Mark
14:1-15:47
Palm
Sunday
You
remember the story in Genesis about Abraham and his son Isaac? Abraham believes
the LORD is calling him to kill his son and offer him as a sacrifice. It’s a
terrible story, and the common interpretation is that God is testing Abraham to
see if he really has faith. I think there is a test going on in that story, but
it is not whether Abraham has faith: the test is whether he or we believe in a
God who would demand such a thing. In the end, God won’t let him kill his son,
but provides a ram to offer as a sacrifice instead. But it's a close call and a
haunting story, especially on a day like today, and it reminds me of a Wilfred
Owen poem. Owen was a British soldier and poet who served in the trenches
during World War I. Before he himself was killed, he wrote some devastating
poems about the horrors of that war. One of them — famously set to music in
Benjamin Britten’s great War Requiem —
retells the story of Abraham and Isaac, but with a different ending:
When lo! An angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not do so, but slew his
son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
It
is not God who likes violence: we do.
And
it is crucial to remember that as we hear the terrible story we just heard. The
Passion is filled with violence of every kind: the emotional violence of
betrayal and abandonment, the verbal violence of mockery and abuse, the physical
violence of torture and agonizing death. And it is set in the framework of a
capricious crowd that violently turns on Jesus, going from shouting “Hosanna!”
to screaming “Crucify him!” in a matter of days. We’ve heard this narrative
before many times, and so we can have the numbed callousness that familiarity
breeds, but if we hear this story with any shred of human empathy, it’s
horrible.
And
the violence is painstakingly laid out for us to see. We go through it event by
event, line by line. But that is not because God takes some kind of sadistic
pleasure in the suffering of his son. There are some strains of Christian
thought, and some churches, that seem to emphasize that. The thinking goes that
we are all such horrendous sinners that we deserve the worst punishment, and
God needs to punish. So he punishes Jesus instead of us, laying the pain on
thick. And we’re forced to listen to it, to remind ourselves of how miserable
we truly are. And then, the thinking goes, we’re supposed to rejoice because
God is so loving: loves us so much that he caused Jesus, an innocent man, to be
tortured, broken, and slowly asphyxiated to death instead of us. Do we worship
that kind of God? I don’t.
It
is not God who likes violence: we do.
The
point of reading through the Passion and listening to that story is not to
savor the violence in any way, but to see how Jesus responds to it. And he
responds without a trace of violence. He does not fight back, he does not
return curse for curse, he does not meet spite with spite. Even when people
around him are willing to fight, like that man who takes out a sword and
strikes the slave of the high priest, Jesus will have none of it. He speaks the
truth simply, and otherwise remains silent and peaceful.
But
it is not the silence of passivity or the peace of avoidance. More than perhaps
any other Gospel, Mark presents Jesus as the Anointed One who drives out demons
and overcomes the forces of evil. And in the Passion narrative, that is what
Jesus is doing. When we read through it, we are reminded of how much cruelty
and violence we humans are capable of, but we are also reminded of how much
love and power God is capable of. By refusing to respond to violence and hatred
with yet more violence and hatred, Jesus does what God does. The cross is the
ultimate expression of divine strength, the ability to encounter the worst
human nature can dish out and meet it with love and transforming power. It is
unworldly power, but there is no mistaking its might. It is no accident that
the final word goes to a centurion, by definition a hardened Roman soldier: Truly, this man was God’s Son! God wins,
love triumphs over violence, and that victory is made clear on Easter morning.
But
before we jump to the Resurrection, we can spend this week in the trenches with
Jesus, which means more than just remembering what he did. We are in Christ,
after all, one with him in the Spirit, which means his struggle against the
forces of evil is our struggle. If we are going to walk with him this week or
any week, the question looms: how can we join him in confronting violence with
love? Violence is all around us, and it can feel overwhelming. And it is within
us. All the cruelty displayed in the Passion
narrative and all the cruelty we witness and read about on a daily basis begins
in the human heart, and we’re all capable of it. We can too easily stew in
resentments and think hateful thoughts that spell out of us as hurtful words
and harmful actions. What if, this week, as our spiritual offering during Holy
Week, we truly followed Jesus in our personal lives by practicing non-violence
in thought, word, and deed?
That
can involve something as dramatic as marching for societal change, as many people
did yesterday, or as simple as being kind to someone who has not been kind to
us instead of lashing out at them. But in all cases it means acknowledging the
violence within us and asking Christ, letting Christ, with whom we are one,
transform our own violent thoughts and feelings with love. We are not capable
of doing that on our own, but Christ can do it in us and for us. That’s why we
call him Savior. If we can allow his love to even begin to change our violent
tendencies, to let his Spirit even begin to show us a better way, then the
narration we just heard is no longer a terrible story from ancient history but
a redemptive story that changes lives now. And being changed is the only reason
to listen to such a story.
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