | |
| Ferrovius wanted to be a Christian, | 14:31 | |
| he tried to be a Christian, | 14:34 | |
| but when he was thrust into the arena | 14:37 | |
| with a sword in his hand, | 14:41 | |
| to face six gladiators, | 14:44 | |
| he killed them all. | 14:48 | |
| And listen to his agonizing explanation of his conduct. | 14:50 | |
| "In my youth, I worshiped Mars, the god of war. | 14:55 | |
| I turned from him to serve the Christian God. | 15:01 | |
| But today, the Christian God forsook me, | 15:05 | |
| and Mars overcame me and took back his own. | 15:09 | |
| The Christian God is not yet. | 15:15 | |
| He will come when Mars and I are dust, | 15:20 | |
| but meanwhile, I must serve the gods that are, | 15:26 | |
| not the gods that will be. | 15:30 | |
| Until then, I accept service | 15:33 | |
| in the Praetorian Guard, Caesar." | 15:38 | |
| The Christian God is not yet. | 15:44 | |
| He will come when Mars and I are dust. | 15:48 | |
| Until then, I accept service in the Praetorian Guard. | 15:52 | |
| There is an integrity to a statement like that, | 15:57 | |
| which calls for respect as well as sorrow, | 16:01 | |
| and Ferrovius speaks for not a few of our fellows. | 16:07 | |
| And yet others of us will struggle with this schizoid fact | 16:12 | |
| that we are citizens of two kingdoms, | 16:17 | |
| the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God, | 16:20 | |
| and the two realms are not always in agreement. | 16:25 | |
| As a result, we live in a day-in, day-out tension, | 16:30 | |
| honoring yet unable to honor the valid claims of both. | 16:35 | |
| It's not a situation which makes for happiness, | 16:43 | |
| far less blessedness. | 16:47 | |
| But there is one thing we can resolve to do. | 16:50 | |
| Even in this world, we shall seek to know this Jesus | 16:55 | |
| and seek to understand what lay behind | 17:02 | |
| and below and throughout the centurion's statement, | 17:06 | |
| that this man was a Son of God. | 17:13 | |
| So help us, God, | 17:18 | |
| because if we believe that God became man in Jesus, | 17:20 | |
| we should learn what kind of man he became, | 17:26 | |
| and what legitimate claim he has on us. | 17:33 | |
| If we are not sure that God became man, | 17:37 | |
| we should still learn what kind of a man | 17:43 | |
| Jesus of Nazareth was, | 17:47 | |
| so that people, including this centurion, | 17:50 | |
| linked him with God, and linked God with him. | 17:54 | |
| Because listen to Bernard Shaw again, | 18:00 | |
| of all people, Bernard Shaw, | 18:04 | |
| in the preface to "Androcles and the Lion," | 18:07 | |
| which in typical Shavian fashion | 18:11 | |
| is twice as long as the play. | 18:13 | |
| It's on the first page of the preface. | 18:16 | |
| I'll read it twice | 18:20 | |
| because you won't believe that Shaw ever said this. | 18:21 | |
| "We have always had a curious feeling, | 18:25 | |
| that though we crucified Christ on a stick, | 18:30 | |
| he somehow managed to get hold of the right end of it, | 18:36 | |
| and that if we were better men, | 18:42 | |
| we might try his plan." | 18:45 | |
| On the first page of the preface | 18:49 | |
| to "Androcles and the Lion." | 18:51 | |
| "We've always had a curious feeling | 18:52 | |
| that though we crucified Christ on a stick, | 18:55 | |
| he somehow managed to get hold of the right end of it, | 18:58 | |
| and that if we were better men, we might try his plan." | 19:02 | |
| If we were better men. | 19:07 | |
| One wonders if the centurion tried his plan, | 19:12 | |
| believing him to be a Son of God. | 19:19 | |
| Amen. | 19:26 | |
| Let us pray. | 19:28 | |
| O mighty God, who hast not left thyself without a witness, | 19:34 | |
| in this chapel set apart for thy glory, | 19:40 | |
| in this hour set apart for thy worship, | 19:44 | |
| help us so to understand Jesus | 19:48 | |
| and his relationship to thee, | 19:52 | |
| and what he should mean to us, | 19:56 | |
| that we may be his intelligent followers and disciples | 19:59 | |
| to thy glory and for our own good health. | 20:05 | |
| Amen. | 20:12 | |
| (gentle music) | 20:27 |
