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Music
O vos omnes – Casals
Choir of Jesus College, Cambridge
CD: Out of darkness: Music from Lent to Trinity (Signum Records)

Reading: John 19: 13-15

Neil MacGregor
We are in the National Gallery in London, standing in front of Rembrandt’s Good Friday meditation - his exploration of  the reading you have just heard from the gospel of John. Pilate, the Roman governor, is presenting Jesus to the crowd for the second time; earlier, he had brought him out and said simply, ‘Behold the man!’,  now he dramatically  raises the stakes and says to the priests and the people: Behold your King.

Pilate has just questioned Jesus carefully in private, and has at last made up his mind about who this man is – and, as he’s a diligent imperial administrator, he will in a few minutes make sure that he writes it down, on the notice that will be put on the cross.  He has come to the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth is the King of the Jews. 

Now, the priests and the watching crowd have to decide whether they also think that Jesus is their king.   And so, crucially do we.   Because Rembrandt here is not just illustrating a particular moment in the story of the Passion.  He is putting us, the spectator, on the spot, along  with the crowd : who do we think Jesus is? where do our ultimate loyalties lie?  For everybody involved, and for us spectators, it is quite simply a choice  between life and death.  A choice that has to be made and re-made.  In Jerusalem in 33 AD.   In Rembrandt’s Amsterdam four hundred years ago.  In our own home town, today. Every day.

Music
Crucifixus – Lotti
Tenebrae
CD: Allegri Miserere (Signum Classics)

Rev Lucy Winkett
This choice is ours to make as it was theirs then, and over the 2000 intervening years this choice has been expressed in many different ways. Shamefully, Christian orthodoxy developed in such a way that Gentile Christians accused their Jewish elders of the ultimate crime; deicide, the killing of God. Which in its turn led, still leads in some places, to anti-Jewish, antisemitic tropes being repeated on this day. But having acknowledged the appalling history, theologically, the real choice is much more challenging and is addressed not only to a particular people at a particular time but to all people for all time.  In the words of Jesus himself you cannot serve two masters. Human beings are presented with two pathways ahead of them; two kingdoms if you like. One in which you swear allegiance to human power, gained inevitably through exploitation and avarice, and the other to a kingdom ‘not of this world’. A kingdom, a society perhaps, characterised by as RS Thomas put it, ‘mending the bent bones and the minds fractured by life’.  

Neil MacGregor
It’s a small picture, roughly twice the size of a sheet of A4 paper, and it’s  painted on paper, in oils.  It’s almost entirely in  browns and greys and whites,  because it was made as a preparatory study for a  black and white  etching, which was produced shortly afterwards , and turned out to be extremely popular.  Indeed if you look at this picture in a certain light, you can see that the outlines have been gone over with a stylus, to transfer them to the copper plate for the etcher to work on. So this is not official religious art, commissioned and approved by a particular church.  It’s very much a private image, intended to be looked at closely, to be bought in the market place or the print shop, and taken home, where you ponder what it means for you there, in your daily life.  And the more I look at it, the more disturbing I find this image becomes.

Music
Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten – Arvo Part
English Chamber Orchestra
CD: Music for Mindfulness (Decca)

Neil MacGregor
Rembrandt follows John’s text very closely.  The left half of the picture shows a grand official building,  the governor’s palace,  with a large stone terrace in front of it at first-storey level.

Here, nearest to us, is Pilate, splendidly robed and turbaned, as you’d expect of the emperor’s representative, shown in his place on the judgment seat mentioned in the text – a kind of low throne.  Above him is a canopy, emblem of imperial authority, and its drapery provides the only colour in the whole composition: a dull blood red.   Kneeling in front of Pilate, and clearly vigorously arguing with him, are the chief priests, also sumptuously  robed.   Above and behind them, we see what they are arguing about: on a step in the centre of the Pavement, and the highest figure on it, is Jesus. Unlike the figures below, he is almost naked,  except for the mocking robe and crown of thorns.  He is handcuffed, surrounded and jostled by soldiers carrying pikes,   and standing quite   still, looking out at us.  

On the right hand side, below the platform, we look down to the city gate and the shadowy square in front of it,  packed to overflowing with a large crowd.  All we can see of the people there is a multitude of sketchily painted heads, crammed close together, with no discernible features. This is literally a faceless mob, but Rembrandt, by repeating the curving rhythms of the anonymous, amorphous heads, suggests a suppressed violence that could at any moment explode into riot.  This crowd, we sense, is dangerous.   In contemporary terms, this is a social media storm waiting to break, about to turn into very ugly action on the street.

Music
‘Father, forgive them’ Seven Last Words from the Cross – James MacMillan
Dimitri Ensemble
CD; James MacMillan – Seven Last Words from the Cross (Naxos) 

Rev Lucy Winkett
The choice presented to us in this painting is not one we make solely alone.  The teaching of Jesus was often to what the gospels called ‘the crowd’. A crowd welcomed him as he parodied human power by riding on a donkey not on a horse at the head of a military procession. And now the same crowd who shouted ‘Hosanna’ shouts ‘crucify’.  Just as crowds watched the execution of the nobility in revolutionary France and families took picnics to witness the lynchings of African American men in the 19th century South, crowds of human beings act sometimes in ways they would find impossible alone.  Jesus faced the crowd of religious types who dragged a woman in front of him caught as they said in the very act of adultery. He knew that one stone couldn’t kill her, it needed many. Let the one who is without sin cast it he said. And the crowd melted away.  

Music
The Seven last words of our Saviour on the Cross (3rd movement) - Haydn
Klenke Quartet
Haydn – Siebenworte (Edel Classics)

Neil MacGregor
Now a figure on the platform gestures to them to hush, and they look up, watching, waiting, as their religious leaders insistently hold out to Pilate the long rod of justice  which he must take in order to pronounce the sentence of death on Jesus.  But Pilate, for the moment, refuses to take it, and asks one last question:

At this point, we notice the top right hand quarter of the painting. There, on a tall column in the city square, is Caesar himself– or at least an over - life-size bust of the Roman emperor, whose troops occupy the country and control the city, wearing round his shoulders a military commander’s cloak, and on his head the laurel wreath of victory in battle . Like Jesus on the other side of the picture wearing his mock-royal cloak and his crown of thorns, Caesar looks serenely outwards.  The two heads echo each other --- they’re the highest heads in the whole composition --  one in stone, one in flesh;  the opposing poles of this drama.  Caesar or Jesus? The might of the Roman legions, or the refusal of all force?  The security of power and the established order, or the powerlessness of humility and love, with its unavoidable suffering ?   Between these two figures, we have to choose.  Caesar stares blankly over our heads; Jesus looks at us, and is looking for our answer.

Rev Lucy Winkett
It is a picture that functions as an ikon. Not only do we look at it, but in the eyes of Jesus, it contemplates us.  Good Friday is the day of crisis for the relationship between God and humanity. And the word crisis simply means at its root a judgement. A discernment, a decision.  We live in  a world that is moving away from such binary choices. As we explore a creation more complex and more subtle not least in the arena of human identity, than we ever thought before.  But sometimes it is this or that, me or you, here or there. And so Jesus looks at our life on Good Friday, but looks at it from the point of view he has hanging on the cross, lifted up above us….. dying….. to offer us the freedom we find it so hard to receive; freedom to love irreducibly our neighbour, God, ourselves - as we were made to love. And to know that this life of love, forgiveness, compassion, is an abundant life, a joyful life, but with the tendency, perhaps the necessity to break our hearts too.   

Music
Hope, faith, life, love – Eric Whitacre
Eric Whitacre Singers
CD: Light and Gold (Decca)

Neil MacGregor
Beside the bust of Caesar, over the arch of the city gate, is a large public clock, marked with Roman numerals. Now Rembrandt knew perfectly well that the ancient Romans didn’t have clocks.  But the Amsterdam of his day did – and it’s the people of Amsterdam, the people pondering this picture, that Rembrandt is concerned with.  This event, he is saying, happened 1600 years ago in Jerusalem, but we face the same dilemma in our city, in our own homes,  now.  And to underline the point, it is here, just below the anachronistic modern clock, that he prominently places his signature: Rembrandt, 1634.  Verse 14 tells us that it was ‘about the sixth hour’ and the hand of the clock is indeed just approaching the Roman letters VI – six.  But – brilliantly --  Rembrandt has turned the dial of the clock upside down, and put the six at the top, where we would today expect to see twelve.  So the seventeenth-century eye, like our ours,  reads the time instinctively as approaching High Noon, or a minute to midnight : either way it’s time for the show-down. Decision time. 

Music
Christ in his Passion (from ‘Crucifixus’) – Leighton
Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge
CD: Leighton – Sacred Choral Music (Naxos) 

Rev Lucy Winkett
God, in allowing Godself to be crucified in Jesus, turns the world upside down. And exhibits what the German theologian Dorothee Soelle called ‘revolutionary patience’.  This is a moment in deep time; a sacramental moment where time meets eternity and Christ stands at the crossroads asking us if we’d like to join.  A colossal and cosmic moment in a town square that looks quite ordinary. Not an escape from time in a Wonderland sort of way, but a step into a moment that will define ‘before’ and ‘after’ in a way unimagined previously. The London poet and prophet William Blake illustrated this deep time in his imagined judgement which, rather than being one moment in time, was a constant journey between sheep and goat, heaven and hell, now and then.  We are, as human beings, always living in this deep time, living life but close to death and eternity. As Jesus said elsewhere, we cannot bear this knowledge now.  The town square and its day to day-ness saves us from being permanently overwhelmed by the thought.  

Neil MacGregor
The people that Pilate has asked to make that decision are the focal point of the picture - the four chief priests, the leaders of the religious establishment, the Temple.  The light falls on them with the harsh intensity of a spotlight . They look anxious, confused, angry.  They know that their power and authority depend on the established order, and that Jesus threatens that order, with his insistence that the law is not in fact about control and punishment, but is the living instrument of God’s boundless forgiveness and love. He has driven the money-changers out of the Temple, and has consistently questioned the need for ritual observances.   And so they, the guardians of those rituals and of the Temple, are urging Pilate to kill him; they, the most devout of Jews, they protest their total loyalty to the Roman occupier:

Like religious hierarchies before and since, they cling to the letter of the law.  On the head-dress of the priest nearest Pilate you can see written the Hebrew letters for Jahweh: God. And it is that priest who is pressing  Pilate to take the rod of justice and pronounce the death sentence on Jesus.  They have appropriated to themselves the power of God to judge. They are trapped in the letter of the law, that kills; and resist being set free by the spirit.

Rev Lucy Winkett
Not long before this picture, Jesus had made a whip of cords and expelled the exploitative financial practices going on in the Temple courtyard. The choice Rembrandt illustrates here is expressed in that action too, as it leads us to ask ourselves today: what tables am I sitting at that Jesus would overturn if he could? Boardroom tables, canteen tables, tables at which, like the money changers, unfair rates are charged or  where not everyone is welcome. It’s so much easier for us in contemporary life to position ourselves as the one who joins Jesus in his righteous anger.  And so we must, as we look at our world and all the suffering it holds. But we are much more reluctant to answer the other sorts of questions that Jesus’s gaze presents us with as he faces his own unjust trial and sentence to death.  Without becoming caught up in an unhealthy obsession with our own sin, a clear-eyed answer to Jesus’s question ‘who do you say that I am’ will inevitably change the way we live.  

Neil MacGregor
The question is as frightening and destabilising to us now as it was to everybody then.  The implications of following this man, of changing our life to match his teachings, are too much for most of us. We just want that existential  question to go away.  And so, again and again, in our different private ways, we behave now like the chief priests then, we become one with the crowd, we ask Pilate to take the final decision for us --- and we send the love of God, once more,  to Calvary. 

Music
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Jessye Norman
CD: Jessye Norman Spirituals (Philips)

The Collect for Good Friday
from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer