The Centurion’s Pronouncement

The last convert to Christ recorded in the Gospels was a Roman centurion. Strangely, he converted after Jesus’ death, and before His resurrection. But all we know from the gospel is that after Jesus was dead, a centurion looked up at the body still hanging on the cross and said, “Truly, this was the Son of God.”

How did that centurion know? Why was he converted by Christ’s death, when so many others remained in their unbelief? What was revealed to that centurion on Good Friday? And what can we learn from it?

The Signs that Convinced Him

The Centurion’s act of faith didn’t come from nowhere. After all, He’d seen the spiritual power of Christ on the cross already. He’d seen Him lend comfort to His fellow sufferer. He’d seen Christ’s solicitude for His mother and His beloved disciple. And most amazing, inexplicable, really, without divine power, he’d seen Jesus praying that those who hated Him would be forgiven. Then, as a kind of confirmation, after Jesus died, the whole world seemed to convulse.

St. Matthew reports, “And behold, the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth quaked, rocks were split, tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised… The centurion and the men with him who were keeping watch over Jesus feared greatly when they saw the earthquake and all that was happening…”

So there you go: the evidence was there. Spiritually and empirically, the evidence was there. The Centurion was just responding to the evidence when he confessed the truth about Christ. So the real question isn’t, “Why did the Centurion come to believe,” but rather, “Why didn’t the Pharisees and the Jewish religious leaders? Why, how, could they continue to persist in their unbelief?

The Obstinacy of the Pharisees

Why didn’t the Jewish religious leaders convert? It was for them that Christ besought His Father’s forgiveness, even as they taunted Him cruelly during His torment. Then, after He died, they experienced the same supernatural signs that led the Centurion to belief. In fact, they had more! They not only saw the signs at Calvary, but they also knew the truth about the Resurrection. Remember? It was they who paid the Roman guards to lie, to spread the story that the disciples had stolen the body while they slept. Plus all the miraculous exorcisms and healings they’d seen during His public ministry.

The evidence was all around them. So what could have possibly prevented their faith? Put differently, what on earth could have blinded them so thoroughly to the reality of Jesus right in front of them?

The Blinding Power of Hate

Jesus preached the centrality of love. He came to reveal the God of pure love. And, obviously, the opposite of love is hate. And the sad truth is, by the time of the crucifixion, the Pharisees’ hearts were filled with hate. They wanted Christ dead. They wanted Him tormented. They wanted Him mocked. Now love and truth go together. God is both. Which means that hatred and blindness also go together and seal you off definitively from the Lord. 

God could pierce through the blindness of the Centurion even though the Centurion probably had plenty of vices, plenty of misconceptions, plenty of weaknesses, and deficiencies. But God’s truth could pierce through all that until the light of faith shone forth. But God couldn’t pierce through the blindness of the Pharisees. Their hatred was too antithetical to God’s love, and it blinded them completely to His truth. 

So above all else, above all else, we must be absolutely ruthless in ripping any hate out of our hearts. Otherwise, we will sit before the crucifixion, we will sit there, during the passion narrative on Palm Sunday and Good Friday, and we will remain blinded to the Savior.

Pulling out the Roots of Hate

The seeds of hate can grow in all sorts of ways. There can be a lot of beginnings to that twisted desire that bad things happen to someone else. It might be envy. It might be that we’re intimidated by someone. It might be a nasty divorce, or someone who abused us when we were young. It might be dysfunctional and selfish parents. It might be the person who fired us for no reason. It might be the friend who thoughtlessly said something that really hurt us. It might be a politician. It might be a priest or a bishop. It might be a group of people. 

At the end of Lent, there are going to be a lot of vices that are still with us. We won’t be able to get over all the selfishness and sloth and sensuality. But as we pass through Calvary to get to Easter, let’s at least renounce, once and for all, any hatred in our hearts. If there’s anyone we’re even tempted to resent, any public or private person, let’s pray for them right now, the way Christ prayed for His enemies on the cross. Let’s pray that God be merciful to them. Let’s pray that one day we will be completely reconciled to them, whether in this life or the next.

Let’s renounce that supreme blindness of hatred, and ask that our eyes be open, as the Centurion’s were, to the love and truth that Our Lord wants to give us, and give everyone else, from His life-giving cross. 

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