Sermon Preached, Good Friday, 2013
St. Mark's Episcopal Church
St. Mark's Episcopal Church
When someone is diagnosed with lung cancer, one of our first
responses is to wonder, “Were they a smoker”?
Beneath that question, beyond our mild curiosity, is a question about
blame. If they were a smoker, then we
can understand their current affliction.
Likewise, if someone is out in the sun everyday without sunscreen, we
can understand why they might have a diagnosis of skin cancer. By our nature, we want to attribute
blame. I remember in high school,
memorizing the Latin phrase, “post hoc
ergo propter hoc” – “after which, therefore, because of which.” After smoking, therefore, because of smoking,
Mrs. Jones has lung cancer. After sun
bathing, therefore, because of sun bathing, Mr. Smith has skin cancer. Simple cause and effect. Right? O.k., how about this one? Roosters crow prior to sun rise. Therefore, crowing roosters cause the sun to
rise. Simple cause and effect --- it doesn’t work very well in this situation
does it?
Many times cause and effect are not so clear. This is particularly true when an innocent person
becomes sick or dies. A teenager diagnosed
with leukemia. A toddler killed by a
drunk driver. Jesus nailed to a
cross. At times such as these, all cause
and effect logic crumbles into nonsense.
And yet, we continue to seek meaning, to seek explanations.
This meaning-making that we do, this attempt to create logical
explanations for the illogical places in our lives is part of the human
condition. But, I would suggest it is a
part of our humanity that we often use to veil the uncomfortable truth – and
that truth is that there are some things of which we have little or no
understanding. And so we create
explanations, we create myths.
Harold S. Kushner’s classic, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, was written in response to the
author’s son’s early death from a disease that caused him to age
prematurely. Kushner writes, “The facts
of life and death are neutral. We, by our responses, give suffering either a
positive or a negative meaning.”[1] When the meaning that we weave, says Kushner,
“makes us bitter, jealous, against all religion, and incapable of happiness, we turn the person who died into one of
the 'devil's martyrs.'”[2]
Today we come together to recall the crucifixion of
Jesus. That Jesus’ death defies a simple
cause and effect logic or any other type of logic that would place blame on the
victim is emphasized by the readings we heard. The reading from Isaiah is the fourth of four “Suffering
Servant” poems written during the Babylonian exile of the 6th
century B.C. While it is unclear if the
author of these poems had an individual in mind or was speaking of the
Israelites collectively as the suffering servant, it is clear that the poet rejects
any explanation that blames the victim for his fate at the hands of an angry
mob:[3], [4]
“Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God,
and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our
iniquities. . .”[5]
Let’s hear that again - “We accounted him stricken, struck
down by God.” Surely he did something
wrong to be punished in this way by God.
Cause and Effect. But Isaiah
boldly rejects this logic when he declares,
“By a perversion of justice he
was taken away . . . although he had done no violence, and there was no
deceit in his mouth.”[6]
Simple cause and effect?
Isaiah says, “try again.” The
suffering servant is a scapegoat, a scapegoat in a society that believed scapegoats
(often referred to euphemistically as sacrificial offerings) to appease God for
the wrongs of the community. But the
poet writes to reveal the truth – God does not seek scapegoats. God’s way is the way of love, not
violence. And yet, throughout history –
even to the present day - Jews, Muslims, and Christians have ignored and
continue to ignore this truth.[7]
As Jesus looks to the Hebrew Scriptures to find models for
his own ministry, it is not surprising that these suffering servant poems
provide such a wealth of useable materials.
Jesus does not see himself as a necessary sacrifice to appease an
angry God. Jesus is not an unwilling
scapegoat chosen by the culture. No,
Jesus goes willingly into the darkness and the emptiness that the human
condition offers. There is a rubric in The Book of Common Prayer that allows the
congregation to take the part of the crowd during the reading of the Passion.[8] When this is done, each of us joins our voice
with the voices of that 1st century crowd yelling “Crucify him! Crucify
him!”[9] I
don’t know about you, but I would much rather take the part of Peter denying
any association with Jesus whatsoever than to acknowledge that I have taken a
part in sending Jesus to his death.[10] Surely someone else is to blame for Jesus
nailed to the cross – it can’t be my fault.
And yet, as soon as we look for someone else to blame –– whether it is
the Pharisees or some other subset of the Jews, the Romans, the cultural milieu,
or God – as soon as we point the finger, we too become complicit in this ritual
of scapegoating violence and, like those first followers of Jesus, we too miss
the connection between what theologian Gil Bailie calls “the cure (the
crucifixion and its after effects) and the disease (the structures of
scapegoating violence upon which all human arrangements have depended).”[11] In other words, looking for someone else to
blame, we implicate ourselves because “the crucifixion was demanded by those
determined to find a culprit to blame . . .”[12] This understanding of the Good Friday events,
have certainly changed my experience of the old spiritual: “Were you there when
they crucified my Lord?”[13]
Jesus’ manner of living and manner of dying demand that we
renounce the ritual of scapegoating violence.
That we acknowledge that “the facts of life and death are neutral.”[14] No gospel does a better job of demonstrating
this than the Gospel of John where it is clear from the very beginning that
Jesus, not the crowd, is responsible for his own death. When the chief priests and Pharisees arrive
in the garden, the Gospel of John tells us that Jesus “knowing all that was to
happen to him” comes forward.[15] Later, when Pilate is interrogating Jesus,
Jesus tells him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you
from above.”[16] “Jesus goes to his death willingly . . . not
as a suffering victim, but as the one who remains in control” of the outcome.[17] By embracing the darkness and emptiness of
the human condition, Jesus strips death of its power.
Harold Kushner wrote, “If suffering and death in someone
close to us brings us to explore the limits of our capacity for strength and
love and cheerfulness, if it leads us to discover sources of consolation we
never knew before, then we make the
person into a witness for the affirmation of life rather than its rejection.”[18] Just so Jesus desired to make something good
out of something that was very bad, indeed. Jesus embraced the uncomfortable places of his
life and of his death with strength. On
this Good Friday, I invite us to reflect on those places of darkness and
discomfort in our own lives. Will we
allow them to become one of the devil’s martyrs or will we use them to explore
our limits and to discover sources of consolation and strength we never knew
before? The choice is ours to make.
[1] Kushner,
Harold S. When Bad Things Happen to Good
People, (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 138.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Rob
Moore, “The Theory of René Girard and Its Theological Implications: Part I,” Kyrie, 7 accessed online at http://www.kyrie.com on March 28, 2012.
[4] For a
discussion of the identity of the suffering servant see Bernhard W. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament, 4th
edition. (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1986), 488-502.
[5] Isaiah
53:4-5a.
[6] Isaiah
53: 8a, 9b.
[7] For a
good discussion of cultural scapegoating see Rob Moore, “The Theory of René
Girard and Its Theological Implications: Part II,” Kyrie, 3-5 accessed online at http://www.kyrie.com
on March 28, 2012.
[8] BCP, 277.
[9] John
19:6.
[10] John
18:17; 25.
[11] Bailie,
Gil. Violence Unveiled, p. 218 as
quoted in Rob Moore, Part I, 8.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Negro
Spiritual, “Were You There,” in Lift
Every Voice and Sing II: An African American Hymnal, (New York: Church
Publishing, Inc., 1993), 37.
[14]
Kushner, 138.
[15] John
18:4.
[16] John
19:11.
[17] O’Day,
Gail R. “The Gospel of John: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in
Volume IX of The New Interpreter’s ® Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes,
edited by Leander E. Keck, Thomas G. Long, et. Al. (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1995), 799.
[18]
Kushner, 138.
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