Especially in light of our just-completed Passion reading, one of the most powerful songs we often sing during Holy Week is the much-loved African American spiritual “Were you there?” (The Hymnal 1982, #172)
“Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”
“Were you there when they nailed him to the tree? Were you there when they pierced him in the side? Were you there when they laid him in the tomb? Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble…Were you there?”
In his 1942 best-selling novel The Robe, and then later in its 1953 film adaptation, author Lloyd Douglas touches on this same theme, focusing on the robe of Jesus, that seamless, one-piece garment, and on the Roman tribune Marcellus who, loosely based on Scripture, wins the robe in a game of dice played in the shadow of the cross while he oversees Jesus’ crucifixion. Focusing on that robe and on the effect that owning it has on Marcellus in the wake of his actions, Douglas’ story traces Marcellus’ emotional and spiritual deterioration as he is increasingly haunted by the memory of what he’s done.
“Were you there?” “Were you out there?” becomes the question that Marcellus asks again and again in his misery, the question he asks everyone he meets about the experience he cannot escape or forget. “Were you out there?”
With a nod to Marcellus, and speaking theologically, the Greek word anamnesis is a term that refers to the spiritual action of bringing a past event into the present, our present, so that we here become participants in the event just as much as the original participants were.
For example – and a very timely example it is, as Passover 2025, on the Jewish calendar Passover 5785, began yesterday evening at sundown – and for Jesus in his time and for all Jews through the centuries, the Seder dinner, the ceremonial dinner eaten on the first night of Passover, last night, the Seder dinner is all about anamnesis. As the lamb shank is eaten with bitter herbs and unleavened bread, as the youngest person present asks, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”, as all the pieces of the ritual and of the story fall into place, the very first Passover with its flight from Egypt is re-membered, put back together, brought forward from Biblical times into the present; and as God’s deliverance comes forward in time, God brings all the children of Israel in every generation out of bondage in Egypt once again.
In our own Christian worship, anamnesis is at work in our Eucharistic prayers as we tell the story of Jesus’ final Seder, which we call the Last Supper. “On the night he was handed over to suffering and death, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread,” we say, bringing the meal in that upper room forward into our time so that we too are disciples sitting around that table, we too are eating that bread and drinking that wine in the presence of the Lord.
So, although we were not “out there” at the cross in the literal sense that Marcellus means, through the anamnesis of this Sunday of the Passion, through the anamnesis of the services of Holy Week, we are in fact “out there.” Today especially, we are out there to wave palms and to shout “Hosanna;” and we are out there as well to shout, “Crucify!”
As I’m sure many of us remember, amidst much advance publicity, back in 2004 actor and producer Mel Gibson released his take on Jesus’ crucifixion in his very graphic movie “The Passion of the Christ.” Personally, I had mixed feelings about “The Passion” at the time, and through the years my opinion hasn’t really changed. I think the film tells us a lot more about Mel Gibson himself and about the very rigid form of pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism he embraces than it does about the actual Passion of Jesus, and about God’s love and self-emptying on the cross…but that might just be me.
This being said, however, “The Passion of the Christ” does serve as a very powerful reminder that we who do shout “Crucify!” – and we all do shout “Crucify!” even if we think we wouldn’t have at the time – Gibson’s film is a reminder that we do all have blood on our hands.
A Wake Forest University professor named Eric Wilson reflects on his own response to a gory Passion play he attended some years back at a megachurch in South Carolina. In a book called Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can’t Look Away, Wilson writes that he had gone to see the play because he was curious about why, like the Gibson film before it, why modern-day, live Passion dramas have a reputation for being excessively violent.
“Is exaggerated violence in Passion plays merely a product of our baser natures?” he wonders, “Or does the savagery actually have a proper place in the crucifixion’s meaning?” (Christian Century, 2/22/12, p. 10)
What Wilson discovered about himself at that play surprised him. Disgusted by the brutality of Jesus’ arrest and torture, and pleased with himself for being so, Wilson suddenly hit the wall. “Just as I was settling into smugness,” he writes, “the crucifixion occurred. The visceral torture, only ten feet from where I was sitting, tore me from my aloofness. Exploitation or not, the episode moved me. I had never seen pain performed so intensely, and the agony gripped me, jerked me toward empathy: I imagined as palpably as I could what it would feel like to be starved and dehydrated, bruised all over and cut to shreds; to have thorns lacerating my head and nails hammered into my hands and feet; to have my limbs strained to the point of rending.”
The Passion play Wilson attended finished with the appearance of a resurrected Christ all in white, with cheering, and with a fireworks display; and Wilson admits, “The violence had moved me. On the most basic level, I was, I had to admit, titillated by the torture. It gave me a physiological rush – increased pulse, tingly skin. But the violence also whipped my emotions to high turbulence. Fear was there, and pity, too, and an array of other feelings – remorse, anxiety, nostalgia, affection. The intensity was enlivening; the aftermath, serene….”
He continues, “All depictions of violence are dangerous, I realized, especially in performances of the crucifixion: they threaten to stir up sick thrills alone and drown out any higher moral message. But precisely in the risk,” he writes, “I also understood is the power: brutal representations of the Passion can inspire intense acts of empathy.”
In his book, Wilson finishes by asking whether or not the risk is worth it and then he says, “When the savagery works to reveal difficult truths or moral challenges, when the luridness isn’t an end to itself, the answer, for me, is yes. The artist creating the violence must hope that the better natures of the audience will prevail, that empathy will transcend exploitation.” (Ibid., p. 11)
Unlike the Passion play that Eric Wilson attended at that megachurch in South Carolina, the Passion narrative we just heard this morning ends with death, not with resurrection; and certainly not with fireworks. It ends with that pronouncement that turns everything upside down, the pronouncement that starts to devour Marcellus and, for a while, his sanity. In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, today’s story ends with the centurion’s recognition that “Truly this man was God’s Son.”
Here in Luke, things are slightly different. The centurion does witness to the dead Jesus’ innocence, but Luke leaves it to others to recognize Jesus’ divinity on Easter Day. At this point in Luke, Jesus is dead and Marcellus has won himself a robe.
Even so, this is still Passion Sunday, and we still have blood on our hands. If ever we have cause to tremble; if ever we are called to empathy, it’s here and it’s now.
We are out there today, as we will be again on Good Friday. We are all out there, and we stand at the foot of a cross slick with blood; blood that we in our blood-lust, blood that we in our “physiological rush” and our mob mentality have clamored for; and as the curtain of the temple is torn in two, as heaven and earth collide and groan, only now do we hear the centurion say that truly, truly – or as Scottish commentator William Barclay would say, “look you” – only now do we hear that look you, this man was innocent; this man was the Messiah; this man is God’s Son.
And, so, what?
This is today’s question, the question each of us needs to think on, to pray on, and to meditate on throughout this Holy Week: so what? What difference does all of this make? What difference does any of this make?
At the end of the day, what difference does Jesus make? What difference does his life and ministry make in my life? What difference does his crucifixion make? Who am I with his crucifixion, and who am I without it?
And it’s not just all about me: What difference does the crucifixion of Jesus make in your life, and in the life of your family?
Were we out there when they crucified our Lord? And if we were…so what?
Amen.