Where the Cross Was Planted

A Good Friday Reflection

By Rev. Vijayesh Lal

The death of Jesus Christ was not a tragedy that God permitted. It was an act that God initiated. That is perhaps the most disturbing sentence in all of Christian theology and the most liberating. The Creator, entering his own creation. The Judge, taking the place of the condemned. The one without sin, becoming sin. Not as a last resort. As a plan.

That is what the cross is. Before it is anything else, it is that.

And yet the one through whom all things were made was executed by the state. Falsely accused. Denied a fair hearing. Put to death to protect the interests of the powerful. The religious establishment gave its blessing. His followers scattered.

This is not incidental detail. This is the shape of the gospel. God chose to save the world not from a throne but from a cross, outside the city walls, among the condemned and the discarded, in the place reserved for those whom no one was coming to help.

Which means Good Friday is not only about what God did for us. It is about where God stood. And it is an uncomfortable question, in every generation, about where we stand.

Sunita was thirteen. She died of typhoid last November in Chhattisgarh. Her family was told her body could be buried in the village only if they renounced their faith. They carried her ten kilometres in the night to find ground that would receive her. Last month, a woman named Sambai Mandavi died. Her husband buried her 200 kilometres from home. In Benur village, a man who had been in the ground for over twenty years was exhumed, his remains burnt to ash and scattered, deliberately, to send a message to the living. In February this year, the Supreme Court had to issue an emergency order to halt the exhumations. The court orders exist. The ground tells a different story.

And through all of it, the families who refused to renounce the name of Christ have not moved. Everything has been taken or threatened. Their homes. Their land. Now their dead. But their grip on God, or rather His grip on them, has not loosened. That stubbornness, in people who have lost almost everything for it, is the most serious sermon this Easter season.

Across the world, wars continue. Civilians die in the rubble. Children are buried in the soil that was their home. These are not distant news items. They are the places where the crucified Christ is most present, because he said so himself. I was the stranger. I was the one without shelter. I was the one you passed.

And across the world, some of the loudest voices carrying the name of Christ are not in those places. They are in the rooms where power is held and decisions are made, offering prayers of blessing over those who hold the weapons, lending the gospel to the purposes of the powerful.

The high priest prayed that day as well.

Good Friday does not ask where you stand theologically. It asks where you stood. In your presence. Your silence. Your choices.

The cross was not raised in a comfortable place. It was raised outside the gate, with the shamed, the condemned, the ones nobody was coming for. He was there then. He has not moved.

The question this Friday is not whether we believe in the cross. The question is whether we are willing to be found where the cross was planted.