“Our Place at the Cross”

Matthew 27:27-44
Delivered on Good Friday, April 18, 2014 at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church during a 3-hour, 6-sermon Passion Service.
New York, NY

MANUSCRIPT

AUDIO
[audio http://mapc.bndpr.com/mp3files/2014-04-18-GoodFri-Andrew_Ruth.mp3]

“Hundreds of kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope. . . . Picture cards photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling the postcard showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of country schools the day’s routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man.” [i]

That story printed in a 1915 Tennessee newspaper, but somehow all I could think was, “And they put him to death by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 10:39).

Friends, I hate reading this stuff. I hate learning how truly inhumane humans are. But even more, I hate the nagging feeling, the small voice in my soul that tells me I would have been there. I hate knowing that had I been born a 100 years earlier in the place I grew up, I would have been one of the mob or one of the kids ditching school to mock a tortured man. I hate knowing that had I been born 50 years earlier in the place I was born, I would have been one of the men spitting on and attacking African American students leading sit-ins. I hate the nagging suspicion that at very best, I would have been complacent, quiet, moderate.

As I read those words and saw myself in them, I thought about the spectacle of Jesus’ crucifixion. I thought of the people there and the actions they committed and I wondered where I would have been had I been born 2000 years earlier.

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[i] Quoted in James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Reprint ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), 1. The image of Jesus as a lynched man is heavily influenced by Cone’s book.

TO READ THE REST OF “OUR PLACE AT THE CROSS” CHECK OUT THE MANUSCRIPT.