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I continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word. As it is recorded in the Gospel according to Luke, the 23rd chapter, I begin the reading at the verse which is numbered 44. It was about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth

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hour, while the sun's light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." And having said this, he breathed his last.

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Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, "Certainly this man was innocent." And all the multitudes who assembled to see the sight, when they saw what had taken place, returned home, feeding their breasts.

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And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his Word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Certainly, this man was innocent. That's what the centurion said. An unknown soldier. There is no monument that marks his grave.

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There is no decoration upon his resting place. Yet he was the man who observed the affairs associated with the crucifixion of Christ more closely than any other, for he was in charge. And he saw it all.

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And at the end of it, he arrived at a certain conclusion which he did not hesitate to announce. And that conclusion was this. Certainly, this man was innocent. Now that's a very significant conclusion.

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For you see, Jesus was being crucified on the charge of lying. He was accused of blasphemous deceit, of claiming to be the Son of God, when in point of fact, he was not. So when this unknown centurion says that Jesus was innocent, he is saying that what Jesus

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claimed to be the truth was in fact the truth. This statement of the centurion's is nothing less than an affirmation of Jesus' deity. If you read the story as it appears in the other Gospels, you will find that both Matthew and Mark notice that what the centurion said was, "Truly, this man was a Son of God."

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But in this instance, that is no different from saying, "Surely, this man was innocent." For the essence of all three of these remarks is the same. And what comes home very powerfully to me is that in these, the last words spoken on Calvary and the first words spoken about what had happened there, the man who saw it all,

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who had been involved in it from the very beginning, came to the conclusion, "Truly, this man was who he said he was." There's something very strangely beautiful about that, something very wonderfully special. It's one of the great kindnesses of Calvary.

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Now, of course, we do not know what this sun-bronzed man meant by his remark. He is an unknown to us. Oh, there are certain generalities about him that we can make. He was probably an older man.

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You did not get to be a centurion until you had had considerable experience in the military. He would have been raised in a home where the Roman gods were worshipped, Janus and Vesta, Consus and Ops. His wife, perhaps, when he went off on his tour of duty, would slip into the bundle of

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his veer some little wooden statues of deities to whom she prayed for his protection. And it's very likely that in his small barracks room there in Jerusalem, with its single shelf, he would have set up those wooden gods and prayed regularly to them. He had been taught as a boy that the emperor was God, but in that time and place, no one

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really believed that. They understood it to be a political ploy and nothing more. Being assigned to Jerusalem, he probably was astonished at the religious passion of the Jewish people.

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The Romans were much more blase about religion. Now he was in the midst of those who made it the first priority in their lives, and he probably thought that very strange and sophisticated. We can't know then all of the thoughts that went through his mind about things religious

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when he said, "Truly, this man was who he said he was." We can't understand what that meant to one raised in the tradition of Roman religion. There undoubtedly were overtones of that religious faith in what he said here. But what's important to observe is that this is at least some kind of expression of faith.

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This centurion, after watching the death of Jesus of Nazareth, affirmed about him some kind of deity. And that leads me to three thoughts, just three thoughts I'd like to share with you, and then we are done.

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And the first thought is obviously this. This Roman centurion had a mind that was open. You know, it's interesting to observe that even God will not penetrate a closed mind. I do not mean that God cannot do so.

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God can force himself into any mind regardless of its resistance. But God does not violate the freedom of his creation. He does not intimidate people into believing. You remember that great passage in Revelation where Jesus says, "Behold, I stand at the

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door and knock. If anyone open to me, I will come into him and sup with him." Here you see there is no reference to a battering ram. There is no suggestion that he's going to push his way through the portal.

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Instead of that, there is testimony, "Behold, I stand in patience. I only knock." I know of two artistic presentations of that scene, Jesus knocking at the door of the heart. One is by Hoffman and the other is by Salman.

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And it's interesting to observe that in both of these pictures, the door on which Jesus knocks has on the outside no handle, no knob. And both artists explained why this was so. They said the door to the heart can only be opened from the inside.

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Redemption you see is exclusively an inside job. The necessity for redemption is a mind that is open and is willing to act on the basis of its openness. And that's what we see in this centurion.

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My friends, make no mistake about this. Of all the stupid things that have ever been said, one of the most stupid is this, "What you don't know won't hurt you." The fact is that what we do not know hurts us terribly.

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We do not know the cure for cancer. We do not know the solution to heart disease. We do not know the things that make for peace. Many of us do not know the blessings of stewardship because we have never tried it.

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Ignorance is a curse. And many times ignorance only exists because of the folly of closed minds. But in this centurion, we see a humble man, a man who listened by command to those who were in authority over him and who was open to new ideas.

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And we also see a brave man, a man who was willing to lay down his life for what he believed but who was also courageous enough to confront a new belief and to consider it. And out of that humility and that bravery, out of that open-mindedness, the beginnings of his faith were forged.

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It would do us well to imitate the open-mindedness of this unknown soldier. And I would ask you to observe, secondly, that his mind was not only open, it was also changed. He saw Jesus in extremis.

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He did not see Jesus as he is so often pictured, with a bird on his shoulder and a child in a lap and a lamb at his feet. He saw Jesus caught in the bloody claws of torture. This dark-skinned Roman, his shoulders rubbed raw by the weight of his armor, baked because

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of the Syrian sun in which he'd stood all day long. This was a tough man. He crucified people without a qualm. He controlled the soldiers who served under him, who were younger and stronger and faster.

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And one of the ways he was able to control them was by his experience, and another was by way of his brutality. This is no milquetoast militarist. Even the gods that he worshipped were as hard as the hobs on his Roman sandals.

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Jupiter, who rode across the heavens in a chariot drawn by four white horses and with the crack of his whip caused the lightning to flash and the thunder to roll. Hercules, who captured the great bull of Minas. His gods were heroes.

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There was no weakness in them. And some say that that is what drew this old soldier to his respect for Jesus, that he saw in this one who was crucified and died so terribly courage and never heard from his lips even the hint of a whine or of a whimper.

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And there may be truth in that. It is not at all hard to believe that this old soldier admired the courage of this young soldier dying on the cross, and there are some who see nothing else in the cross but an example of consummate courage.

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But I would suggest to you this morning that that understanding of what transpired between this centurion and the Christ is far too shallow. For what the centurion really saw when he looked at the cross was not only heroism, but also love.

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It wasn't the fact that Jesus didn't curse. It was the fact that he prayed. It wasn't the fact that he controlled his anger. It was the fact that he spoke about forgiving those who had put him there.

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It wasn't that he breathed out no threats. It was that he breathed out compassion. It wasn't just that in Jesus he saw no vehemence. It was that in Jesus he saw the victory of a magnificent peace.

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I think that for the first time in all of his life, this old Roman saw love crawling in the dust for the sake of those who were loved. That was a new power for him. Until that time, power meant Rome and armies and legions and swords.

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But in Jesus, he sees the loving power of a greater idea. He sees a strength in compassion that will not quit. He encounters, I think for the very first time, the fact that mercy is greater than might and that gentle love is greater than cruelty.

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And I think it stunned him. It's very easy for people to talk about bravery, but speaking of bravery means nothing until bravery itself is tested. And if that is true, then the bravest man who has ever stood in this pulpit was Dr.

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Martin Muehmuller, imprisoned for so many years by the Nazis, tortured in their concentration camps, threatened with death every day for holding fast to his belief in the face of Hitler and all that Hitler stood for. Muehmuller told on one occasion of how his little cell had a single window there at Dachau,

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and it looked out directly upon the gallows, and every day he would see men hanged there. And he said that every time he saw this, two questions came to his mind. As he would watch them being put to death, either with curses or with prayers upon their lips, two questions would insinuate themselves into his thinking.

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The first question was this. When it came his time to go to the gallows, would he scream out at those who hanged him there, "Criminals! Scum!

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There is a God and someday you'll get yours!" That was the first question. His own behavior when it was his turn. And the second question that he found himself confronting again and again was this.

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What would have happened had Jesus, when he was put upon his cross, cried out to those gathered there, "Criminals! Scum! My father God will see that all of you, each in his own time, gets what he deserves!"

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Most of all, he said, "Jesus had uttered those words. What would have happened?" And then posing that question, he answered it. He said, "Why, nothing would have happened.

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Absolutely nothing would have happened. We never would have heard his name. There would be no Gospels. There would be no New Testament.

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There would be no Church. There would be no Christian history. For the magnetism of the cross, the strange luminescence of the cross, the charm of the cross, if you will, is precisely this.

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That put in such a place by such people, this Jesus said, "I will not be the enemy of your enemies. I am not even the enemy of my own enemies." The statement of an omnipotent love.

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And that is what changed the mind of the centurion. Make no mistake, the cross was not a defeat, canceled out by the victory on Easter, which happened three days later. The cross was the victory of one who was drawn into the center of the blackest crime of human

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history, and yet who did not sin. The cross is the victory of one who endured the worst the world's power could do and never moved a finger to try to use that same kind of power. The cross is the victory of one whose love was unbreakable, and because of that, whose

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spirit was unstoppable. And that is what caught the centurion, the final omnipotence of love. And that, it seems to me, should lead us to think about ourselves and the power of the world versus the power of love.

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You know, one of the frighteningly unique things about humankind is that we alone, of all creation, use our conscious minds, our intellect, to abuse other people with power, to be cruel. We do it especially to those who are weak and unable to defend themselves.

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To children, to women, to the poor, to the weak and defenseless, to racial and ethnic minorities, to homosexuals and the like. There is a terrible misuse of power in the world, a pornography of power and of cruelty exercised by people against other people.

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To the breaking of my heart, I've let my mind dwell on this now for six days. I've thought about women chained to basement walls in Philadelphia and tortured by a killer there. I've thought about little kids in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, whose bodies were penetrated

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by medical instruments while pornographic cameras took pictures of the scene. I thought of the words of a man whom I heard say just eight days ago to a group of people gathered, one of which was his slightly overweight wife. And I heard him say to them, "Gathered there, you know my wife is the only investment I

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ever made which has never stopped growing." I watched a woman, a well-dressed woman, stand on the corner of 6th and Smithfield and say to her little girl, five or six years old, "Shut up, stupid!" While others stood around and saw the scene.

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Was intimidating their employees, threatening their security and the security of their families for a little more production's sake. I got a letter this week from the Prudential Home Mortgage Company, which is a division of the Prudential Insurance Company of America.

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They hold the mortgage on my condominium. I've lived there for five years. Never missed a payment. Never even gone into the grace period.

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I believe Christians should be responsible with regard to the meeting of their obligations. To me it is a matter of faith. So I got this letter from them. It was a form letter, unsigned.

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And this is what the letter said. We appreciate the fact that your obligations are met on time. We can tell from this that you value your credit rating. So we want you to know that beginning now and continuing into the future, if anyone

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exceeds the grace period in the payment of any mortgage payment, we will immediately notify six different credit bureaus across the country, and your credit rating will suffer accordingly. We thought you'd like to be advised.

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What kind of thinking motivates that kind of writing? An evil jaundiced man doesn't like a book and orders the death of another. And others using power blow up bookstores to underscore that dictum. People who talk about reverence for life blow up Planned Parenthood centers.

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Individuals who claim to be witnesses for Christ, assaulting others with a blast of verses and a torrent of theology, holding themselves up while trampling on hurting souls that many times believe more in their unbelief than these people do in the cruel way they present a loving Christ.

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A child in the South Hills cheats in school and is caught and is so terrified by the power of his father that he commits suicide. And Christians talk about increasing the throw weight of our nuclear missiles so that we can hurl them at a country on the other side of the world called the Soviet Union, where

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a hundred million other Christians live. People behave at church meetings with such vile temper and such intemperate speech that members of the church coming in from the outside and seeing it call me and say, "What is happening here?"

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The earth is raped and pillaged by those who pursue profit at the expense of the planet and are powerful enough to get away from it. And our astronauts come back yesterday and tell us how they can see the marks of this abuse.

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Thirty-five thousand children die of hunger every day in the world, while nations that have too much refuse to share and are powerful enough to get away with that and heartless enough to let the pile of tiny bodies stack up on their very shores. An airline fights a union, a union fights an airline, and both, seeking to use the power

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of the world, seem destined to end what has been a great and profitable enterprise. And both will lose. Make no mistake about it. There are still crosses.

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People are still put on crosses. They're put on crosses in families, they're put on crosses in friendships, they're put on crosses in churches, they're put on crosses in businesses, they're put on crosses in society, they're put on crosses in the world.

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And hanging over against this is another man on a cross who says, "I repudiate every power but love. Cruelty is nothing but the course of folly. Love will win what power can never hope to claim.

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Love can enter where no amount of power can ever infiltrate." Jesus, saying to a whole world, "In the absence of love there can be no final victory, and in the presence of love there can be no final defeat." So as we enter Holy Week this year, let's just remind ourselves that it is Jesus Christ

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who grips history. This lonely man, dying in the dark, praying for his enemies, it is this man whose magnificent power will finally judge all the world, and that includes us, even as it judged that centurion on Calvary who watched it happen and then felt the earthquake at his feet.

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And while others ran home beating their breasts with fear, this strong soldier thought of his gods, thought of Jupiter and Janus and Sibyl and Bacchus and Mithra and Augustus, and as he thought of them, saw only blood and tyranny. And then, looking up to that central cross, he saw briefly a shaft of golden sunlight,

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hurled he must have thought like a javelin into the darkness, suddenly illuminate the form of this crucified Galilean. Seeing that, he fell to his knees and lifted his face till he saw the face of that one now still in death.

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And then slowly, with strong, scarred hands, he lifted from his head the golden helmet, which was the testimony of his honor and position in the world. The golden helmet with its crimson blue, and dropped it to the mud and said in submission and in awe, "The victory is yours, pale Galilean, for love is greater than the world's power."

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And you are who you say you are. Truly, truly, the innocent son of God. Let us pray. O God, open us where we are closed, soften us where we are hard, make us loving where

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we are without love, make us agents of Christ and not of cruelty, servants of peace and not of power. For the sake of that one who loved and loved and loved and loved and loves and loves and loves.

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Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]