From John 13, verse 33. Jesus said, “I am with you only a little longer . . . Where I am going, you cannot come.” May I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. The summer before my junior year of high school, just the other day, I sat in the bleachers of a stadium in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The start of school was weeks away. We’d picked up our helmets and shoulder pads and we were sitting in the bleachers so the coach could tell us what to expect as we prepared for the season. “Boys,” he said. “I’ve got two rules. Rule #1: The coach is always right. Rule #2: If you think the coach is wrong, see Rule #1.“
Crucifixion was like that. If you were not a Roman citizen, Rome had two rules. Rome is in charge. And if you think Rome is not in charge, look around. Talk about a brutal advertising campaign: crucifixion killed two birds with one stone. It made a dying man a billboard.
Jesus knew that. He prepared for it by going alone to places (something we can relate to), going off by himself alone with increasing frequency as he began to attract a crowd. For him the presence of the One he called Father was most palpable when he isolated himself. Matthew tells us that Jesus withdrew “to a deserted place by himself” to absorb the shocking news that his cousin John had been beheaded. Off by himself he went to grieve the loss of the one who understood him best. Off by himself, Jesus “got his game face on.” Withdrawn in prayer, talking with the Father, ‘in solitude, for company’, to borrow a phrase from Auden, Jesus gathered strength to face the approach of his own violent death.
Before going out to meet Goliath, David picked up five stones. Before going out to meet the adversary, Jesus consecrated bread and wine with his disciples. Then after supper he said to them, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” And he left for the ultimate out-of-the-way place.
Ten years ago, at a quarter past six in the evening on Tuesday of Holy Week, a college classmate of my son Gabriel climbed the ten-foot-tall safety barrier surrounding the observation deck of the Empire State Building and jumped. Cameron had left a suicide note in his room at Berkeley, his residential college at Yale, apologizing for his plan to jump either from the George Washington Bridge or the Empire State Building.
It was raining in New York. There were seven people on the observation deck at the time. One of them tried to talk him down. A reporter in the New York Daily News wrote, “A man named Luis Mosquea was manning the front entrance of a women’s boutique on West 34th Street across from where the young man landed, and he recalled in horror how stunned pedestrians scampered in every direction to flee the nightmarish sight. Said Mr Mosquea, ‘One guy ran over and covered the body with an umbrella.’”
At a vigil held the next night at Yale, the Berkeley Master Marvin Chun told a crowd of grieving students, “I saw Cameron as recently as yesterday, a few hours before he died. It was raining and I asked him to walk with me under my umbrella down Wall Street. He complimented my big, parachute-like umbrella with its bright red Berkeley shield. He said he didn’t know that there was a Berkeley umbrella. I said that it hadn’t been issued as Berkeley gear for a long time. And as we hit the corner I added that I could order a new batch if he really liked it. He said he did. Then we parted ways. So here’s the guilty thought that I shouldn’t have but I can’t get out of my mind. I wish I gave him that umbrella.”
You and I are “reconciled to God in Jesus’s fleshly body through his death.” I believe that. Where Jesus goes to confront the prince of darkness to do that awful work we cannot go. We follow as far as we can. But tonight, when he leaves for ‘movement to contact’, we part ways with him and listen for the cry and stillness to follow after. We may wish to help him, wish to give him the flimsy thing we carry for shelter; but there is nothing we can do to help him.
Jesus is our champion. His combat in the darkness of Golgotha (“the place of the skull”) is his alone. Israel’s champion David smote Goliath using Goliath’s own sword to cut the giant’s head off. And winning victory on behalf of all the people of God, he took the skull to Jerusalem and buried it on a hill far away.
All we can do, confined to barracks, is shelter in place, from the bleachers, at the window, in the garden where the small birds sing. All we can do is overhear Jesus talking to the Father, in solitude, for company, taking strength for the fight from the Most High.
And we look away. I look away. And I remember something else my coach used to say. “The will to win is not worth a nickel unless you have the will to prepare.” Jesus, our champion, had the will to prepare. He goes to the cross. And there, at Golgotha, he will take Satan’s greatest weapon, death, and run him through with it. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.