The Gospels depict Jesus in a
variety of moods. He can, of course, be
gentle and nurturing, as when he says to his disciples, “Let the little children
come to me.” Or he can be angry, as when
he says to the Scribes and Pharisees “Woe to you, hypocrites: you shut the door
of the Kingdom of Heaven; you do not enter yourselves, and when others try to
enter, you stop them.” But the Jesus
that we meet today is the one who suffers.
This afternoon we keep vigil with a suffering Messiah. We remember his pain, and we seek in some way
to share it, by our fasting, by spending these three hours in prayer and
meditation on his crucifixion.
But as affecting as the story of
his passion and death may be, this is not the sum total of his suffering. The Servant Songs of Isaiah, one of which we
heard read today, have profoundly shaped our experience of Jesus. They may have formed his understanding of
himself. And they describe the servant
of God as one whose vocation it is to suffer.
He is, as an older translation had it, a “man of sorrows; acquainted
with grief.”
The sorrows of Jesus did not begin
the night he was betrayed and handed over to his enemies. We keep vigil with Jesus on the cross because
his passion is a vigil he kept with us.
But it is the climax of a life-long vigil of compassion, in which he
bore with us and our self-inflicted pain, a pain we finally turned against
him. So we acknowledge that the fact
that he died in this way is no accident.
It is not a chance misfortune that befell him on the way to his
exaltation as King of Kings. We cannot
simply pass it off with a callous remark, as we so often do with the suffering
that we encounter every day around and within us, shrugging our shoulders and
saying “shit happens.” Instead, we make
a conscious choice to open our eyes and our hearts to the sorrow and pain of
Jesus. We even honor it, venerate it,
give thanks for it. We call this day
“Good Friday.”
And that is because we sense that Jesus’
crucifixion tells us something we need to know.
We come to it searching for meaning that we can’t make any other way. Jesus endured this suffering because he knew
something essential about us, and that knowledge, in itself, was already sorrow
and pain. That is why we recount and
remember every detail of his betrayal and desertion by his friends, his anguished
prayer in the garden, his arrest and interrogation, the mockery, the false
accusations, the scourge and crown of thorns, the journey to the cross, and his
agony upon it—not in order to add more and more to the account of his
suffering, but because at each one of these moments his heart was breaking, not
only for himself, but for us.
The extreme physical brutality of
crucifixion, and the sheer volume of pain that Jesus had to endure, is often
held up before us as the measure of his love.
But these things in themselves have no redemptive meaning. They are, in fact, business as usual in the
long nightmare of history. But what
makes the cross of Christ truly sacrificial is that he accepted it willingly,
and that in that acceptance he was free.
“Sacrifice” means to make sacred, and Jesus offered his suffering to God
in the faith that God would make it sacred, for our sake, if not for his. Because the God of Jesus is a God who sets
his children free.
And we are not free. We are not free in relation to our suffering,
and because of this we are not free at all.
Much as we might pretend otherwise, with our possessions and technology,
with our power to mold the world to our convenience; much as we might entertain
and distract and anesthetize ourselves by our endless consumption of the
products of a culture of denial; much as we might seek the approval of others,
or at least our selves, with flattery and conformity and productivity, all of
it is so much effort wasted, trying but ultimately failing to avoid the truth
that we are weak. We are hurt. We are lonely and dissatisfied. We are going to die.
Jesus understood this about us. He talked about a man who built his house on
sand, and how the rain fell, and the floods rose, and the gales blew against
that house, and how great was its fall.
He talked about the one who had a rich harvest and tore down his barns
to build bigger ones, not knowing that the very same night his life would be
taken from him. He tried to teach us
that the real measure of our worth is not our strength and self-reliance, our
imperviousness to the afflictions that mar the happiness of lesser folk, or how
well-defended we are from their envy and hate and slander; but it lies in our
capacity to be affected, to love and be loved.
He tried to show us that our true and lasting value is in the eyes of
God.
A lot of people didn’t want to hear
this. As a general rule, the more
well-off and prestigious they were, the less interested they were. Jesus captures this himself when he reports
the contempt of those who say, “this man is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend
of tax collectors and sinners.” So add to
his sorrow at seeing men and women trapped in useless vanity, the pain of their
rejection and hostility. And this enmity
reveals a deeper and still more painful truth about us. Because we are not in denial only about our
own pain, but also of the pain we inflict on others, and the toll it takes on
our own souls.
This is more than personal. The fear and aggression that come from
bracing against our vulnerability are contagious. They pass from house to house and generation
to generation. They threaten to dissolve
the bonds that hold families and communities together. And so we develop systems of social and
psychological repression, to establish and maintain order. These systems propagate the myths and rituals
that impress deeply on their members the illusion of security and peace. The fear and aggression are still there,
below the level of conscious awareness, but we channel them into organized and
sanctioned outlets. This process operates
by a logic which seems self-evident to everyone. Everyone, that is, except its designated
victims, who are the only people who can see how arbitrary and irrational these
systems are.
Every society has its victims—its
heretics and Jews, Commies, Niggers, Chinks, Gooks, and Redskins, its illegals,
Ragheads, junkies, nut jobs, and retards, its faggots and punks, its thugs, bums,
and trailer trash, its bitches, sluts and hoes.
It has its rituals of dehumanization in which the suffering and death
that haunts us all is meted out in measured doses against the most vulnerable
of our neighbors. The unity that comes
from bonding together against a common enemy, the feeling of release that
follows the catharsis of sanctioned violence—this is what passes for
peace. And only the victim knows the
truth.
Only the victim really knows how
scapegoating, abuse, and lynching dehumanize the perpetrator. Only the victim, bearing witness to her own
inviolable humanity, can break the spell of sanctioned hate and violence. That is what the word “martyr” means—witness. A martyr is one who bears witness, in his freely
accepted suffering, to the unbreakable truth of our shared humanity, our common
identity as children of God. This is
the truth that Jesus received, the truth in which he reached out to the lost,
the outcast and afflicted, and welcomed them as sisters and brothers. This is the saving knowledge that he restored
to them when he healed them. It is the
truth he carried with him to Jerusalem and bore witness to on the cross.
This is truth where the deepest well
of Jesus’ suffering mingles with the springs of hope and joy, because the witnessing
victim is the one who knows it doesn’t have to be this way. He is the one who sees that acknowledging pain,
given and received, is what opens the door to forgiveness, to reconciliation
and true peace. He is the one who can
say to the people preparing to destroy him “you will know the truth, and the
truth will set you free.” He cannot
force that to happen. He can only stand
fast in his own humanity, and bear his cross.
But he shows us in this way what mere words by themselves cannot convey—the
hope that his sufferings are not fruitless and in vain, but are the birth pangs
of a new world.
No comments:
Post a Comment