Sermon100402
St. Philip’s, Tucson, Good Friday 2010
Lucas Mix
John 19:1-12
Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. They kept coming up to him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and striking him on the face. Pilate went out again and said to them, ‘Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no case against him.’ So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, ‘Here is the man!’ When the chief priests and the police saw him, they shouted, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ Pilate said to them, ‘Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him.’ The Jews answered him, ‘We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of God.’
Now when Pilate heard this, he was more afraid than ever. He entered his headquarters again and asked Jesus, ‘Where are you from?’ But Jesus gave him no answer. Pilate therefore said to him, ‘Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?’ Jesus answered him, ‘You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.’ From then on Pilate tried to release him, but the Jews cried out, ‘If you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against the emperor.’
Sermon
We travel through death to resurrection.
It is at the heart of the Christian mystery.
During the Triduum, the three day remembrance
that stretches from Maundy Thursday to Easter
we look at this strange reality.
Jesus Christ died for us…and rose again.
Through death to resurrection.
It’s somewhat fun to preach on Easter:
you can recall the glory of resurrection
and speak of the good coming into the world.
Good Friday is somewhat more difficult:
one must deal with blindness, betrayal, torture, and death –
in short the things that required resurrection.
And I do not think the two can be separated.
We remember the whole of the Triduum,
the strange and, I suppose miraculous, joining
that comes about in this unique story.
Through death to resurrection.
The end does not make sense without the beginning,
nor really the beginning without the end.
It surprises me how often we want one without the other.
So often we seek
a Christianity of righteousness and law,
where the rules were broken and Christ fixed things
- at least for those who follow the new rules.
Action and reaction, command and response,
Order without exception.
Crucifixion without Resurrection.
God killed His son for you and you’d better be grateful.
On the other hand -
So often we seek
a Christianity of boundless abundance
where the rules simply do not apply
- at least for those who open their eyes to grace.
Freedom without choice, openness without vulnerability,
Love without passion.
Resurrection without Crucifixion.
You don’t really have to accept anything strange or difficult.
I’m not saying this is you.
More likely the opposite; this is me.
These are the traps I fall into.
And I fall into them for one obvious reason.
They make perfect sense.
You don’t get something for nothing.
Rewards come from merit.
So if you’re bad, you had it coming,
if you’ve been rewarded, you must deserve your reward.
The world teaches us these lessons.
Both sides come in conservative and liberal flavors.
Some say the punishment comes from licentiousness and vice;
others from greed and apathy.
Some say we are rewarded for our unwavering faith to tradition;
Other for our willingness to embrace change for the sake of love.
But it doesn’t work that way.
We don’t get what we deserve – good or ill.
We get grace and transformation.
So many things must have been going through the mind of the author
when the Gospel of John was written.
It is a fascinating and deep story,
with wonderful things to say about the humanity and divinity of Jesus.
No one gloss could sum it up,
but there is this:
The world we experience is broken.
“He was in the world,
and the world came into being through him;
yet the world did not know him.
and his own people did not accept
him.” (John 1:10-11)
We remember today how fundamentally broken we were,
and in some ways continue to be.
The story of Jesus’ passion is one of people who do not listen.
They do not listen to one another, and they do not listen to God.
Let us start with Pilate, often vilified, or exculpated
we like to wonder about Pilate’s guilt or innocence
and the various Gospels give us various pictures of him.
One thing stands out, however; he just doesn’t get it.
Just before the passages we read today,
we hear Pilate say “What is truth?”
In John’s Gospel, he runs back and forth
between the Jews outside and Jesus inside,
trying to get a grip on what’s going on.
But, notably, he does not listen.
Jesus has tried to speak the truth, and Pilate would not engage.
“What is truth?”
By the time we get to the question of “Where are you from?”
Jesus knows that it is pointless to answer.
Pilate is far more concerned with actions and consequences,
than he is with understanding Jesus.
Or the Jews for that matter.
Pilate insists on mocking the crowds,
calling Jesus their king – which Pilate does not seem to believe –
and seeming to ignore the question of what
Jewish law has to say on the matter.
Pilate isn’t really listening to anyone –
unless perhaps he’s waiting to hear something he can use.
The Jews come across no better in John’s Gospel.
And here we should be particularly careful.
Many of our Christian ancestors have equated “the Jews” in John
to modern Rabbinic Jews,
which is a gross injustice,
both to Rabbinic Jews and to the clear meaning of the text.
John is referring to the people of Judea:
the man on the street,
the woman in the crowd,
everyday people.
Or, perhaps more likely, he is referring to those who held power in Jerusalem:
the intelligentsia,
the priests in the Temple.
John makes it clear that they’re not thinking about the Law,
at least not the Torah, which has no rules against claiming to be God,
and certainly did not have the death penalty.
They judged Jesus at night, in secret, with thin evidence
then insisted that the Romans do the dirty work of actually killing him.
They haven’t been listening to Jesus,
nor are they really listening to Pilate.
They want a nuisance dealt with.
Pilate and Jesus are nothing more than means to an end,
keeping things the way they are.
They want the rules of the world to stay unchanged.
And, lest we become complacent, the disciples fair no better.
They were arguably worse, because they knew the truth
and chose to ignore it.
Most of them scattered, afraid to be caught up
in the storm of accusations and blasphemy.
Peter, who followed Jesus to the high priest’s house, denied him,
Three times.
Judas, turned him over.
Some accounts have John and the Marys at Jesus feet at the end
but they don’t stand up for him in court.
It was a mess.
Everyone was busy ignoring the truth,
because the truth was so…inconvenient.
A situation somewhat like today.
The fundamentalists are disgusted with the progressives – and vice versa.
The democrats are tired of republican rhetoric – and vice versa.
The Muslims don’t know what to do with the West – and vice versa.
We have a terrible time just listening to each other.
What’s to be done?
The answer is simple,
if not at all easy.
We do what Christians always do, should always do, must always do.
We follow Jesus,
through death to resurrection.
Jesus was, for once and for all, a reality that could not be ignored
though, as the lessons point out, we tried mightily.
We have a great capacity to ignore,
to see the world as we would have it
instead of as it is.
And sadly, most people who call themselves “realists”
really mean that they prefer the model of the world they understand
to a real world.
Seeing the real world requires vulnerability.
It requires letting down your guard so that you can see things
and people as they are.
It means
accepting that other people have values
as valuable as your own.
accepting that they have ends
which might be right and good and joyful
even when they do not match yours
accepting that the reality of them
is more than you could imagine.
Because other people are real,
they affect us, they change us
in a way that money, or power, or treasure never will.
And that reality can be scary.
True fear goes beyond the simple desire to avoid,
it has to do with recognizing that other people can change us
even against our will.
We fear their impact on our lives, on our souls,
so we try to ignore them,
as we try to ignore God,
who has infinitely more influence in our lives than we could imagine.
But this fear has a flip side.
True hope means the possibility of growth.
You cannot grow strong without real food.
You cannot become whole without real medicine.
And people, being real, can be this for us.
They can heal us and feed us and fulfill us.
But only if we let them in.
Jesus did this.
Jesus was real in an unguarded way.
He allowed us to see his true self.
And that was terribly frightening to a lot of people.
And terribly hopeful.
Because he was a reality that could not be avoided or ignored.
The tragedy of this day is that we abused his trust.
We humans,
and none of us is without fault,
ignore one another,
and we ignore Christ.
We tried our best to fit him into the categories
of revolutionary, conqueror, and enforcer
but those categories failed.
Even King, Priest, and Prophet
while useful, disguise the thing itself
Jesus Christ, God incarnate.
On this day, we remember that Jesus,
made himself open to us
suffered our abuse, our apathy, and our disdain
and never once closed himself off.
He gave himself up, an offering and a sacrifice
to our ignoring, our ignorance.
Could there have been another outcome?
Could this level of vulnerability have been met
with anything but torture and death?
I do not know.
Truly.
Though it saddens me to think this is the way of the world.
Still, God took this tragedy and made something of it.
Even in death, we found that we could not ignore the reality of Christ.
Even as persecutors, we found ourselves beloved.
And even in fear, we found hope.
Jesus Christ was returned to us.
More real, more alive, and more vulnerable
than he was before the crucifixion.
And we can no longer ignore the depth of reality behind that resurrection.
And we too, are called to make ourselves vulnerable,
to share that piece of God within us,
the image and likeness of the creator.
We too are called to see people as they are:
neither worthy or unworthy of God’s grace,
but simply real in a world of imaginings.
To be honest, we know what the result of this vulnerability will be,
people will ignore us if they can,
they will persecute us if they cannot,
for what could be more terrifying than the image of God
shining out from inside a human.
What could be more dangerous than the kind of reality
that forces us to see the world in a new way
and become new people.
Our vulnerability, our openness, our passion
will not be met with the same openness from the world
and that will hurt
dearly.
And it may come to pass that we too shall die,
But in the wake of that death,
they will learn from our love.
They will see us as we were, and are, and will be.
And though they may hurt us,
still they will not avoid the reality of our example.
And through us,
through our love
they too may be resurrected.