There is a cartoon in last week’s New Yorker magazine that shows a family seated at a table formally
laid with roast turkey and all the fixings.
Their hands are folded and their heads are bowed in prayer, and at the
head of the table the father is standing with his eyes closed, speaking, and
the caption says, “The takeaway tonight is ‘Thanks.’”
Today is the final Sunday of the church year, which means the
end to another cycle in the lectionary readings, the end of another re-telling
of the story of God’s words and deeds in Jesus Christ. And so, it’s only natural to ask “what is the
‘takeaway’?” “What does another year’s
rendition of the Gospel all boil down to?”
One traditional way of summing it all up is that Jesus Christ is the
King, the true ruler of the world.
That seems simple enough, but, of course, it’s not. In the Gospel text this morning we hear
Pontius Pilate wrestling with this notion that Jesus is a King, trying to grasp
it in some simple and definite way. In
Mark, which is the shortest and most likely the earliest of the Gospels, the
conversation between Pilate and Jesus is just this: Pilate says “Are you the
King of the Jews?” and Jesus answers, “You have said so.” Later Pilate asks him
more questions about the charges brought against him, but Jesus says no
more.
This telling of the story is compelling in its own way. That curt answer of Jesus is not a throwaway,
and neither is the silence that follows it, but the imagination of the church
wanted more. As our apostolic ancestors
kept contemplating the significance of Jesus Christ for the world, and as their
own project in the world got larger and more complex, they came back to this moment,
to Jesus and to this man who held the power to condemn him to death or to set
him free. Their communities kept
thinking about this representative of the Roman Emperor, the ostensible ruler
of the world. They kept pondering his
question, “Are you the King?” and some of those communities decided that a
little more needed to be said.
And so the Gospel of John gives us this conversation between
Pilate and Jesus about who is king, and what it means to be king, and what is
the kingdom anyway. It’s a curious kind
of conversation because although both men seem to be talking about the same
thing, one of them means something else entirely. Jesus understands exactly what Pilate is saying,
but Pilate hasn’t the foggiest notion what Jesus is.
And this gives Jesus the power. To be sure, Pilate has the power to kill and
to terrorize and to force people to submit to his will. Jesus understands this power, knows how it
works, is willing to allow that Pilate has it, and even to submit to it, because
he knows that in the end it is weakness.
But Jesus has the power of truth, the truth of God, of God’s sovereignty
and freedom that he gives in boundless love to everyone who loves him. Jesus has the knowledge that is the light of
the world, which no darkness can ever overcome, the knowledge that is eternal
life. Pilate doesn’t have a clue.
In 1984 I had a conversation with a man named Franklin
Miller. He was the civilian Director of
Strategic Planning for the United States Department of Defense, and an alumnus
of the college I was attending. He’d
accepted an invitation to a conference on campus about nuclear weapons and
disarmament, which was a hot topic at the time.
It was a topic I personally was deeply concerned about, in that
brooding, overwrought way that adolescents have. The main event of the conference, on a
Saturday evening in the main college assembly hall, was to be a debate on the
merits of an immediate “freeze” on the production, testing, and deployment of
new nuclear weapons. A retired rear
admiral, Gene La Rocque, the founder of the Center for Defense Information, was
to argue for the proposed “nuclear freeze.”
Franklin Miller would be against it.
But the afternoon before the debate there were a number of
workshops in various places around campus.
I signed up for Franklin Miller’s.
I didn’t know exactly what the Pentagon’s Director of Strategic Planning
did until I spent a couple of hours with him on that rainy day. It turned out that his job was to plan nuclear
war. I’ll never forget watching him
write numbers on the classroom chalkboard, row after row of six- and
seven-figure numbers in neat columns representing population centers in the
Soviet Union that he was planning to incinerate. Each integer was a human life—tens, even
hundreds of millions of them on the chalkboard, adding up to the number we would
need to kill in order to be able to say that we’d won. The whole thing was so easy, a child could
understand it. And at the same time it
was completely incomprehensible and utterly unreal.
That night, at the end of the debate, they turned on a
microphone in the center of the auditorium and invited questions from the
audience. With my heart racing and my
voice shaking I went the microphone and I addressed Franklin Miller. I told him that he seemed like an intelligent
and well-meaning person who loved his country.
I asked him why he couldn’t use those gifts to try to understand the
people of the Soviet Union, to learn their language and history and culture and
politics, what their hopes and dreams and motivations might be. I asked him why he couldn’t work for
understanding and friendship between us and them, instead of threatening to
murder them all. He didn’t answer my
question, which I admit was asked with a little more disrespect and
self-righteousness than I’m bringing to it now.
He told me that I was only free to stand there at that microphone
because of people like him, and then it was my turn to get defensive. “Well, God bless the bomb!” I said, and
returned to my seat.
Now I don’t want to
make it sound like I did something noble that night, because Franklin Miller
was certainly right about this much—whether or not he deserved any credit for
it, I was free to stand at that
microphone and mouth off at the United States Director of Strategic Planning
and it didn’t cost me a thing. But I do
want to honor something about that moment in my life, which is that I tried to
speak up for the power of the truth as truth, even if I could have done a
better job of exemplifying it.
The truth doesn’t need weapons, be they verbal or nuclear. The truth doesn’t need to threaten or to
dominate to hold its place in the world.
If we truly understood what it is like to live on the other side of the
barrier that divides us from our enemies, we would start to imagine new
possibilities for the ordering of the world.
If we dealt with our enemies as if both of us were able to know the
truth about the good and evil, in our own hearts and one another’s, we open a
space through which healing can flow into the world. This is as true of our everyday lives with
our spouses, our co-workers, and our children as it is of international
relations.
But to live with this kind of deep trust in the power of the
truth is risky. Not everyone wants to
know the truth. Pontius Pilate is a good example, and we know
how his conversation with Jesus ends. The
truth might not be worth the effort and the sacrifice that it requires if
weren’t for the way that it opens us to the gift of knowledge. To be vulnerable for the sake of truth is to
the only way to directly experience a power that comes from somewhere outside
our existing frame of reference. It is the
power that created the universe, that keeps it in order, and sustains it in an
everlasting harmony. This power is not
fear. It is not strength. It is not greed, or lust, or ambition. It is not random variation. It is love.
Love rules the universe. There’s
your takeaway.
No comments:
Post a Comment