Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on Palm/Passion Sunday, April 8, 2001, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Psalm 39:9-16; Luke 22:3923:47

 
   

     It is jarring, as someone was heard to complain, this jump from the Palms to the Passion. It's enough to give you whiplash. We invite you to overcome your natural Yankee reserve and parade around with palms, and just when you get loosened up and into the mood for a little fun, we yank you around and tell you it was all a huge narcissistic deception, and the palms in your hands are symbols of a horrible, willful misunderstanding of Jesus. The triumph is only prelude to tragedy. Myself, I figure that's the Gospel, and I'm OK with it. Today is not Easter.

     But all that is nothing compared to the jolt of seeing how differently the Cross of Christ is experienced by Christians and by Jews. It's hard to believe they are both talking about the same thing. The Cross for Christians is the great sign of Jesus' self-giving, self-emptying love and compassion, his fearless faith and truth-telling in the face of the establishment's hypocrisy and idolatry, and what Paul calls the power in weakness and the wisdom in foolishness. The Cross to Jews is the symbol of Christian dominance over Jews and Christian hatred of Jews.

     Any decent Christian is immediately aghast to discover this perception, and eager to explain that we don't mean it that way and never did, and it is unworthy of Jesus whom we call Messiah. And we are confounded when our explanations don't satisfy the Jews.

     This came to a painful head about a dozen years ago in Auschwitz, Poland, when an order of Catholic sisters, Carmelites, put up a convent within sight of the gallows whereon the Nazi commandant of the death camp was hanged for war crimes, and built a twenty-three-foot tall wooden cross in front of it. And the Jews called that cross a desecration and a blasphemy against the memory of the six million Jewish dead of the Holocaust. And it made no difference to them that the sisters in the convent were praying in lamentation for those who died there and in penitence for peace on earth.

     A Holocaust survivor, looking at that wooden cross, recalled his childhood in 20th-century Christian Poland. Catholic funeral processions were always led by a young boy carrying a long sceptre with a cross on top. Any Christian man meeting the procession would take off his hat and kneel before that cross. A Jew would not. Uncovering your head is disrespectful to God if you're a Jewish man, and it wasn't their cross. But the Christians would beat you up if you didnt show respect as they understood it. To avoid trouble, Jews would circle around the block or hide in a doorway so as not to confront the cross at all. They grew up literally hiding from the Cross of Christ.

     Sixteen hundred years earlier, in Asia Minor there was a great preacher of the Gospel named John. He was so eloquent that they called him Chrysostomos, which means Golden Mouth. All the gold in my mouth was put there by my dentist. I have read a sermon of John's in which he talks about the Jews in the following terms: They crucified Christ. They are dishonored, abandoned by God, but they provoked it. They killed God's son. They are murderers. Their synagogues are unholy. They worship demons. They are God-killers. It is madness, folly, stupidity and blasphemy for a worshiper of Christ to gather in the same place with them. And the church calls this man a saint, St. John Chrysostom, and holds him up as one of the Fathers of Christianity.

     Which is exactly what he was and is, if you believe that Christianity is essentially hostile to the Jews. But whether that is true or not depends on which Christianity you are looking at. Are you looking at the faith of Jesus, or are you looking at the faith of the followers of Jesus, and if so, which of his followers?

     Jesus was a Jew, all his apostles and disciples were Jews, and their faith was as Jewish as matzoh-ball soup. But the Gospel stories about Jesus, all four of them, date from at least a generation after he was crucified, and things had changed by then. By then the church and the synagogue were rivals and competitors. They were both under the thumb of the Roman Empire, so it might have been wise for them to form an alliance of the weak against the strong, but that didnt happen, any more than it happens today between African-Americans and Asian-Americans in south central Los Angeles. So the church and the synagogue disliked each other at the time when the Gospel stories, as we know them, were being formed. And because those stories became sacred Scripture, both have been living with the legacy of that hostility ever since.

     So every year we hear how it was "the Jews" who shouted, "Crucify him!" It always sounds as if the Romans would have found him not guilty and let him go, if the Jews had not demanded his death. But I am here to tell you that that is not the Word of God.

     You might ask, quite reasonably, "Well, somebody killed him. Who was it? Who's really to blame?" And there are two ways to answer that.

     The first is to say that he was rejected and killed by a religious establishment and by a political establishment; a man who did and said what he did and said would be rejected and killed by any such establishments, certainly including our own. Our country occupies the place once held by the Roman Empire, and our church holds the place that the Temple in Jerusalem once held. So we are the ones shouting, "Crucify him!" And the Gospel witnesses against our sins.

     But there's another way to look at it. To ask who really killed Jesus, who is really to blame, is all by itself to miss the point and pass the buck. The question itself, no matter how you answer it, divides people, divides human beings, divides God's children, into guilty and innocent, bad and good, them and us. The question itself can only be asked by someone who has forgotten that we are all in the same boat and it's not a very big boat and it leaks.

     Hundreds of Chinese and American warriors and diplomats are working around the clock to determine who's to blame for an airplane collision. The Congress of the United States is a regular snakepit of fault-finding. And never mind the Jews, the world is full of Christians who think that certain other Christians aren't very Christian and blame them for the decline and fall of Christianity. Everybody's playing Name That Goat and nobody is willing to be the goat. Well, I know who the goat is. You're looking at him. And he's looking at you. And the story we are about to hear is about us. Listen!

     (The reading of the Passion Story followed: Luke 22:39-23:47)