It was convenient and pragmatic for Caiaphas and Pilate to put Jesus to death. But it was also gravely immoral. They worked it so that religious and political expediency prevailed, so that the status quo could be preserved. It’s true that, at one point, Pilate genuinely seemed to want to release Jesus, but his ambition to get out of Jerusalem and his fear of losing the Emperor’s favour, and thus his chances for promotion, was even more genuine, if you can say that fear and ambition are genuine.

Maintaining the status quo can sound so reasonable. It avoids disturbance. It keeps the peace, at least on the surface. It saves the bother of change. But it can also conceal, even if badly, both fear and laziness. It can serve as a mask for holding on to power, privilege or pleasure. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” (attributed to Edmund Burke). Like a virulent cancer, evil is ever at work to gain the upper hand – in everything and everyone. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus Himself reprimands indifference or passivity in the face of both evil and good. Remember the man who only had one talent and buried it in the ground. Would so many of the laws we today bemoan in our society ever have been passed if good men and women had done more? Indeed, can we even claim to be good if we fail to oppose evil, never mind pretend that it is not evil?

It is so easy not to commit and to pretend that I am merely being prudent when in truth I am hiding my fear or coveting my own comfort. How often do I leave the difficult work and the difficult speech to others? How prevalent in me is procrastination? And how many can be so adamant and active in their anger and outrage at both world and Church but only when they are sitting comfortably on the sofa before the television, sipping their favourite beverage and with remote control in hand ready to turn off anything that is too challenging!

Before the Cross of Christ, every human person stands at the crossroads, sooner or later. The Cross puts us in crisis. His Cross challenges and even judges those who would make of the status quo their chosen lifestyle or life’s philosophy. The Crucified Christ is Himself like a spear that seeks to penetrate the sluggish and stubborn and hard of heart. Indifference before the Cross is impossible. The indifferent or uninterested or “otherwise occupied” reject the Cross. They are like the lukewarm of whom Christ says in the book of Apocalypse: “since you are neither hot nor cold, I vomit you out of my mouth.”

We human beings boast of our freedom of choice, and rightly, since it is the decisive faculty God has conferred on our human nature. But freedom of choice does not necessarily guarantee of itself that whatwe choose is worthy either of God or of ourselves. If we use our freedom to choose ways of thinking and acting which effectively enslave our freedom then we end up squandering our freedom, losing it to slavery, no matter how much we still protest that we are free. As Jesus says, whoever sins is a slave. When a person chooses to ignore the Cross or reject it, that does not stop the Cross from being there or the Crucified from being our judge – just as saying that I don’t believe in Christ doesn’t mean that He doesn’t exist. The denial of reality doesn’t make reality unreal; more likely it makes the denier mentally ill.

Christ died to take sin away. But sin is not only the deliberate choice to do what we know to be wrong: it is also the deliberate failure to choose to do what we know to be right. Christ died therefore to take away the false use of freedom in all its forms and to restore to us the right use of it in all its forms. The false use is always to put self before God and in the place of God. The right use is to put God before self. Freedom was not created for the self-love of obedience to sin, but for the selfless love of obedience to God. It was given to us to choose the truth of God in which alone we find life and peace. We cannot carve out an alternative truth, for then we would be carving out an alternative god. Christ alone is the truth, our truth. He alone with the Father and the Spirit is our God. He is the truth which was bound to be rejected and murdered by those who had falsified religion and God to maintain their power and make money, and also by those who considered Caesar and, by extension, the flesh to be god. Remember how angry God was before Moses when the people of Israel erected their golden calf, for it meant they had rejected Him.

 Jesus was murdered because he would not conform to the prevailing wind of expediency blowing in the religious and political establishments of his time. He came instead to unleash the wind of the Spirit of God to shatter the status quo and to awaken hearts to the urgent need for conversion and the love of God. He was murdered because He was God, because He spoke and lived the truth of God and because He revealed the true nature of love, of religion and of authentic human existence. He surely abhors the political correctness and pseudo-progress of so much of today’s society and Church. The spirit of Caiaphas who rejected the truth is still around in the Church today; and the spirit of Pilate who is the chief cynic of the truth is still around in politics and society today. But so also is still blowing where He will today the Spirit of Christ who was crucified to deliver us from shunning and doubting the truth.

And so we ask the Crucified Lord to breathe His dying breath of the Spirit within us today: that we may never be among those who let evil triumph in the world or in the Church because we do nothing; that we may never be complacent with the status quo of our own lives as regards the practice of true religion; and that His crucified love will empower us evermore to be committed to Him, no matter what the cost, for as long as we have breath in our bodies.

Christ, our crucified King and Mighty Hero, we adore you and we bless you because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.