It is commonplace to talk about Christ’s Passion in terms of what it accomplishes: ransom, the destruction of death, our salvation, or any of various other theories about why the Son of Man had to die. I will not be doing that here. I find no hope in a world where blood and gore are glorified, or a man’s immense suffering transmuted by helpless passivity. Christ’s death was meaningless, tragic, not a part of some divinely pre-ordained plan by a power-hungry God who thirsted for blood, but the consequence of power-hungry men who did the same. Salvation begins with this fact: that a Galilean man lies dead upon the branches of a tree. Who is this man? Why was he killed? And what will happen now to all those who were close to him? The answers to all three of these questions are incredibly complex, and I won’t pretend to do them justice. Nonetheless, I will haltingly respond from the position of an outsider looking in, hoping with fear and trembling to do justice to this fragile moment.

The wind stirs across the hill, pushing locks of hair against the man’s blood-matted forehead. There is a policeman nearby. He stands, tense, gun still held in his hand. He has done this a million times before, and every time the tiny tremble of his hands grows less and less, the look of hollow shock in his eyes dissipates moments earlier than the last. First will be the visit to the coroner, then the funeral. “This man, Johnson, we now duly lay to rest…” as the doors of the casket are closed and the tomb lowered into the cold, dark ground. His mother stands nearby and is too overwhelmed even to cry. Standing beside her, a young friend of the deceased comforts her in the position where her other sons and relatives would be. The estranged family has declined to be present; Peirce Simpson, once a close friend of the man, had even sent out a group text blast reviling against the man, and ending with the statement that “he deserved what he had got coming” before blocking everyone. Where he was now no one knew. His other friend, Jonas, was processing his grief by drinking himself silly at a bar down the street.

Tragedy was the word that repeated through the sermon. So young, so full of life, only to have all that potential be cut off in an instant. Wrong place, wrong time. Some called it an accident in the hopes of lessening the mother’s grief: in her heart she thought, and what a cruel world that can so casually destroy with hardly even a glance of regret.

This death is a tragedy, to be sure, as all death is. Yet it is not simply tragedy, but condemnation as well. The world stands before the scene and is indifferent to the passing on of a life. Just another Tuesday, and for this the world is condemned. For those present, shell-shocked into silence as they are, the world has ended, and in this they are condemned. Perhaps with time, they’ll regain some semblance of normalcy again. The man who shot him, after all, will return to work the next day; perhaps in a month’s time he’ll shoot someone else. But for the man now in the tomb, there is no hope, no future, no possibility for anything else. He, above all, is condemned. His reality is the worms that will nibble his flesh and the beetles that will nest in his guts. Yet life goes on, life goes on. Does it hope to avoid this tragedy itself? Perhaps by looking away death will likewise avert his gaze. Yet even media vita in morte sumus, as the medieval antiphon goes, even in the midst of life we are in death. Death is the rule of life and the law of the land. Woe to the one by whom death comes; woe to the one to whom death reveals his face.

Men, women, elders, children are all crucified before us every day. Many times we stand complicit; sometimes we stand the victim. In all cases, we come face-to-face with a world that didn’t have to be. Every death, in all its necessity, always and only happens as an accident, some mere contingency in the midst of what had moments before been the banal stream of life. And as we stand there a question comes to us: what will happen next? What is our future, what will we do now? The answer always is: we will forget. Some more quickly than others, some more thoroughly than others, but always, in the end, we turn away. Life goes on, we say, oblivious to the fact that for this person it doesn’t, and death, for all its suffering, remains unquestioned and accepted.

There is one exception. One man who, two thousand years ago, walked the earth. He lived a strange life: poor, uneducated, a backwater country hick. There was nothing to his appearance that would make you turn a second glance on a crowded morning street. He had no sex appeal, and his friends were all losers and low-life scum. He had a habit of bad-mouthing pigs to their faces and he refused to grovel when judges demanded repentance. No respect for leaders, no piety for the powerful, no nonsense from the know-it-alls. The State had no place for him, and so they made one, six feet under, and were even so kind as to give him the VIP ticket to his destination. And everyone passed by, and no one batted an eye.

Yet not quite. One person did. God, in his Godlike ways, took pause. This, it seems, was finally too much for God to bear. Let the world burn itself to the ground, and let the world be damned, but to torture a man whom they despised—that was more cruelty than even God could bear. Was his breath held as he watched the man slowly suffocate to death? Did his heart break when that final, precious gasp of all-too-scarce air came out in an accusation of pain: father, Father, why did you leave me, why aren’t you here, why won’t you save me? Did he feel anger as the men nearby, callous to the site of blood and the heavy moans of agony, rolled dice and goaded each other on to take just one more shot? And when Judas gave his neck a short but intense aerobic workout, did the briefest glimpse of a smirk glimmer across God’s face?

Some of these, perhaps, seem plausible, others less so. Yet let it not be said that I denigrate the Deity: I, certainly, could not be able to hold composure as did God. I would not beat the air, I would not scream in primal rage, I would not grab the nearest person and shake and shake and scream until I had nothing left to do but collapse in exhaustion. Perhaps a single tear and a brief sob would escape me, but the rule of law would soon enough re-impose order. Suit and tie would find me somber, and then come Monday morning. I, in the end, would forget.

This is not what God did, and blessed be God who is greater than us all. God screamed and pouted and raged: and his shouts roared across the sky like lightning and his sobs poured down as hail and his tantrum-driven feet shook the whole earth. And then God paused in anger and thought, long and hard. Throughout the night God thought, and he didn’t sleep, and he didn’t eat. And the whole next day, God called off work, and he thought, and his anger turned to rage, and again that night he refused to be consoled, refused to let life be life and move-on. And then God, come daybreak, thought some more and his rage became a decision, a violent crime against all law and order and wisdom as God uttered one single word: no. No to death, no to forgetting. God remembered, and God stood up with his rage and with him stood up the man, the Christ chosen by God. Death was destroyed, and life was destroyed too, the kind of life that would call itself life when it is merely another word for death-that-has-not-yet-arrived, and God in his angry and childish and completely unreasonable protest against this world remembered his beloved one, and in remembering gave him a new life and a new hope and a new future, and a Name that is above all names.

This was the first time that anyone had paused and thought and remembered, and it changed the world.

Did this man, Jesus of Nazareth, have to die? No, and when someone finally stood up and called that fact out for what it was, meaningless, suddenly the meaninglessness of the world was transformed into hope. That hope, faith tells me, comes to me as well: that one day, someone will remember me and transform the lovelessness that put me in the grave into the loving embrace of two long-lost friends. And so I, too, feel a duty to respond: to look at someone else deeply and say ‘no’ to the forces that would tear us apart, and so save them and so save myself. To refuse to accept that this is how things will be, and to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ This is my obligation, this is my call—so help me God.