Good Friday March 25, 2005
Wisdom 2:1, 12-24 Psalm 22:1-11 Hebrews 10:1-25 John 18:1- 19:37

For example, twenty years earlier, in September of the year 70, Roman forces responded to Jewish rebellion by destroying the Temple and massacring many of the Jews living in Jerusalem. Judaism was in turmoil. Deprived of their spiritual home and central symbol of identity, its members were dispersing to settles as communities within communities in the larger world.

For example, the revolutionary movement of the Spirit that had been evoked and inspired by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, was now becoming something more contained and defined. The novel elusive and Spirit-infused response to the Christ event was becoming Church, religion, an institution.

You might think of the very early post-resurrection church as a gas – and I bet it was a gas to be a participant in those heady times. But what I’m referring to is physics. When the component parts of something, its molecules, become excited and energized they move quickly and expand outward, embracing all the available space. The substance becomes light and mobile, permeable and penetrating, like the steam that rises from your tea kettle.

When the molecules of a substance lose energy, they slow down, pull in, occupy less space. They line up in an orderly fashion to create something resistant and self-contained, crystallized, solid and separate like the cubes in your ice cube tray. Spiritual movements have a similar kind of physics – uncontainable, changeable, energized, revolutionary and barrier-breaching when they first arise; contained, predictable, slow-moving, structured, self-aware and interested in preserving their separate identity as they gradually coalesce into institutions.

Young movements are by nature inclusive, simply because they haven’t yet begun to think of themselves as entities with established boundaries. Institutions tend to have a more developed sense of separate self and, therefore, a more developed awareness of what separates them from others. For example, the early post-resurrection followers of Christ saw themselves as a renewal movement within Judaism. The coalescing Church to which the writer of John’s gospel belonged ninety years later had come to understand itself as rejected by and separate from Judaism.

As a result of that shift, we get one of the reasons why every year I devoutly wish we could read some other gospel on Good Friday. That would be the Gospel according to John’s repeated references to the Jews as the perpetrators of Jesus’ suffering and death. This zeroing in on the Jews, this portraying an entire culture as Christ killers, has contributed to two millennia of anti-Semitism, a poisonous exercise in separation that reached its genocidal culmination in the Nazi death camps. It was a regular part of Holy Week observances in many communities throughout Christendom for the faithful to leave Good Friday services, where they had been immersed in the passion according to John, to go directly to the Jewish quarter -- torches, clubs and stones in hand, cries of “Christ-killer” on their lips -- for an exercise in cathartic violence.

At that time, congregations did not participate in the reading of the passion. It was read to them by the clergy – the primary authority figures of their community. Perhaps, if the people had taken the part of the Jews, as we do today, they would have been less inclined to demonize their Jewish neighbors. I find, however, with John’s gospel, that even while speaking the words, “Crucify him!” it is possible for me to disassociate myself from what I am saying, precisely because I have been told repeatedly throughout the narrative that it is the Jews who are calling for Jesus’ death and, well, there it is, I’m not a Jew. I’m not a “them”. I’m an “us”. I’m with the ones who stand just outside the circle of those calling for the annihilation of the Prince of Peace.

And so, I, who am supposedly enlightened about this issue, fall prey to the temptation which lies behind all anti-Semitism, perhaps behind all sinfulness, certainly behind all genocide, and definitely behind our recurrent affliction of projecting our own brokenness outward on to others. And that would be our addiction to seeing ourselves as separate from and more powerful than some one else as a way of feeling better about ourselves. 

The rush of self-importance that accompanies this practice is, as with any addiction, unstable and short-lived. It is a house built on sand and must be rebuilt again and again at the cost of community and forbearance and any real spiritual growth. It is a practice that flies in the face of the living example and teachings of the one whose death we commemorate today, the one who said “Love your neighbor as yourself” and then went on to demonstrate, via the parable of the Good Samaritan, that our neighbor is the one we most tend to hate and marginalize. 

It is interesting to me that the Johannine version of the passion, with its relegation of responsibility to those Jews, was written at a time when Roman authorities were beginning to persecute the growing Church. It was dangerous therefore to criticize Rome, which had the power to do great harm. But the shattered Jewish community, from whom the followers of Jesus were already feeling estranged, could be saddled with the blame for Christ’s death without much risk of reprisal. It is always those who are too weak to cause us any real harm whom we make our scapegoats.

It disturbs me each Good Friday to see in John’s gospel the early Church, as it becomes more aware of itself as an institution, choosing this path of separation that, in the name of self-preservation, denies the teaching of the Christ it claimed as Lord and avoids the kind of interior self-examination that makes for spiritual maturity. It is a kind of foreshadowing of Christendom’s later more pervasive and terrible abuses of power. It demonstrates just how soon after the crucifixion’s profound expression of the lengths to which Love will go on behalf of the beloved, we Christians began to disassociate ourselves from Christ’s soul-challenging teachings about love, commands such as “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

When I participated in Sunday’s reading of Matthew’s passion narrative, it was, for me, a different story. I found that, when it was the more generic crowd that cried out “Let him be crucified!”, it was much easier for me to identify with the speakers, much harder for me to stay outside the circular beam of responsibility’s spotlight. Interesting that the three earlier versions of the passion in Matthew, Mark and Luke, written when Christianity was more permeable movement and less crystallized institution, all present this aspect of the story in this much more universally applicable form.

It is important for my sense of perspective to count myself among those who would reject transformation, who would kill Life, who would smother Love, because there are times in my own life when I have made choices that have placed me firmly in that camp. It is important for the health of my soul for me to look within and find there the potential to be Christ-killer and, aligned with it, the potential to turn my back on those my Lord tells me I must learn to accept and love as brothers and sisters. It is necessary for the strengthening of my capacity to be obedient to Jesus’ charge to love my enemy for me to first recognize in myself that fearfulness and that desire to be separate and above which create enemies.

For a long time, I have been uneasy about the way in which John’s passion narrative offers a slippery slope down which we can slide into demonizing a particular group of people. Now, the world in which we live is becoming more and more polarized with each passing day. Everywhere individuals and groups are sliding into that dark abyss where it becomes possible to dismiss another human being or group of human beings as worthy only of annihilation. Leaders – even some who claim Christ as Lord – prey upon our fears and counsel us to act in contradiction to the teaching and example of the Christ we think we follow: a suffering servant whose arms embrace all of humanity with compassion from the cross. And we, in our fear, respond in thought and action in ways that multiply and deepen the growing chasms that divide us one from another. 

But Christ, whose mystifying self-offering we contemplate today, was not about division. He was, and is, and – dare I say – will be, about connection. If we must read John’s version of the passion, let us approach it as a cautionary tale that bears witness to how easily we can slide from a place of holy inter-connectedness to a place of fearful and destructive separation, even in the name of God. AMEN.