Sunday, April 16, 2017

And on our children



The Liturgy of the Palms
The Liturgy of the Word

When I was a child, the place I went the most, besides home, school, and (possibly) church, was the county library.  It was an exceptionally fine one, as I came to appreciate later, and at least once a week in the summertime my mother would drop my brothers and I off for a couple of hours while she ran her errands and when she came back we’d check out shopping bags full of books to read until the next time.  I recall disappearing into the dark canyons between the stacks of the children’s section and volumes in series lined up on the shelves like veins of precious ore: The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, the Childhoods of Great Americans.  And I also remember a spacious, open area with picture books lying flat on desk-like shelves, and two of them, in particular, that I was drawn back to look at again and again. 
One was called “Four Days,” and it was a photojournalistic compilation about the assassination of President Kennedy, his funeral and burial.  I don’t remember the title of the other, but it was a re-telling, with modern woodcut illustrations, of the story of the Passion of Jesus.  Looking back, it is not hard to understand what appealed to me so powerfully about those books.  It was partly a child’s fascination with violence and death, but it was also the drama, the unfolding of a series of tableaus, each with new characters, adding a new emotional dimension to the tragedy.  The death of the main figure was the center of the plot, but it was these other participants who gave each story its richness.  I can still clearly picture in my mind certain iconic images of those characters: the shocked young woman in the cabin of the Presidential jet, standing by in her blood-stained coat while her husband’s successor takes the oath of office; the Roman soldiers, rolling dice for Jesus’ clothing at the foot of the cross.
These are dramas in which everyone participated.  Entire generations can remember where they were when they heard that JFK had been shot—it was a trauma that affected the whole nation.  And the Passion Gospel makes the claim that the death of Jesus was like that, too.  So it’s no wonder that we read it in the form of a drama in which the whole congregation takes part.  Because it impacts all of us, and having seen and heard it, we can’t be in the world in the same way again.
Of all the Gospels, the one “according to Matthew,” makes this argument most forcefully.  I am thinking in particular of that moment in the story when Pontius Pilate makes a show of washing his hands and declaring himself innocent of Jesus’ blood.  Up to this point, Jesus’ actions in Jerusalem have been attended by various crowds.   He rode into the city astride a donkey and a great crowd spread garments and branches on the road, and went before him and behind.  And when he taught in the temple and told parables against the chief priests and the scribes, the crowds were there, listening intently.  When the priests and elders followed Judas out to arrest Jesus in the garden, a crowd came with them carrying swords and clubs, and again the next morning a crowd went along when they took him to accuse him before Pilate.  But it is never clear exactly who is in these crowds from one scene to the next, if it’s the same people or different.
But when Pilate washes his hands, the writer of Matthew makes a sudden and momentous change in terminology.  Instead of ochlos, meaning a crowd of indeterminate size and composition, he writes laos, from which comes our word “laity,” meaning the inhabitants of a city or a nation as a whole.  The result is one of the most infamous lines in the entire Bible: “Then the laos, the people as a whole, answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’”  In time, authoritative teachers of the church would interpret this text to mean that in that moment the Jewish people willingly incurred perpetual guilt for Jesus’ crucifixion.  This, more than any other single New Testament passage, would fuel centuries of Christian hatred of Jews, and barbarous violence, oppression, and cruelty against them.
But to read these words as Christian anti-Jewish polemic is an anachronistic error.  In the time this Gospel was written, there was no “Christian religion” separate from Judaism.  If those people shouting at Pilate spoke for “the whole nation,” that, by definition, included the followers of Jesus.  Peter and the rest may not have been there, howling for his blood, but they had deserted him the night before, and surely felt some share in the guilt for what happened to him.   Not only that, but I think it is possible to find in these words resonances, with the Hebrew scriptures and within the Gospel of Matthew itself, that suggest some very different avenues of meaning. 
There can be no doubt that in the Passion story “blood” is a synonym for “guilt.”  That is certainly how Pilate uses it.   The passage about the death of Judas does the same, several times.   But we also have to consider the bigger picture.  We have to remember that the backdrop for this entire drama is the Passover, the great annual festival of remembrance of God’s liberation of the whole people of Israel from slavery.  And like so many other moments in the Passion gospel, this one may be a symbolic reference to the Passover story.  Chapter 12 of the Book of Exodus tells how, before the Passover night, Moses summoned “all the elders of Israel” and told them to have each family kill a lamb.  And he instructed them to put the blood of that lamb on the lintel and the doorposts of their homes, as a sign of protection from the angel of death, so that it would not enter to kill their first-born, as it would do to the Egyptians.  Moses goes on to say, “You shall observe this rite as an ordinance for you and for your children for ever.”
There may also be a reference here to the scene at Mt. Sinai, further on in the Exodus story, where God gave Moses the law.  After Moses came down from the mountain he sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord.  Then he read God’s covenant aloud to the people, and they said “All that the Lord has spoken we will do.”  And Moses took the blood of the sacrifices and threw it on the people, saying, “Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you.”   It would seem like a stretch to relate this story with the Passion Gospel if Jesus himself hadn’t made the same connection himself, when he lay down with his disciples for the Passover meal.  He took a cup, and gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many...”  --and here Matthew adds something that is absent in the other accounts of this moment, in Mark, Luke, and Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians—“…for the forgiveness of sins.”
In older published versions of today’s dramatic reading, the line “his blood be upon us, and upon our children” was said by everyone, and I think this was an appropriate choice.  Because it is not simply the hideous slander it would later become; it’s the ironic key that unlocks the heart of the Passion Gospel for us.  When we do not try to falsely wash away our own part in shedding the blood of the innocent, our guilt for the violence, betrayal, and hypocrisy that stains our whole nation, and calls the survival of our children into question, we receive the sign of God’s protection, and deliverance from the power of death.  We are renewed in God’s covenant of forgiveness.
When we hear of the children gassed in Idlib, or blown apart in the mosque in Mosul, or dead of starvation in Somalia, we know they are not other people’s children.  They are our own.  They are also our own victims, if only for deserting them in their hour of need, and stopping short of doing everything in our power to spare them from the angel of death.  But when we take the blood of lamb upon us, we no longer ask “who is to blame for their deaths, and whom must we punish to avenge them?”  We ask “what would have to happen for all of us, who are implicated in their suffering, to acknowledge our guilt, and seek the forgiveness of those we have harmed?”  And, “what amends would have to make, for our victims and their families to be able to forgive us?”  And, “What could be my part in that drama?”           

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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.