Good Friday, 2009

It has been almost a year since I've posted on this blog. A student in one of my writing classes said my blog was "pathetic."

Blogs are a kind of bane for writers, another mouth to feed. In any case, here's a bit of a homily I preached on Good Friday.

Biblical scholars, historians, archeologists all agree: The Jewish religious authorities did not execute Jesus. The Passion plays of Medieval Europe blamed "the Jews" for the death of Jesus, after which, we know, Christians who watched them slaughtered Jews by the thousands. This is a stain on Christian history and on our hearts.

But if the Jewish authorities were not responsible for Jesus’s death, then who was? And why? What was it all for? Why the torture, the beating, the cross ?

Why did Jesus die?

Knowing that there are many theories of atonement, as theologians say, I want to take a look at one in particular tonight: I want to look at Jesus’s life to shed light on why he died.
Jesus lived in occupied territory. Israel, Jerusalem, the Galilee were colonized by the great Roman Empire: builder of aqueducts, commander of the largest and most efficient army in the world, and inventor of that peculiar form of execution, one they saved for dangerous political terrorists, persons who were threats to the empire itself, charismatic leaders who attracted followers–crucifixion, the cross.

Scholars have studied Jesus’s relation to Rome and for them, neither the term political activist nor personal savior quite cuts it, but rather something or someone in between.
This ground is delicate: These days, we often make Jesus into only a personal savior. I don’t want to swing all the way the other way and make him into a political revolutionary. That limits him, too. But to remove Jesus from his political and historic reality is to deny him and us, his full story.

Trying to understand Jesus without knowing how Roman imperialism determined the conditions of life in Galilee and Jerusalem would be like trying to understand Martin Luther King without knowing how slavery, reconstruction and segregation determined the lives of African Americans in the United States.

Jesus grew up under the heel of an empire. And he saw, all around him, its cost. The Romans saw themselves as creating “a new world order.” To accomplish this, Roman soldiers burned villages, pillaged the countryside, slaughtered or enslaved those they conquered. Huge taxes were imposed on the people in the colonies. When the Roman governor Antipas built two Roman-style cities in Galilee, a rural countryside, the Galilean peasants had to provide the resources for this massive building project. They paid taxes unto Caesar.

We don’t know exactly how Jesus fits into this reality but to imagine that he was not influenced by his place in time, or had nothing to say about it, is more than far-fetched.
How does this speak to us, today? We know from his life that Jesus chose not to identify with those with power. There are no gospel stories about Jesus having drinks at the private clubs of Antipas or Herod.

We are all, every one of us, interested in having power. Some power is good: the power to speak, the power to live out your vocation, whatever it is; to have what is called “agency,” the ability to act. We speak of empowerment, calling out of others their own strength and creativity. But we also know, as the old adage says, that power corrupts. Even in the smallest ways, power can corrupt the work of love.

Many of us have been in the position of either the giving or on the receiving end of the corruption of power. We see it in the many CEO’s who have confessed to lying, cheating and stealing. Power unabated can become demonic: witness Stalin, Hitler, Rwanda. And, I think, we have all, at one time or another, collaborated in the abuse of power, small and large. At my workplace, I’ve made sure I kept my turf intact, nurtured my ties to the owners of the company. When we laid-off 20% of our workforce in the early nineties, I hid my face from those who got pink slips. I, like just about everyone else in America, want to identify myself with those who have more, not with those who have less. I said identify myself. I give to the poor; I taught in the homeless shelter, but I don’t identify myself with Them. The people I cozy up to are the one’s with the power. 

Jesus, too, faced choices between power and vulnerability. He was a man who over the short stretch of his life came into contact with power over and over again. He made choices. Once again, let’s not confuse power with agency. Jesus was no passive guy, no milquetoast. He had a lot of agency, and he used it well. Yet, tonight: Let us remember his life: Jesus took a blind man by the hand and restored his sight. He fed a crowd with loaves and fish. He helped a deaf and mute man find his voice again. He listened when a Gentile woman begged him to heal her daughter of demons. He did not even exclude persons who were collaborators with the empire: i.e. the tax-collector, Matthew. He bound himself to those in need.

His parables are as clear as water in regard to power: Don’t be absorbed in who is sitting at the head of the table.The last shall be first. The meek will inherit the earth. Before this Lent, I took these stories as difficult admonitions, slightly accusatory reminders of how I should always remember those on the margins. But what I am coming to understand is that Jesus meant to say these things to himself, as much as to me. He said these things to himself because he understood, that choosing the vulnerable path was the way to keep his soul alive, and protected, from the harsh realities of power. He sought out the vulnerable because they helped keep him vulnerable. And he finally came to identify with them.

Jesus’s compassion for those who suffer because of the powerful is , as the theologian Walter Brueggemann puts it: “a radical form of criticism,” a radical form of criticism for it announces that, “the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.”

Jesus in his compassion says that the hurt of those who are hungry and poor, and taxed beyond their means is to be taken seriously: It is not normal for people to be without food; it is not normal for someone who is blind or deaf to beg on the street.

Injustice has a price and it’s paid in human flesh. Many of the men who came to our soup kitchen here at Trinity were homeless because the parts of town that had once been their sanctuaries were gradually “redeveloped” into places for time-share condos, fancy beach-side hotels. The single room occupancy, cheap hotels downtown were sold, and renovated, and became boutique spas. The people in our parish who work at the Faulding Hotel, one of the last single room occupancy hotels in town, know this story. Or we can just as well imagine the sweat shops where our T-shirts are made, or the pesticides that migrant workers have to breathe so our strawberries look nice, or the bombs and shrapnel that fall, as we speak, on civilians in Iraq.

Brueggemann continues, “Empires are never built nor are they maintained on the basis of compassion…” Empires, like Rome, like the United States, live by keeping their own citizens distracted with “bread and circuses.” The Roman rulers expected their citizens to remain silent in response to the human cost of war; mute in the face of the human cost of greed. And they kept those in the colonies in check by systemic terror: the price of prophetic witness was death.
But Jesus speaks up. He acts. By and through his compassion, he takes the first step in revealing the abnormality that has become business as usual.

This led him, finally, inexorably, to the cross. To the place where power and vulnerability, where power and Reality, intersect or , more accurately, collide. The cross stood at the end of a long series of choices. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who decided to return to Germany from a safe haven in the United States, like Rosa Parks who finally sat down at the front of a bus, like Martin Luther King, Jesus did not suddenly make a choice between power and vulnerability. He put his foot on a path, and years later he looked back and saw where that path had led him.
I remember thinking as I worked in the soup kitchen that I didn’t want to know what I was learning. Because then my life couldn’t go on in the same way as it had before: driving around in my nice red Volvo thinking about what new linens to buy. What we learn we cannot unlearn, what we see, we cannot unsee.

Jesus doesn’t call us to live in a soft cocoon, distracted and undisturbed, allowing others to pay the costs of our comfort.

When it comes right down to it, Jesus followed where compassion led him, and he bore the cost of what he found. Jesus asks us to follow where compassion leads, and bear the cost of what we find.

He calls us, as Nicholas Cage says in the movie Moonstruck, “to ruin our lives, to break our hearts, to love the wrong person and to die.” We are invited to ruin the old life of silence, to break our hearts with compassion over suffering, to love the wrong person–that would be Jesus–and to die. As a friend of mine said once, “ to get resurrected ya gotta get dead.” Because we know, from Jesus’s example, and from our own lives, what lies on the other side of this death. The other side of silence and distraction , of the deadly life of business as usual, is new life, resurrected life, born of compassion-awake and broken-hearted, and, yes, dangerous. Take up your cross.