Atrocity

If you grew up going to church like me, you will know well the story of the two days leading up to the moment Jesus died. Because of their familiarity, it takes a special effort to comprehend the seriousness of those days, but even when we manage this I think we miss something still more important. We overlook the evil of those days. Perhaps this is because we have grown accustomed to the mundane evil coursing through each day of our lives. But it wasn't that sort of evil - it was the sort that sees millions of Jews gassed to death, a woman beheaded in front of her two kids in a suburb of Santiago the other day, and a young homosexual guy slowly tortured to death by skinheads who carved swastikas into his flesh. I hope you have no personal knowledge of this sort of evil. The closest I have come is a man on the train in Sydney one day who stared at me from across the carriage with such penetrating malice and brutal arrogance that I knew to get off at the same stop as him would be to invite rape and violence. It was a horrible and eery moment - I could almost see the evil emanating from the heart of him.

We shouldn't read the accounts of Jesus' death lightly - in fact, we should almost be unable to bear reading them at all.

  . . . You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. You killed the author of life . . . (Acts 3:13-15)