The verdict is in

The angels were stunned, the stars hid their light, the universe went silent at the audacity of it, the wrongness of it, the outrageousness of it.  The Judge of the guilty is himself judged guilty.  Here now at last, in all the thick catalogue of human rebellion, is the lie so brazen as to surely bring down upon the heads of the insurrectionists a punishment swift and terrible. But no, the prisoner standing in the dock calmly responds, "For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice." - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


The judgment to which Fr. Neuhaus refers is not merely the judgment carried out upon Jesus of Nazareth. He spends a couple pages developing the idea of how we conclude that we are not to blame for the wrong in the world, and that therefor God is guilty, or nonexistent. But our audacious judgment meets its match in Jesus' willingness to accept it.

But how, we must ask, is God glorified by the humiliation and death of God? This great reversal of everything we think we know is too much to bear. Dark is light and light is dark, right is wrong and wrong is right and a lie is recruited to the service of the truth. The order of things is shattered. Precisely so, our disordered order is shattered so that things might be restored to order. - ibid.

I'm not sure we've ever been so insistent on our own idea of order, on the rightness of how we understand the world to be, on fairness as we insist it must be, on our right to determine for ourselves (and impose upon others) what is really right, as we find ourselves in this day. God will not insist on restoring order for us. As long as we insist that we know best, we will be allowed to continue in our disordered order. But if, gazing upon the injustice of Jesus on the cross, we quietly consider why a just God might have accepted it even though it was so exemplifyingly unfair, perhaps we get humble enough to reject the logic that screams how justice must be, and that any opposing voice - no matter how tender - is that of oppression, and must be silenced.