SunApr52009
Scripture: MARK 15:1-39
It is, on many levels, a pretty grim story we hear today. Two long chapters of Mark’s gospel—about 15% of it—are devoted to the events surrounding the death of Jesus. That’s a lot. To Mark and the early gospel writers, that event is central. Everything else builds to that dramatic erasure, that terrible negation.
Many of us in today’s church are simply flummoxed by that death, though. My sense is that we don’t quite know what to make of it. We can make sense, quite easily, of what Jesus taught, even when it’s odd and somewhat threatening: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk. 12:31) we can deal with. We can even make some sense of the healing power that resided in Jesus: we know people, or know of them, who have an especially healing touch, one we may ourselves have experienced.
There’s a lot about Jesus that we can at least vaguely comprehend. Teaching and healing we get. But that death: what’s that all about? Why spend so much of the story on such a gruesome conclusion? What possible benefit could it offer?
There’s not really any answer to these questions, of course. Faith is much more about exploring mysteries than it is about finding answers. It’s much more like a walk in the woods than it is like solving a set of math problems. When you’ve finished with the math problems, you’re done. Every walk in the woods, though, even the most familiar woods, reveals something new—as long as you’re paying attention. A tree has recently fallen across the path, a darting chipmunk emerges from the bushes, the light shines through the trees in a way you’d never quite seen it before. That’s the way it is with faith: every exploration, every venture reveals something new. And no new engagement ever exhausts the fullness of what’s there to be uncovered.
So as we delve into the mystery of Jesus’ death this morning, there are two dimensions of the story that I want to lift up. The first is that this is a story about us. It’s something of a cliché to say, I suppose. But it’s nonetheless true. It’s not just some long-ago bullies who give up on Jesus and turn against him and make his life miserable. In Mark’s story, nearly everybody turns away. Peter, the disciples, the crowds, the religious authorities, the Roman rulers, Judas: one after another. There’s hardly a single exception to the massive betrayal Jesus suffers. Which means that it’s not just they who are guilty. It’s we who are culpable, as well.
Frankly, I’d just as soon run from this news. It is much easier to pretend that it’s someone else who’s so disloyal. It’s much more palatable to believe that I wouldn’t have hurled insults at him as he was dragged by, that I’m much better than they were. Yet I’m not. None of us is. We, too, mar Jesus’ world, with too big a carbon footprint. We, too, let Jesus down by failing to stick up for people who have neither the energy nor the resources to stick up for themselves. We, too, smack Jesus around by being snippy with those we love, acting impatiently with store vendors, and even not honoring the body we’ve been given with the proper diet and exercise. And in a culture that has witnessed two brutal mass shootings in the last several days, we know that, even though we haven’t pulled the trigger, we too have tolerated teasings and hazings and inequalities that have left enormous scars. None of us is free of blame in the “killing Jesus” department. It’s tempting not to admit this. But if we deny it, we’re living a kind of lie.
A few weeks ago, Browns wide receiver Donte Stallworth killed a pedestrian named Mario Reyes in a traffic accident in Miami Beach. He’s been charged with DUI manslaughter, and may well go to prison for up to fifteen years. In Friday’s Plain Dealer, columnist Bill Livingston wrote this: “Stallworth deserves the anger his actions have created. But if he deserves a harsh judgment, how many of us might have wound up the same way, except the angel who protects fools decided we got a second chance?
“Alcohol was part of the culture for years among newspapermen. I can tell you about the free, gin-heavy mixed drinks the Phillies’ dining room staff poured after games for writers. Or the Christmas checklist for free bottles of bourbon or scotch from the Dallas Cowboys. Or the bar Ted Stepien left open at a party for reporters when he owned the Cavaliers. Or how most reporters had flasks in their office desks when I started in this business. . . .
“The clock that ran out on Reyes is ticking at every pro game. Vendors always sell alcohol. Sales are curtailed late in games, but beer commercials are part of the financial underpinning of professional sports. The NFL has become a drinking game among fans, the way soccer is in England. . . .
“It is easy to make moral judgments about Stallworth. It is hard to examine ourselves and change the behavior that could make us like him” (April 3, 2009, p. D5).
What a perceptive confession. Livingston doesn’t condemn the drinking of all alcohol. What he does say, in effect, is that if we heap vitriol on someone who has driven while he was in the same state some of us have been in, we’re doing what the crowds who followed Jesus were doing. We’re jumping on the bandwagon and turning a blind eye to our own complicity. We’re forgetting that we too are part of the problem.
So that’s one dimension of this story. We’re all part of the taunting group that turns on and abuses Jesus, sometimes in little ways, sometimes in big ways. A second dimension of this story, one which is on the other end of the spectrum and is, in fact, even more central to this tale, is that, no matter what happens to Jesus or anyone else in this story, God remains utterly faithful. All through the beating and whipping and teasing, all through Jesus’ agony and sense of abandonment, God is the ground on which it all happens.
So when your life is falling apart, when your business seems to be crumbling, when your job is axed, when you don’t get into the college or graduate school of your choice, when your 401(k) has become a 201(k), when you fail even the ones you love most in the world, even then, when all seems lost, the God of all hope is there to undergird you. God doesn’t leave.
You may feel abandoned—after all, Jesus did, too: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:34). That, to me, is one of the most comforting lines in scripture. Even Jesus, who we like to think had perfect communion with God—even Jesus felt he had been left alone by God. So it’s hardly surprising if we feel that way, too. The striking thing is that Jesus addresses those words to the very one he’s convinced has abandoned him. If God has really left the picture, why would Jesus ask that question and address it to God? Perhaps because, even when he felt utterly alone, Jesus knew that God was lurking in the shadows of his desolation.
That may be a helpful way for us to conceive of God when we’re in the midst of the grimmest moments—that God is lurking in the midst of those shadows. And because God is in those shadows, they’re not quite as dark and foreboding as they might otherwise have been. The presence of God is a spark that lightens those moments and gives them a shiny and hopeful tint.
The unalterable thing is, though, that we see that light because of those shadows. There’s a sense in which going through the struggles and death of life is what deepens the experience of holy grace. As I heard a church member say this week, it’s the compost, the refuse, that yields the lushest gardens. In a few moments, the B-W Singers will sing a cantata from an Easter text. But they will also sing of “pressing through death” into the dominion of God’s glory (Cantata BWV 67, J. S. Bach, movement 6). It’s the journey through the tunnel, in other words, that leads to the brilliance at the other end.
The story of Jesus’ crucifixion invites us to affirm at least these two truths, and to affirm them simultaneously: that we are the very ones who deface the life of Christ, and that, precisely in and through our failings and inadequacies, God bathes us, like a butterscotch sundae topping, in a delectable acceptance and goodness. Accepting both our own shortcomings and, at the very same time, God’s bottomless grace can be the most freeing thing imaginable. And so often the darkness and the light go together.
Episcopal priest Michael Battle tells a story about the distinguished Orthodox priest, Alexander Schmemann. “When [Schmemann] was a young man living in Paris, he was traveling on the Metro one day with his fiancée. They were very much in love and bound up in each other. The train stopped and an elderly and very ugly woman got on, dressed in the uniform of the Salvation Army. She came and sat near the young lovers, who began to whisper in Russian about the ugliness of the old woman. The train came to a stop. As the old woman got up to leave, she said to the young people in perfect Russian, ‘I wasn’t always ugly!’”
Schmemann told that story to point out how egregiously he had failed Christ, slinging insult and injury at one of Christ’s precious children. He also added this, though: that precisely in the midst of his ghastly failing, this woman was, he insisted, “an angel of God.” She brought to him the shock of the deepest sort of truth and opened Schmemann to an entirely new way of looking at people—not just the people he was predisposed to like or think well of, but everyone. This sudden recognition wasn’t just happenstance to him. It was revelation. And as revelation, it was a word from God: she wasn’t ugly; she was holy. And it took the shock of that encounter to reveal that beauty to him (Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 2, pp. 180-2).
The death of Jesus: bottomless mystery. But mystery with immeasurable gifts wrapped inside. There is, in all of us, an inadequacy and incompleteness that never entirely leaves us. It’s OK, and even good, to admit that. At the same time, even our bitterest failure and most desperate yearning is filled with a holy love that never lets us go, a love that can transform us and make us new. As we live through this Holy Week, and as we listen now to this glorious cantata of Bach’s, may we remember this and celebrate it.
This is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God.