Sermon, Good Friday, March 29, 2013, Episcopal Church of the Messiah, Santa Ana, California
Reading: John 18:1-11
Harold D. Baker
As church-going folks, we spend a lot of time hearing about Jesus, or you might say we spend a lot of time with Jesus in our minds, which can make us take certain things for granted. (Or, if you're not really a church-going person, welcome to Messiah! There's a yellow card in the back of the pew in front of you. . .) Now, I would suggest that we like to spend time with Jesus because of a particular reality that surrounds him much of the time, and that we can observe in the Gospels. In Jesus' presence, what is more remarkable than any miracle is the bizarre phenomenon that people are made to appear, not necessarily good, but human: drawn out of their public roles and personae, they are revealed as weak, fearful, vacillating, impulsive, trusting, generous, capable of the utmost devotion as well as the grossest treachery, in other words, complex, unpredictable. Think about it; even the great villains of the Gospels are not unmixed evil: Pilate, for example, is clearly intrigued by Jesus and reluctant to condemn him. Even characters drawn in a single stroke have depth and unpredictability: the criminals flanking Jesus on the cross who converse with him at the last moment, the centurion watching from below who proclaims him surely a righteous man. In the words of the popular Spanish hymn, Jesus indeed looks into our eyes and calls us by an individual name; this is important to us, and we want to stay in that moment.
There comes a time, however, when Jesus in turn appears as complex and unfathomable, when it is no longer about us, so to speak, but about his own freedom and destiny and the great conflict to which all of his actions lead us.
***
Just last Sunday the annual Blessing of the Streets took place a few blocks from here, in the Logan Barrio neighborhood just past St. Joseph's Catholic Church. Many of you know how this tradition started. About 20 years ago that area was plagued by gang violence. One tragic night a young man was shot in a drive-by just outside of St. Joseph's, and he died on the sidewalk, cradled in the Priest's arms. The first Blessing of the Streets was organized to resist the violence of the gangs, with Messiah as a founding participant. Imagine the feelings of those stepping out for the first time! Who could be sure how the gang members would respond? It was their turf! Tonight at 6:30 we have the Via Crucis through places of suffering in downtown Santa Ana. "Out of the narthex and into the streets," that's our motto around here.
We become aware of a world of violence outside of our protected spaces of cultural, economic, and I would even say spiritual privilege, and a realm of need or necessity that violence feeds on, that is its enveloping nutrient. There is the plain, naked violence of war, crime, domestic and sexual abuse, and there are also the more oblique forms of political violence, all pressing in on the sheltered spaces of our fragile humanity.
In the Gospel reading we just heard, the world of violence, force, and compulsion intrudes suddenly into the garden that Jesus had used as a place of prayer and teaching.
This moment comes to us quite differently than in the other three Gospels. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it is preceded by the scene of Jesus' praying the garden, where he asks for the "cup" to pass him by, and Peter, John, and James fall asleep waiting for him. This scene is missing in John, where emphasis is on the collision between Jesus' small group and the massive cohort of soldiers sent to arrest him. We have to imagine that the garden is dark; the crowd of armed people comes in with lamps and lanterns, and Jesus steps into their light. It is literally a collision, and the force of Jesus' emergence is such that they fall backward and onto the ground. Though Jesus is a bound prisoner through most of the Passion narrative, at this moment he acts freely and powerfully.
Artistic depictions of Jesus' arrest often focus on two dramatic details: Judas' kiss and the cutting of the servant's ear. In John's Gospel, the kiss is omitted, but the incident of the ear is prominent; in particular, the servant is given a name, Malchus. In one anonymous painting from 1520, which you can see at the Art Museum of Dijon (or on the internet: see References), France, the servant is shown as a slender young man sprawled backward on the ground, vainly trying to defend himself, flailing with his lantern, screaming wildly. St. Peter, large and strong, crouches over him, his eyes cold, a sword raised over and behind his head. The servant clearly expects the blow to kill him. Jesus is already bound at neck and hands and being hurried away, but all his attention is bent on the helpless victim. He has forgotten his own situation entirely for the pity of this young man. We recall the servant as paradigm in the teachings of Jesus. Hours earlier, he had been washing his disciples' feet to illustrate this teaching a final time. Now he sees this servant suffering violence from one of his own disciples.
In one of his very short plays, Thornton Wilder depicts Malchus in a conversation with Jesus in heaven. Malchus wants to be removed from Scripture because the role he plays is so ridiculous. Jesus reminds him that his place in Scripture is essential, that he shares in Jesus' moment of deepest humiliation.
We can ask ourselves many questions about this incident. How did Peter happen to have a sword? True, Jesus tells his disciples to buy swords (Luke 22:36), and they respond as though it were a literal command, not a prophetic figure of speech. Then, what motivated his action?
If Jesus stands firm in the face of the world's violence, the same is not true for his followers. At the moment of collision, the great, pervasive violence of the world enters into Peter at this moment and claims his obedience. In the presence of great evil, he becomes that evil in a miserable, petty form, and seeks an outlet for his rage in the nearest and easiest target available.
How truly this speaks to our culture! We love our guns and we love our power. We believe profoundly in readiness, retribution, and "armed response" (posted in front of so many comfortable homes); this includes many professed followers of Jesus. Yet the Gospel passage draws a clear contrast between Jesus' response and that of Peter. On Jesus' side stands a whole tradition of moral exemplars who have chosen the higher path of sacrificial resistance.
In San Francisco an Episcopal church has covered its interior with a panoply of mostly unconventional "Dancing Saints." Some of these we know: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mohandas Gandhi, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Julian of Norwich. Others are probably unfamiliar: Bartolomé de las Casas, a 16th c. priest who was the first Christian theologian to reject all forms of slavery; Iqbal Masih, a Pakistani boy murdered in 1995 at age 13 for urging other bonded child laborers to leave their masters; Jenny Read, a San Francisco artist, an Episcopalian, murdered in 1976 at age 31 while working on a sculpture of St. John of the Cross; Wang Zhiming, a Chinese Christian pastor martyred by the Red Guards in 1973; Maria Skobtsova, a beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking Russian nun, killed in Paris by the Nazis for concealing Jews.
What is the meaning of these crazy lives? In wrestling with the phenomenon of sacrifice, the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (herself one of the Dancing Saints) speaks of a "transferal of suffering":
The captain who has been scolded by his colonel relieves himself by scolding the lieutenant. . . The smashed porcelain vase cannot be restored, but, fortunately, the slave who broke it can be flogged to ribbons. . . If the slave falls to his knees, the sensation of having him in your power may sometimes be enough.
The whipped slave--or even if he was only humiliated by having to beg for mercy--will then need to find his own satisfaction. All evil that arises in this world must travel from one head to another . . . until it arrives at one who is perfectly pure. That one accepts it in its entirety, and, in this acceptance, the evil is destroyed. (105-06)
We recognize here the pattern and model of Christ's passion. The evil that has traveled throughout history arrives at the great Kairos or center-point of time and lands on the head of one perfectly pure, the Paschal Lamb, the Lamb of God, who accepts it, and that ends its dominion.
From our perspective far off in time we look back--or forward--to this center as the goal of our Holy Week pilgrimage. The evil and violence of the world are all around us, and they still make us dance to their old tune, and we are tired sometimes. But here at Messiah, we are not discouraged, we're just getting warmed up! As the choir sang last Sunday, "No man can hinder me." In 1939, on the eve of war, W.H. Auden wrote: "Yet, dotted everywhere, / Ironic points of light / Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages." That is something to be, an ironic point of light. Let us pray to be ironic, to be light, to be together, and to keep the faith of this path that we are on.
*****
REFERENCES
L'arrestation du Christ [The Arrest of Christ]. Anonymous, 1520, Burgundy. Museé des Beaux-Arts de Dijon. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/The_capture_of_Christ_mg_1677.jpg
Auden, W.H. "September 1, 1939." First published in The New Republic, October 18, 1939.
Dancing Saints Icon Project. All Saints Company.
http://www.allsaintscompany.org/dancing-saints-icon-project.
Weil, Simone. La Connaissance Surnaturelle [Supernatural Understanding; containing her American notebooks from May to November 1942 and London notes from 1943]. Collection Espoir. [Paris:] Librairie Gallimard, 1950.
Wilder, Thornton. "Now the Servant's Name Was Malchus." In The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Vol. II, pp. 53-56. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1998.
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