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The other day I was having a discussion with someone about judgment; not final judgment – the kind many Christians seem obsessed with. We were talking about judging each other. This person was arguing that honesty in a relationship requires judgment. If someone does something wrong, she deserves to be judged. If the wrong is serious in my view, it is only natural that he would lose my respect. If she corrected the wrong, then she could earn back the respect of the other. There was clarity in that conversation that focused for me a major difference among people about how we view the world, our existence, and the way things change.
It was a difference apparent in the scene of Jesus hanging on the cross between 2 criminals. Most people in the scene agreed with my partner in dialogue that it was a scene of judgment and lack of respect. Jesus had been judged guilty of something – it was never quite clear what. The punishment was to die on a cross, the capital punishment du jour in the Roman Empire. The criminals hanging with him had obviously done something worthy of death rather than mere imprisonment. This was serious judgment.
The lack of respect was clearly evident as well. The leaders scoffed: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, God’s chosen one!” Then the soldiers joined in: “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” Finally, one of the criminals in a panic throws insults at him: “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself; oh, and while you’re at it, save us!” The other criminal asked to be remembered, but still didn’t expect anything but judgment.
Only one person present demonstrated an alternative view. Jesus said, “Abba God, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Even Jesus’ closest followers were thinking in their hearts, “Come on, Jesus; they know damn well what they are doing.” The powerful who heard Jesus offer forgiveness got distracted by theology: who has a right to forgive? They say “only God.” But that totally misses the point. Jesus was offering a new way for human beings to be in the world – a way characterized by love and forgiveness rather than power and judgment. The contrast isn’t about divine and human but about ways of being divine and ways of being human.
The mission of Jesus, crystallized into a single moment in this scene, was to usher in the Reign of God, increasing the number of people who offer forgiveness rather than judgment. In that moment, Jesus revealed in a more dramatic way than he had revealed throughout his entire ministry that God’s core identity is forgiving love.
The church hasn’t done very well over the millennia in getting that message. It actually did fairly well for the first few hundred years as the story of Jesus swept the world over which Caesar held sway because it spoke intimately to those whose throats were under Rome’s heel. The Gospel took root in the soul of powerlessness, which is why it beckons the dispossessed in ways it does no other group.
But then in the fourth century along came a Roman emperor named Constantine, who became a Christian. That sounds like really good news. It would be something akin to Osama Bin Laden becoming a Christian today. The only problem is that the conversion that happened changed Christianity more than it changed Constantine. Constantine transformed the cross from being one Christian symbol among many – a sign of suffering – into the dominant symbol of Christianity – now a sign of power in the world.
Some of the unfortunate consequences of that transformation include the backwards movement on the matter of women’s equality. The early church had made great strides against the patriarchal culture of the Roman Empire. Under Constantine the patriarchal culture was strengthened in the church. It has only been in the past fifty years that the church has begun to restore the mind of Jesus on women’s equality. We still have a long way to go. The symbol of the cross became a lightening rod that fanned the flame of enmity between Christians and Jews. It led to persecution that reached all the way to modern days. The impact on the Muslim world is famously known through the Crusades. In all of these historical stains, the hand of Constantine can be seen.
So, when we come to this Sunday to celebrate the Reign of Christ, we have to make some adjustments. We can’t allow the familiarity of a scene like Jesus on the cross between two criminals to lull us to sleep. It needs to be a wake up call & a call to conversion. What Constantine did to the cross & to Christianity still holds sway both in the church and in the way the world views the church. Jesus has been co-opted by those who understand the Reign of Christ to be not about the supremacy of Love but about obedience to orthodoxy. The king whose throne was a cross and whose dying words were “My God, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” has been replaced with a judge whose message is “My God will not forgive you unless you are doing it the right way.”
In case that seems like a marginal issue today let me call your attention to recent history. Back in the 1980s when I was beginning to understand the political dimension of my own faith, many US Christians were supporting Central American dictators because they used anti-communist language and created favorable conditions for minority evangelicals to gain influence in the dominant Roman Catholic culture. Today those same Christians and their descendants support the right of our government to torture prisoners because our leaders use anti-terrorist language that gets their vote. They’re even willing to compromise on opposition to some of their key personal morality issues like abortion & hate crime legislation in order to make sure we are safe from terrorists. Jesus on the cross presents a very different picture from those who want to make peace by threatening violence.
It is time for others in the church to find our voices & reclaim the historic faith we’ve inherited: to PRO-claim the Good News of the Gospel of Grace whenever & wherever we can; to challenge those who preach the Jesus of Judgment by our serving instead the King of Love. Every time we try to make Christ reign into a rule of law rather than of love we crucify him again. Every time we choose the institution of the church over the inspiration of the Holy Spirit we grieve the heart of God. Every time we hold our tongues and allow the strident voices of the all-too-certain ideologues of the Religious Right to claim moral values as their sole and private preserve, we fail in our call to shepherd God’s people, to calm their fears, to gather them in. (Susan Russell, Christ the King)
Jesus embodied the best of Jewish values: not causing fear, not causing terror, not causing exclusion; practicing wisdom, practicing justice, & doing what is right. Jesus has had a liberating and healing effect on a wide variety of members of God’s family. Jesus was a king, but no an ordinary one. Jesus was a leader, but not an ordinary one. Jesus was “the king or leader of fishermen, of tax collectors, of Samaritans, of prostitutes, of blind people, of demoniacs, of cripples. Those who followed Jesus were a rag-tag bunch: women who now leaped with joy, a Samaritan leper with a heart full of gratitude, a crippled woman who had been unable to stand straight with dignity for 18 years, and a blind man who had followed Jesus all the way from Jericho” (Culpepper, R. Alan, Luke, The New Interpreters’ Bible, p. 370)
Our ultimate allegiance is to live our lives in such a way that those who otherwise have no hope can be in a new community along with us and that we can be in a new community with them and thus, all of us be healed by hope and love, for hope and love are the only things that can put fear in its place. My friends, this is the most important conversion the Gospel calls us to this day. There are so many hopeless and lonely people in this city. Some are already in this congregation. Do they – do we – experience the healing of hope and love? Or are we so full of judgment or apathy that people can’t find healing here? How do we become a healing community of forgiveness?
One good starting place is to see ourselves loved by this love, because until we do, we can’t love others with the heart of a shepherd that looks at wolves in their sheepliness. The challenge isn’t to recognize people who are wolves dressed as sheep. It is to creatively imagine wolves that are in some hidden part of their lives like sheep, and to love them as such. In order to respond like that we have to learn to be less concerned about our reputation & more concerned about love. Jesus’ love is for the persecutors, the scandalized, the depressives, the traitors, the finger pointers, and for all those they are pointing fingers at. Jesus’ love will not be party to any final settling of accounts. It seeks desperately and insatiably for good and evil to participate in a wedding banquet. (James Alison, Raising Abel, p. 187-8) Once we see ourselves loved, we must come to know what our ultimate allegiances are in the midst of fear: the values of not causing fear or terror or exclusion to keep us from practicing wisdom, justice, and what is right; to embody those values in our personal lives and find ways in our community of faith to embody them the way Jesus embodied them.
Dorothee Soelle was a German theologian who taught for a long time at Union Theological Seminary in New York. She tells a story that paints a contemporary picture of what this looks like. She was walking by a construction site in New York City one day & asked a construction worker, “Sir, excuse me, do you happen to know what time it is?” He said, in a kind of good-humored mockery back, “Am I Jesus, lady?” She said his answer was so strange that at that time she was completely speechless. But she writes that she has not been able to get his question out of her mind. “Am I Jesus, lady?”
For this worker, she reasons, Jesus is from another world. Jesus is a heavenly being who has nothing to do with you & me, who sees, hears, knows and can do everything, but is removed from us. The churchy language which has called him Messiah, Lord, Son of God, and the Christ really has had an effect to remove us from Jesus. “That’s what you get,” she says, “when you make Jesus into an unreachable, completely other superman, indeed, into God – a Sunday outing of the heavenly being who stopped by for a short visit in Bethlehem.”
She continues, “When I was a young teacher of religion, I once asked the schoolchildren whether they thought the baby Jesus also had wet diapers.” She says, “Most children rejected that decisively.” Jesus, already as the Christ child, must be different and higher & purer. “But that,” she continues to reflect, “draws Jesus away from this world and above all, it tells us that we cannot live as Jesus lived. We shouldn’t even try because it is impossible anyway. I mean, after all, how would we ever manage to feed the hungry? We don’t have more than five loaves and two fishes. How would we ever manage not to serve the industry of death? How would we manage to heal the sick?” “Are we Jesus, lady?”
Then she concludes, “Today I would answer the worker at the construction site a little more openly and I would take the initiative. I would say, ‘Yes, you are Jesus, man – what else would you want to make of your life?’ Being yourself, alone, isn’t sufficient; you know that already. You, too, are born and have come into the world to witness to the truth. So don’t make yourself smaller than you really are. Just imagine, you are Jesus and I am Jesus and your mother-in-law is Jesus and your boss is Jesus. We, together, are Jesus. And if we are Jesus, what would change? There is something in every one of us of God.” Then she closes with a poem, quoting a poem:
If Christ is born a thousand timesSo to the question, “Am I Jesus, lady?” The answer can only be “Yes, shouldn’t I be?” (Dorothee Soelle, Theology For Skeptics: Reflections on God, p. 88)
In Bethlehem and not in you,
You remain still eternally lost.
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