Death's counterfeit--or God's glory?

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:42
Psalm 22

In 1994 I was in Berlin, and one day during my visit, I took a commuter train north of the city to a suburb called Oranienburg.  There I got off, and walked a few blocks from the train station to a place known as Sachsenhausen.  What I found there was field of symbols, representing conflicting stories about what happened there, and why.

The first such symbol meets the visitor at the entrance to the place, an imposing two-story guardhouse with an arched entryway underneath in which there is a wrought-iron gate.  And worked into the structure of the gate itself are bars that spell out the notorious motto of the Nazi concentration camps—Arbeit macht frei—which means, “Work makes you free.”  It is a note of historical interest that one of the notable forms of “work” to which the slave laborers of Sachsenhausen were put was the manufacture on a massive scale of counterfeit foreign currencies—English pounds, Swiss francs, American dollars.

And this single fact encapsulates, in a way, the whole world of the camp, and of the Nazi state of which it, and other camps like it, were the quintessential expression.  It was a counterfeit social order, in which people were punished and killed for that which was no crime, in which the “work” which supposedly made them “free” had no productive or beneficial purpose, in which the whole system, which was supposed to be saving civilization from barbarity and chaos was in fact a vast and barbaric criminal enterprise. 

We can see this now with no difficulty at all, having the 20-20 vision of hindsight.  The Nazi system and its demonic ideology is long vanquished, reduced to rubble, and so is the counterfeit worker’s paradise that took its place.  In the center of Sachsenhausen a massive granite column built during the Communist East German period.  It is both a memorial to the thousands of leftist political prisoners and Russian prisoners of war who died there, and a monument of victory, celebrating the Russian army that liberated the camp and crushed Fascism.  And next to the column, almost as a wry aside, was a newly-installed interpretive sign noting that Sachsenhausen remained in operation for another decade after 1945, as a place of internment for former Nazis and other enemies of the new, Communist state.

That sign was itself a symbol of victory, a claim to have woken from the nightmare of the past, in the clear day of a new liberal and democratic Germany, where the truth about Sachsenhausen could now be told.  It is a reunited Germany at the center of a pluralistic Europe, that has moved beyond the nationalistic and ideological conflicts of her history into political, cultural, and economic integration.  And this Europe is a linchpin of new global order of unprecedented productivity, opportunity, and prosperity, where work really does make you free.  Of course, more than twenty years after 1994, it is less clear than it was how lasting that order will be.  And it remains to be seen what irony people a century from now will find in the symbols it produced to demonstrate its goodness.

But in the meantime, people were making the most of that open space to transform the symbolic landscape of Sachsenhausen.  I saw this in the camp’s “infirmary,” where doctors trained to comfort and heal practiced a counterfeit of medicine, torturing living human subjects in the name of scientific experimentation.  I happened to visit that place at just the same time as a group of pilgrims from Israel was laying wreaths of fresh flowers on the operating tables and saying prayers for those who suffered there.  And in another place, on the outer wall of the camp, there was a memorial to the members of the thriving gay subculture of Berlin who were rounded up en masse and died in Sachsenhausen.  It was in the form of a giant pink triangle, the badge, analogous to the yellow star for Jews, that Nazi laws forced homosexuals to wear.

In this way, persecuted groups have turned symbols of horror into defiant signs of life.  They say we will not accept your attempt to erase the ones we love from the face of the earth.  It is too late to save their lives, but it is still possible to preserve their memories.  We may not know their names, but we know that they lived, and we know how they died.  We remember, and even honor, the instruments of shame and death that were applied to them, as symbols of our refusal to hide the truth that these were human beings, whose torture and murder no rationalization could ever justify. 

The cross is just this kind of symbol.  For many centuries of the history of Christian art, the cross was a prevalent symbol, but until the later Middle Ages it was rarely, if ever, a crucifix.  That is to say, it did not depict a dead or dying man hanging on it.  This was because the cross is more than a memorial to the death of one person.  It had a more universal meaning, as a reminder that the imperial system of Rome, that was supposed to bring law and order, progress and enlightenment to its subject peoples, was a brutal counterfeit that relied on the terror of the cross to keep its slaves in line. 

It was a reminder that the Romans had their collaborators in putting Jesus to death, the Jewish elite who decreed that it would better for an innocent man to die in a travesty of justice, than to allow his imagination of the kingdom of heaven to stir the common people up to challenge their subjugation.  It is a symbol of all our human pretensions to decide for ourselves who is in possession of goodness and truth and who is a threat to these, to decide who is fit to live and command, and who is condemned to slave and to die.

And it is a revelation of the humanity of the victims that such pretensions inevitably make.  The cross is a symbol of the witness that these victims bear.  When we remember the martyrs, we remember human beings whom systematic violence tried to erase, whose example of true humanity shines out all the more for being engulfed by darkness and falsehood.  We recount the gruesome details of their deaths because we wish to honor their courage, and the price they paid for standing firm in the truth.  Without memory of the manner in which they gave their lives, the truth for which they laid them down is in danger of being lost, and without that truth how can there be compassion, forgiveness, or restitution?

But the cross is not only the sign of those who died heroically in the cause of truth, whose names we hold in honor.  It stands for hope of remembrance, and thus of compassion, restitution, and forgiveness for all the countless victims of murderous violence whose names are unknown, who died for no good cause, and with no particular nobility or courage.  And such hope could only be hope in God. 

That is why the earliest crosses in Christian art, and countless crosses throughout the centuries down to the present day make no attempt to present a historically accurate representation of the cross on which Jesus died.  They are geometrical forms, often highly stylized and adorned.  Because the cross is not simply a memorial to the suffering and death of Jesus; and it is not only a disclosure of the falsehood of every rationale for terror, violence, and murder; it is first and foremost a revelation of the glory of God.  The cross is a sign of God who is life, whose love of life reached into our world of death in the person of Jesus.

Because he gave himself to the cause of life, the life that is the free gift of a loving God to all creatures, the forces of death gathered around Jesus.  Because he spoke the truth about the mercy of God, that is for the unjust as well as the just, for sinners as well as the righteous, for the poor and persecuted and afflicted as well as the proud and powerful and prosperous, they showed him no mercy.  But Jesus did not turn away from the end that meets all human life in a world enslaved to death.  He accepted its sentence, and suffered and died like all its other victims.  Yet he died without submitting to the power of death, without succumbing to fear or self-pity, or crying out for vengeance.   He completed on the cross the work of his life, of giving glory to God who is love that is unfazed by hate and life that has no traffic whatsoever with death.   And so his cross became our enduring symbol--of what death is not, and of who God really is.

The witness

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:42
Psalm 22

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.