From noon until three in the afternoon the whole earth was dark. 34 At three, Jesus cried out with a loud shout, “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani,” which means, “My God, my God, why have you left me?”
35 After hearing him, some standing there said, “Look! He’s calling Elijah!” 36 Someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, and put it on a pole. He offered it to Jesus to drink, saying, “Let’s see if Elijah will come to take him down.” 37 But Jesus let out a loud cry and died.
38 The curtain of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. 39 When the centurion, who stood facing Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “This man was certainly God’s Son.” (Common English Bible)
“We Were There: Lenten Edition,” Week Four
I am a soldier.
I have spent my entire adult life in the service of my superiors, devoted to a chain of command that leads all the way to the Caesars.
I have been rewarded for my devotion, rising to this rank and the wages and status that come with it.
But then…*He* happened. What should have been another routine execution, another ordinary blotting out of a trio of Israelite rebels against Rome…well, that is not what happened that day.
When I am executing someone, the sky does not go dark for hours on end. Nobody shakes. Yet I received word that evening that the curtain in their temple had been torn asunder that afternoon, right as I exclaimed that the man I had just executed had been the Son of God.
I could lose everything for that—my rank, my status, all of it—for what I have said. We Romans deify our Caesars upon their deaths. We make them into gods. And so their living sons are…sons of god.
What’s more, I have not only endangered myself, I have called into question our very presence of being here in this foreign land we occupy. Because if it is not in the service of a son of a god, why are we risking life and limb daily to subdue a people that so clearly does not want to be subdued?
He made that much very clear to me in His time on the cross. We—I—might be able to kill Him, but we would not subdue Him. Not forever. He will return, in some way. Of that, I am certain.
He, and not my emperor, is the one true Son of God. May that God, and God’s son, have mercy on me.
This is a sermon series I am excited for in our first Lenten season together. Across the board, feedback concerning Valley’s Advent devotional series, We Were There, was overwhelmingly positive, especially for the first-person voice it was composed in by its many contributors. Buoyed by this feedback, Dr. Lola Kiser and I crafted a similar focus for both our upcoming Holy Week devotional book and this sermon series as a way to lead up to that devotional. This means that each Sunday through Lent, all the way up to Easter Sunday, my message will begin in the first-person, through the eyes of someone who would have experienced Holy Week, just as we did with Advent last year. We began this series three weeks with Lazarus, the man whom Jesus raised from the dead earlier in John 11, and since then we have visited the stories—and possible words—of Caiaphas the high priest also in John 11. We then moved to Mark's Gspel and Simon of Cyrene before continuing in Mark 15 to arrive at a man who has no name in Scripture: the centurion at the foot of the cross, overseeing the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and two rebels against Rome.
From this centurion, we receive a confession of faith, and in Luke’s Gospel a verdict of innocence.
But why? Of all the people we have visited in this sermon series, and will visit in our Holy Week devotional, the centurion alone is nameless. Anonymous. The only other character so anonymized who was considered—and dropped for space at the eleventh hour—was Barabbas. “Barabbas” in Aramaic means “son of a father” or “son of The Father,” and while the latter might have represented a claim to divinity himself, they both functionally cloak Barabbas the historical man in anonymity, which may well have been the point of his nom de guerre.
The centurion is not even afforded a pseudonym, though, which means that he could be us—any of us. And for much, much more than simply his anonymity, although that part probably helps.
During the life of Jesus, the Roman Empire spanned the width of Europe and North Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Middle East. The Koine Greek the Romans inherited from their Hellenistic predecessors was something of a lingua franca—everybody’s first or second language, like how English is in much of the world today, which is why the New Testament was written in Greek and not the Aramaic of ancient Israel.
So the centurion is simultaneously insider and outsider. He is part of the in-group in that he occupies a spot of immense status and stature. But he is also on the outside of the nascent Jesus movement because of that high status and stature that lets him move so freely across the empire.
And that is where we come in, and how we should see ourselves in the centurion. We, I would hope, would not participate another human being’s execution, but what we should see in the centurion is our status as being relatively fortunate, relatively privileged, but also not a part of every other group because that fortune, status, and privilege can be inhibitors to our participation in those groups.
Consider our relationship with Primera Iglesia. We love them and pray for them as our siblings in Christ, but there also exists a language barrier. Because of the status of the United States in the world, we as English-speaking Americans are accustomed to others speaking English with us—and that includes me. When I have traveled abroad, I have relied upon the ability of others I encounter to be able to converse with me in English. And I take a great deal from experiencing worship with Primera Iglesia, but because they are primarily Spanish-speaking, I must rely on Carrie to access their worship on a deeper level.
So, back to the centurion. He would have surely been fluent in Greek. But was he fluent in Aramaic, the indigenous language of Jesus? Possibly, but he may well not have been. He would potentially have expected to have Greek spoken to him the way that we expect English to be spoken to us. Would he have understood Jesus when Jesus cried out in Aramaic, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabacthani?” Probably not. So the centurion is part of an in-group—the in-group, the rulers of the land—but he is also on the outside in that he may well not have understood the final words of God’s Son.
And yet, this man still chooses to believe! And he chooses to believe at the moment the temple curtain is torn into two, symbolizing the crucifixion’s achievement of breaking down any barrier between God and us—including that language barrier between the centurion and God’s Son.
In his confession of faith, the centurion is not only recognizing, he is repenting. He is acknowledging that his service to a Caesar who claims to be a god upon death (and, later on, a god while alive as well) has been based on a lie. While sometimes the office of Caesar was taken by force, it was mostly a hereditary office, passed from a father who is deified upon his death to a biological or adopted son. So for Jesus to be the Son of God, the reigning Caesar cannot be. Their claims to godhood are mutually exclusive. For one to be divine, the other must be mortal.
So for the centurion, this is the moment when Caesar, the emperor to whom the centurion has pledged allegiance and devoted a lifetime of service to, becomes mortal, knocked down forever from his ill-gotten pedestal of divinity in favor of the Son of a God whom this centurion was probably raised to look down on, to loathe, even hate and despise.
The centurion, then, represents the first miracle of the crucifixion. He represents the beginnings of our redemption. Jesus has shown us the way, taught us and healed us, led us and discipled us, but the cross and empty tomb redeemed us. And, given the similarities we share with the centurion with our in-groups and out-groups, they are required still to redeem us today.
And this act was not without risk for the centurion. Since clearly people within earshot heard him—as the detail of his confession is conveyed this way in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, and as a proclamation of innocence in the Gospel of Luke—there could well have been someone to report him to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate for disloyalty. He is bearing witness to the limitations of false godhood and the sins of occupation—as the New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan put it, he is the empire testifying against itself—and that would not be treated lightly. So, the centurion took a risk. But the truth should be worth taking risks for.
So, if we are meant to see ourselves in the anonymous centurion, where does that leave us? After all, we don’t know what happened to him after this potentially dangerous confession. But we would be right to view his confession as a starting point, not an end point. For not only does our redemption begin with him, so does our faith. Once we accept the thesis that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, Son of the living God, we are bound by certain obligations to that belief. We are called to see Jesus not only as a sacrifice dying to ransom us for our sins on the cross, but as our greatest moral teacher, the healer who restores us to wholeness, and the God we worship made flesh.
He who saved us is all of these things, and each of those dimensions demands that we, in our faith, pursue benevolence, charity, peacemaking, and justice. We, as changed creations, are in turn charged to change creation—to improve it, make it better and more loving, so that the kingdom of God need not be some abstraction reserved solely for the afterlife, but can be present in the here and now. We are called to do all these things.
I don’t know if this centurion did any of this. I’d like to think he did. But if he didn’t, may we do so each day in his place out of faith of the Savior he killed. Our Messiah died for us, let us live for Him.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
March 14, 2021