Cross Purposes

a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine

on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 26, 2006

 at The First Parish in Lincoln

 

“If Jesus had been only a mystic, healer, and wisdom teacher,

he almost certainly would not have been executed – he was killed because of his politics.”

– Marcus Borg in The Heart of Christianity

 

 

READINGS: 

 

1.  Our first reading is from a book entitled  Proverbs of Ashes.  It is a personal and theological re-interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross.The authors are Rebecca Parker, who is both a United Methodist minister and the president of a Unitarian-Universalist seminary in Berkeley, California; and Rita Brock, who was a research associate at Harvard Divinity School at the time they wrote the book. We have a copy in our church library.  Here’s a brief excerpt:

 

Conventional doctrines say that Jesus saved the world by dying.  That God the Father required the death of his Son to save the world.  But the people who killed Jesus hated him.  It’s wrong to confuse hate with love.  Jesus’ life and work were not furthered by his death.  His community retained the scars and limitations of those who survive violence.

 

We are convinced Christianity cannot promise healing for victims of violence as long as its central image is a divine parent who required the death of his child.  We want a theology that speaks differently about Jesus. We need a different image of God. 

 

What words tell the truth?  What balms heal?  What proverbs kindle the fires of passion and joy?  What spirituality stirs the hunger for justice?  We seek answers to these questions.

 

2.   Our scripture reading for today is from the third chapter of the Gospel of John, verses 16-18.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I must tell you that I have no use for the Gospel of John.  It is the most dogmatic of the four gospels and the least reliable  for anything resembling an historical fact, it’s anti-Semitic through and through, and I believe Jesus would have disowned its interpretation of who he was.  But John is also the most beautifully written, poetic and mystical of the gospels, and as a result it contains some of the most-quoted verses in scripture, including (unfortunately) these:

 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.  Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

---

When the church up the hill and this church joined forces in 1942, they struck a bargain:

            there would be no symbols in this sanctuary –

                        it would remain unadorned. 

The idea was for people to be able to come into this space, whoever they are,

                        wherever they might be in their own spiritual quest,

            and feel welcome – that there is room for them here.

So – no cross, no chalice, no star of David, no smiling Buddha... no symbol to lay a trip on you.

 

I’m very grateful to the charter members of this parish for making that decision.

I believe it has served us well – and, of course, we actually have ended up with a symbol:

                        the prism one of our student ministers gave us years ago,

            hanging in the south bay window, casting rainbow patches of light onto our walls.

A symbol of our spiritual diversity.

 

We have become a healthy mix: Christians and humanists, pantheists and pagans, Jews and Buddhists.

Which is a lot of waterfront for us to cover, but we do the best we can!

When one of the big holy days in the church calendar comes along, we don’t water it down.

Our Winter Solstice service is a full-fledged pagan celebration of the return of the light,

            and three nights later, on Christmas Eve, we’re right back here to celebrate the birth of Jesus.

Three months later, here we are in the middle of Lent, which ends with Good Friday and then Easter.

 

Some years we have a Good Friday service, some years we don’t – this year we’re taking a pass.

Even so, we need to deal with what happened that day.

So although Good Friday is still almost three weeks away, this is a Good Friday sermon.

 

Jesus was arrested, tried, and convicted in the space of just a few hours.

There was no appeal.

No months or years of waiting on death row.

He was stripped in public, whipped, nailed to a cross, and left there to die.

They buried him just eighteen hours after they arrested him.

They got rid of him in the blink of an eye.

Or so they thought.

 

His community was torn apart by the violence of it all.

His disciples fled – they went home or into hiding.

They couldn’t believe that this charismatic person they had traveled with for two years

            was suddenly gone – and in their grief they asked the same question any of us would:

                        what does it mean?  what does his death mean? 

Because it has to mean something.

 

They all understood the political reasons: Jesus’ message had really rocked the boat.

They had begged him not to go to Jerusalem.

He was killed because he went anyway, and once there he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut.

He told anyone who would listen to form their own direct relationship with God.

That didn’t please the temple priests, who didn’t like independent thinkers.

But it would not have been enough to get him killed.

Theologian Marcus Borg says:

                        “If Jesus had been only a mystic, healer, and wisdom teacher,

            he almost certainly would not have been executed – he was killed because of his politics.”

 

In addition to being a mystic, a healer, and a wisdom teacher, he was also a social prophet.

A peasant-worker movement was starting to form around him.

For the people in power, that meant nothing but trouble.

So they got rid of him.

 

His disciples knew all of this, but for them, it wasn’t enough.

They didn’t like thinking of their fallen teacher as nothing more than a victim of the ruling class.

His life and his death had to mean something more than that.

 

And so they began to think of his death as a sacrifice.

Remember, they were all survivors of violence.

And as Rebecca Parker and Rita Brock say in Proverbs of Ashes

            Jesus’ “community retained the scars and limitations of those who survive violence.”

 

His followers had grown up with the practice of ritual sacrifice.

You went to temple and bought a bird or a small animal to sacrifice to God.

Marcus Borg says that “according to temple theology,

                                    certain kinds of sins could be dealt with only through sacrifice in the temple” –

                        it was the only way to secure God’s favor and forgiveness,

            so the temple had a monopoly on sacrifice: it raised most of its money that way.

 

Jesus community remembered how outraged he had been when he entered the temple

            and turned over the tables of the moneychangers, who were exchanging currencies

                        so people could buy an animal to sacrifice.

That’s when he had shouted: “You have turned my father’s house into a den of thieves!”

Words which may well have been the last straw.

 

So they started saying that his death was the ultimate sacrifice.

And because it was ultimate, it was the last one needed.

Think about how subversive that statement really was.

They were saying: the temple no longer has a monopoly on forgiveness and access to God.

The grace of God is already yours – and nothing can separate you from it.

No further sacrifice is necessary.

 

That was the beginning.

And from that simple beginning, an elaborate theology of the cross has been spun out over the centuries.

By the 11^th Century, this had become the orthodox Christian party line:

 

We were supposed to be God’s finest creation, but we’ve failed to live up to our promise,

            God is deeply disappointed in us, and in the eyes of God, we stand rightly condemned.

So payment is due to set things straight.

Jesus’ death on the cross was payment in full.

He paid the bill for all of us.

 

This way of looking at the meaning of the cross is known as “ransom theology.”

Jesus gave his life as a ransom to put us back in God’s favor.

Those of us, that is, who believe that Jesus did, in fact, die to save us from our sins.

This view dominates the Gospel of John, as you heard in our second reading.

 

But it is by no means shared by all Christians.

Mark Heim, who teaches at Andover Newton Theological School,

            points out that many Christians think that ransom theology was “a terrible wrong turn”

                        because the central image of our faith should not be that of

                                    “a divine parent who required the death of his child.”

 

For my part, I don’t believe that Jesus had to die to save me from my sins.

I believe that Jesus lived to save me from my worst impulses.

In his life and with his example, he said: you are all sons and daughters of God

                                    you all have a divine spark built right into you,

                        and all God ever asks is that you keep it lit and lean toward it,

            because when you do, you will be all that God ever hoped you would be.

And that is enough.

 

In the creation story that the Blackfeet Indians tell,

            we are all created with both light and shadow in us, and we have to deal with both.

The light is our love of life, our curiosity, and our compassion.

The shadow is our dark side – but it is a natural part of who we are.

We learn how to live in the interplay between the light and the shadow.

 

After his death, Jesus’ community had to learn how to cope with the shadow.

But in their grief, and out of their mourning,

                                    his followers found their tongues and their courage,

                        and despite the darkness of Good Friday,

            they came to see that nothing can separate us from the love of God.

 

In the last moment of his life, one of the gospels tells us that Jesus cried out, “It is finished!”

What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t know, was that it was all just beginning.

Amen.