What To Do When The World Goes Mad

While I sincerely believe that the cross reveals a profound and beautiful truth about God – that God is non-violent and merciful – I think it would be a mistake to focus my Easter message on that. The reason is that I think we are too easily distracted by divinity. We are not living in times where we can afford that distraction. Certainly not if we wish to remain salt and light to a world in darkness.  

God concepts are dangerous. We should never forget that. Not because the divine is dangerous, but because of what we do with our god concepts: we use them to hide our violence from ourselves.

That is precisely what Christianity has done with Calvary. We have sacralised the horror of the cross, explaining it away as necessary and even beautiful. That is why this year I want to ask you to resist the urge to gaze up at the heavens, Because when we focus on the divine in the Passion story it is entirely too easy to lose sight of our own faces in the crowd. The story becomes one of us against God, where, depending on your narrative preferences, God has either used our violence to achieve peace (which is simply the scapegoating mechanism in a different guise) or actively orchestrated the sacrifice. Neither is satisfactory because neither acknowledges the violence as a human failing. By suggesting that the violence is divinely sanctioned, our readings place it beyond reproach.

We should loathe the cross and all it stands for. It is Jesus’s response to the cross, not the fact of the cross, that offers redemption.

And to unpack that, I think we need to focus our attention on Jesus’ humanity, not his divinity. Jesus’s preferred self-designation, after all, was “Son of Man”. Scholars are quick to note that this is a reference to Daniel, where the Son of Man stands as a representative for Israel. In Jesus’s Aramaic context, though. that phrase could simply mean “the human”. Not a celestial being in disguise, but a representative of all of us, a second Adam, as Paul put it. In other words, Jesus reveals not just the character of God (non-violent and non-retaliatory) but contains the promise of all we are and everything we might yet be.

But human identity is always formed in relationship. We are always first being-with before we are being. The self never emerges in isolation, but through how we receive and respond to one another. If we want to understand ourselves through the lens of Jesus, we have to observe him in relationship and, more particularly, in broken relationships. This is where the greatest Commandments play out: to love God and (“just like it” in Jesus’s words) to love our neighbours (in which category Jesus’s teachings explicitly include our enemies and persecutors). In the Passion story, all the deeper patterns that shape human relationship are starkly exposed, judged and found wanting.  

The gospels draw our attention not only to Jesus, but to those around him. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate stands before a volatile crowd, under pressure from Rome, tasked with maintaining order in a politically fragile environment. The high priest Caiaphas faces a different but related concern: how to preserve the stability of a people under occupation. Both are navigating the same underlying reality: a community under strain, anxious for resolution.

A familiar logic emerges. It is better, we are told, that one man should die than that the whole nation be destabilised (John 11:50). So we locate the problem, contain it, eliminate it, and restore peace (Luke 23:12).

It is a line of reasoning that feels uncomfortably familiar. Just look around you at your country’s internal politics, at international relations, at the ways your culture responds to escalating tensions. It seems like the world is losing control. Like Herod and Pilate and Caiaphas, we too are drawn toward explanations that simplify complexity. We look for those who are responsible. We speak of threats that must be contained. We begin to believe that if only the right people were removed, silenced or defeated, stability might return.

The gospels invite us to see through this logic, not by denying its persuasive power, but by exposing its cost. The peace it promises is real, but it is fragile and temporary, secured at the expense of another. It resolves tension by redirecting it onto a victim. And, in the figure of the Son of Man, the representative human, we see that the victim is always ourselves. Which means the victim is always also God: “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me” (Matthew 25:40).

This is what the fourth gospel means when it says the cross is the judgment of the world. Not that God condemns from a distance, but that Calvary exposes us. The cross holds up a mirror to every empire, every angry mob, every religious and political system that secures peace through sacrifice. The very exposure is the judgment. And the verdict? Forgiveness. Not because sin doesn’t matter, but because God’s only response to exposed evil is to absorb it and reply, “Father, forgive them”. Judgment, in the light of Easter, is not a threat of retribution. It is the truth that sets us free.

So what do we do? How do we respond when the crowds are baying for blood, when the world seems about to unravel? What do we do when the world goes mad?

If we are willing to see it, the Easter story does more than simply expose the problem; it offers us a choice. The first is a path we know well. It is the path of managing fear through control, of securing peace through exclusion, of resolving crisis by identifying and removing a problem. It is the path of “one for all”: the sacrifice of the one to preserve the many.

The second path is harder to recognise because it runs against our instincts. It does not deny the reality of fear or the urgency of crisis, but it refuses to resolve them through violence, whether physical or verbal. It is the path the Son of Man walks: a path of surrender, of non-retaliation, of remaining in relationship even where others fracture it.

At first glance, this second path appears weak. It does not promise immediate results. It does not satisfy our desire for clarity or control. It does not even appear to “work,” at least not in the ways we have been taught to measure success. It leads, unmistakably, to the cross. And yet the gospels suggest that this is the only path that leads to life.

And at the centre of it, inviting us to pick up our cross and follow him, stands the Son of Man, absorbing the full weight of the violence that surrounds him and responding in a way that interrupts its cycle.

To imitate the Son of Man in a time such as ours is therefore not to withdraw from the tensions of the world, nor to pretend that they do not exist. It is to stand within them without surrendering to the logic that demands an enemy.

We have been shaped by cultures that suggest otherwise, but faith has never been about belief. The urgent question has never been about understanding which path leads to life. It has always been about which path we are willing to walk. It is easier to admire the cross than to follow Jesus and pick it up. It is less uncomfortable to theologise about it than to question the ways we participate, however subtly, in its patterns of blame and exclusion and to elect, instead, to enter fully into broken relatedness in a way that unsettles it. To resist the urge to reduce the complex realities to simple blame, to refuse to participate in the quiet dehumanisation of those we disagree with; to remain present in relationships under strain, to choose words that heal rather than inflame.

This path will not resolve global crises. Jesus died at Calvary. His defiant forgiveness did nothing immediate or visible to redirect the violence. These acts of love in a world gone mad may not even be noticed. Even people who had spent years under Jesus’s direct tutelage did not understand his revelation. But Jesus knew what this path would entail (John 15: 18 – 25) and he called us to walk it with him anyway. Because the question is not whether or not this way is effective, it is whether it is true.

Easter does not offer us a strategy for fixing the world. It offers us a way of being within it. It does not promise that violence will cease if we love our enemies, or that division will dissolve if we refuse to participate in it. The cross stands as a stark reminder that this is not how the world works. But the resurrection insists, just as stubbornly, that this is how life does.