The Symbols of Holy Week: The Empty Tomb

The Symbols of Holy Week:  The Empty Tomb

An Easter Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 24, 2011

Scripture:  John 20:1-18

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

He wasn’t there.  The tomb was empty.  He had been there, but the tomb was empty.  He was dead, there was no doubt about that; but the tomb was empty.  Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ faithful disciple, had gone to the tomb to do what was customary for one who had died.  She went to put spices on the body, a sign of respect perhaps; or in Mary’s case perhaps an act of deep love.  She couldn’t do it because the tomb was empty.  Mary came to the only conclusion she could, that grave robbers must have taken Jesus’ body.  “They,” as John puts it, had taken his body; but surely Mary knew that that didn’t really make sense.  Jesus’ grave cloths were still there.  They were of linen, and they were valuable.  Surely grave robbers would have taken the cloth, which was the only thing of any monetary value in the tomb.  Beyond that, there was the matter of the stone.  There had been a great stone closing off the entrance to the tomb.  It would have taken more than a grave robber or two to move it.  Yet it was moved, and the tomb was empty.

That empty tomb is the central symbol of Easter.  On one level of course, on the level of the story the Gospels tell, the empty tomb is simply a fact.  Jesus’ tomb was a physical place.  It was probably a cave, a hole in very physical rock.  Yet like the other central symbols of Holy Week that are also physical objects—the donkey, the table, the cross—the empty tomb is so much more than a mere physical object.  It is a symbol.  As a symbol it points beyond itself to profound truth, truth about Jesus, truth about God, and truth about us.

The empty tomb is a symbol that points beyond itself to profound truth, yes; but what profound truth does it point to?  To get at an answer to that question let’s take a look at what we know happened as a matter of history before and after the Romans crucified Jesus.  We know that Jesus started a movement among the people of Galilee.  He had a following.  He was inspiring people.  He was exciting people.  Some of them proclaimed him as the long-expected Messiah.  Now, Jesus was and is unique for us Christians in many ways, but he was not unique in that way.  Galilee and Judea, the homeland of the Jews, had seen many charismatic leaders who started popular movements.  John the Baptist was one.  There were others, some of whom the historians know about specifically, but no doubt there were others that have been totally lost to history.  The Romans and their collaborators among the Jewish leadership didn’t like these popular movements; and they had a way to deal with them, a very effective way to deal with them actually.  They killed the charismatic leader, and every time they did that leader’s movement died with him.  His followers disbanded.  They went home, like Peter and the beloved disciple in John’s story of the empty tomb.  Their movements came to a dead end, disappeared, and were never heard of again.  That’s what the Romans and the Jewish temple authorities were sure would happen with the Jesus movement too.  Publicly execute Jesus in the most cruel and brutal way, and his followers would disperse.  They would go home, figuring that they had been wrong about Jesus.  That would be the end of it.

Only that wasn’t the end of it.  The death of Jesus should have been the end of him.  It wasn’t.  His message about the Kingdom of God should have died with him.  It didn’t.  The community he created should have dissolved.  It wouldn’t.  Jesus died, that’s for sure.  As the coroner Munchkin says of the Wicked Witch on whom the house fell in the Wizard of Oz, he was “not merely dead, but really and sincerely dead.”  He was dead, and yet his followers knew that somehow he wasn’t.  He died yet he lived.  He died, but his truth kept marching on.  He died, but his community of followers lived on.  Death couldn’t hold him.  Death couldn’t defeat him.  For him, for his truth, and for his community death was most definitely not the end.

That is a truth to which the empty tomb points.  God raised Jesus from the dead.  God emptied Jesus’ tomb so that we would know that he and his truth are eternal.  He appeared to his disciples to that they would know that his death wasn’t the end, so that they would stay together and continue to proclaim him and his truth even though the Romans really had killed him.  That’s a truth to which the empty tomb points for them, for his first disciples.

For them, yes: but what about for us?  The empty tomb isn’t really symbol of anything for us if it points only to a truth for them.  It isn’t even a real symbol for us if it points only to a truth about Jesus.  For the empty tomb really to be a meaningful symbol for us it has to point to a truth for us, and indeed it does.  The empty tomb points to the truth for us that with God death is not the end, and there are a couple of aspects to that truth.  One is that for God our physical deaths are not the end of us any more than Jesus’ physical death was the end of him.  Paul calls Jesus the “first fruits of the resurrection,” which means that resurrection is first of all for him but not only for him.  The empty tomb of Easter is God’s sign and seal that death does not have the last word, mortality does not have the final say.  With God life is eternal, even our lives are eternal.

A second aspect of the truth for us to which the empty tomb points is just as important.  We all have, or if we haven’t we will, experience little deaths, metaphorical deaths in our lives.  Illness, despair, addiction, and depression are little deaths that we all, or most of us at least, experience in life.  We all experience loss, loss of love and relationship through death or separation.  There are other little deaths in this life too—loneliness, a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of purposelessness.  If we are honest I think that all of us who have lived any significant number of years have to admit that we have experienced some of those little deaths in our lives.  And we know that we will probably experience others before our earthly life comes to an end.

The empty tomb points to a profound truth about those little deaths.  It says they aren’t the end.  It points to life beyond those little deaths.  It gives us hope in those little deaths.  It says that God wants to and can sustain us in those deaths.  It says that God wants to and can lead us out of those little deaths just as Jesus walked out of that tomb and left it empty.

The empty tomb of Jesus Christ speaks to us.  It speaks truth to us.  It speaks divine truth to us.  It says death is not the end, not for Jesus, not for his first disciples, not for us.  It says that death is not the end both in this life and beyond this life.  That is truth we can cling to, truth that can sustain us, truth that leads us out of death and into abundant life, indeed into eternal life.

The tomb is empty!  Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Amen.

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Cross

The Symbols of Holy Week:  The Cross

A Good Friday Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 22, 2011

Scripture:  Mark 15:21-39

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

This week, in our Holy Week services beginning last Sunday, I have focused in my meditations on the symbols of Holy Week.  Now, for our Lutheran and other friends who have joined us here this evening, don’t worry that you haven’t heard those meditations.  You don’t need to have heard them to follow this one.  So far I have talked about the symbol of the donkey on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem and about the symbol of the table of the Last Supper.  This evening we come to Good Friday, and the central symbol of Good Friday is, of course, the cross on which Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, died.  Like the other symbols of Holy Week the cross is, on the most basic level, a physical object.  It is a most terrible and fearful physical object.  It was an object the Romans used not only to execute people.  They used it as their form of execution especially for political prisoners, for people they feared could stir up the masses against them.  They used it in very visible, public places.  Crucifixion is a terrible, horrible way to die, and when the Romans executed someone they wanted everyone else to see the condemned not only dying but suffering horribly as he died.  They wanted everyone to see so that they would think twice about daring to defy Roman power.  As a physical object the cross is an instrument of terrorism every bit as horrible as a bomb exploded in a public market place.  On that level of meaning the cross is an abomination, a crime against humanity.  On that level of meaning we should despise the cross, we should hide the cross, we should have nothing to do with the cross.

Yet like the other symbols of Holy Week the cross is for us Christians so much more than a mere physical object.  It is a symbol.  As a symbol it has another level of meaning beyond its meaning as a mere physical object.  It has a much deeper level of meaning.  As a symbol it points beyond itself to profound truth.  As a symbol it connects us with profound truth.  The truth to which a true symbol, in this case the cross, points and with which it connects us is a spiritual truth.  It is a truth about God and, in the case of the cross of Jesus, a truth about Jesus as the Christ.  So if we are to understand the cross as the central symbol of Good Friday, indeed, as the central symbol of the Christian faith, and not merely as the instrument of execution that the Romans used to kill Jesus, we have to ask:  What is the profound spiritual truth to which the cross of Christ points, what is the truth with which the cross seeks to connect us? 

Christians have given different answers to that question over the years.  The most common answer that the Christian church has given to that question, at least since the High Middle Ages, has been that the cross points us to the truth that Jesus suffered and died as an innocent victim to pay the price for human sin that had to be paid before God could or would forgive our sin.  This evening, however, I want to suggest a different truth to which I believe the cross of Christ points that, for me anyway, speaks loudly and clearly of the love and grace of God in a way that touches my heart and stirs my soul.  Perhaps it will touch your heart and stir your soul as well.

To get at that truth we start where any understanding of the deeper meaning of the cross must start, namely, with an understanding of just who is it that is being tortured and killed on the cross.  He is Jesus of course, and for us Christians that means a whole lot.  It means that he is fully human yet it also means that he is at the same time fully divine.  He is the Son of God Incarnate, the Word of God made flesh.  He is Emmanuel, God with us.  Emmanuel is a title for Jesus that we mostly hear at Christmas.  That’s because the only place it appears is in Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth, but I think it is particularly apt here on Good Friday as well.  Jesus is God with us.  He is God in truly human form suffering and dying on the cross.  During his life as Emmanuel, God with us, Jesus taught us with his words and showed us with his life who God is for us, how God relates to us human beings.  In his life he taught and lived God’s compassion and God’ grace.  Now we come to his death.  What does seeing him even on the cross as Emmanuel, as God with us, tell us about the meaning of his death, the meaning of his cross?

I believe that seeing Jesus as Emmanuel, God with us, even on the cross tells us how God relates to us not only in the good times of life but also, and much more importantly, in the bad times.  Jesus, Emmanuel, on the cross shows us that God does not abandon us in the bad times.  God does not scorn our suffering and our death.  God is not remote and removed from our suffering and our death.  Rather, God is with us even in the worst that life can hand us.  In Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, on the cross, God in God’s own person enters into the worst that life can hand a human being.  God experiences in God’s own person suffering, and even more. 

There is a great paradox in seeing Jesus as God with us even on the cross.  In Jesus on the cross God experiences everything that a human being can experience in the worst of times.  On the cross Jesus cries “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  In that cry God is paradoxically experiencing being abandoned by God.  God enters into the human experience of being abandoned by God.  God demonstrates the seemingly impossible, that God is with us even in our feeling of God abandoning us.  In Jesus on the cross God does not observe our feeling of aloneness, our feeling even of abandonment, from afar.  Rather, God enters into those feelings and shows us that God is with us even there.

And there is an even greater paradox in Jesus on the cross.  On the cross Jesus dies.  On the cross Emmanuel, God with us, dies.  On the cross of Jesus God experiences death.  God dies on the cross.  That’s a shocking statement I know, and it is one the Christian tradition has been very creative in finding ways to avoid.  Yet Jesus Christ is precisely God with us, and Jesus Christ dies on the cross.  In the death of Jesus on the cross God enters into and experiences human death.  In the death of Jesus on the cross God show us in the clearest possible way that God is not absent from human death, that God does not scorn or reject or judge human death.  Rather God enters into human death and is present in it, is present with us even as we die, never truly forsaking us, never truly abandoning us.

The Christian church has long taught that the death of Jesus on the cross functions as an sacrificial atonement for human sin. Yet for me, and for a lot of Christians today, the cross of Christ speaks not of atonement or sacrifice but of the unfailing presence and grace of God in everything that comes our way in life, up to and including suffering and death.  The cross then is about us and about how God relates to us.  God doesn’t prevent the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross, and God doesn’t prevent suffering and death in our lives or the lives of our loved ones either.  Rather, in the cross of Jesus we see demonstrated in fullest measure God’s abiding and sustaining presence with us in suffering and death.  We see God with us even as Emmanuel suffers and dies.  That, for me anyway, is the Good News of Good Friday, and it is very good news indeed.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Table

This is the meditation I gave at the Maundy Thursday service at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ on April 21, 2011.

The Symbols of Holy Week:  The Table

A Maundy Thursday Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 21, 2011

Scripture:  1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

We, many of us at least, are used to thinking about symbols in connection with Communion.  We know—at least in the Protestant tradition we know—that the bread and the wine of Communion aren’t really the body and blood of Christ even if the New Testament stories about the Last Supper have Jesus say “This is my body.  This is my blood.”  We know that the bread and the wine are symbols of the presence of Jesus Christ with his people as they gather to remember him and what he did, and does, for them.  So you might expect a meditation in a Maundy Thursday service on the meaning of the symbols of the bread and the wine of the Last Supper.  Tonight, however, I don’t want to talk about the bread and the wine.  I want to talk about another symbol from the Last Supper.  I want to talk about the table.

There was, after all, a table.  Jesus gathered his disciples for the feast of the Passover, a real, full meal.  There were, we assume, at least thirteen people present, Jesus and the twelve disciples.  I actually think that there were at least fourteen people there because I am pretty sure Mary Magdalene would have been there too.  They came for a meal, and they would have had a table on which the meal was served.  The table of the Last Supper was a real, physical object on which the food of the Last Supper was set.

The image most of us have of the Last Supper, and its table, probably comes from Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous depiction of the scene.  We even have a reproduction of it here in the fellowship hall, and I’ve copied the painting into your bulletin for this evening.  In that picture Jesus and the twelve disciples all sit or stand along one side of a long table.  None of the figures faces directly out toward the viewer, but they are all turned toward the artist enough that he can paint their faces.  It’s a great painting that captures the tension and the agitation of the moment when Jesus tells the disciples that one of them was going to betray him.  It’s a great painting, but I seriously doubt that  it accurately portrays the actual Last Supper.  An upper room in an ordinary house in first century Jerusalem probably wasn’t long enough to fit a table as long as the one Da Vinci depicts.  The room in his painting looks more like a room in a Renaissance Italian palace than a room in a first century Jerusalem house.  But even if the room were that long surely the people present would have gathered around it, not along just one side of it.  Their being all on one side is an artistic device that lets Da Vinci give them all faces.  A friend imagines Jesus having just said “Everybody who wants to be in the picture, on this side of the table!”  I’m sure a picture showing them around a table, not all on one side of it, would be truer to what actually happened.  People who gather for a meal normally gather around a table, not along one side of it.

If we see Jesus and the disciples gathered around a table we can, I think, more easily see the table as a symbol.  The table becomes central to the gathering of the people.  It is the table that draws the people together.  They come to partake of what will be placed on it and to have fellowship with those who will gather around it.  The table becomes the center of their time together.  They form a circle around it.  Gathered around it they face one another.  Across it they share food and drink and conversation.  Around it they become community.

Community is what the table of the Last Supper symbolizes for me, and in symbolizing community it draws our attention to something really important about Communion, something about Communion that we too often overlook or even forget.  There are of course different names for the sacrament we celebrate this evening.  Technically it is the Eucharist, a word we get from the Greek that means thanksgiving.  Sometimes we call it The Lord’s Supper.  Our most common name for it, however, is Communion.  Why Communion?  What does Communion mean?  Dictionary definitions of communion (with a small c) include things like “an act or instance of sharing” and “intimate fellowship.”  What strikes me about the word is that is so similar to the word community.  It clearly has the same root as the word community.  Communion and community aren’t quite synonymous, but they’re pretty close to it.

The symbol of the table as a symbol of community reminds us that Communion—with a capital C—and community are inseparable.  Communion, the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, to use it’s more technical name, is an act of the Christian community.  Yes, usually someone who is ordained presides at the sacrament, but Communion is never something that one person can properly do alone.  European kings used to have their private chapels where they could receive Communion without community, but that was an abuse and a misunderstanding of the sacrament.  Communion requires community.

More than that, however, Communion properly understood builds community.  In our kind of Protestant tradition that puts so much emphasis on words and on right belief we might define Christians as those who believe in Jesus Christ, but some other Christian traditions, on the Protestant side especially the Episcopalians, define Christians as those who gather around Christ’s table for the sacrament of Communion.  In that way of looking at things Christian identity and unity are established by Communion.  We could learn a lot from their way of looking at it. 

So let me suggest that when you partake of the bread and the wine—juice actually, but it doesn’t matter—this evening you think of the table around which those first disciples partook of bread and wine with Jesus just before his arrest and execution.  Open your hearts and your minds to the ways in which our coming to the common table forms us into community.  Be aware that we are partaking of the elements of which Jesus spoke around that ancient table together, as community.  Try seeing taking Communion not as something you do by or for yourself but as something that we do as and for community. 

In a few minutes I will invite you to come to this little table up front here to partake of Communion.  It’s a small table, not big enough for all of us to gather around at the same time; but we have been gathered at this larger table all evening.  We’ve been gathered around this larger table.  We have gathered as a group of Christ’s disciples much like those original disciples did on that fateful night so long ago.  The table, either this big one we’ve been seated at or this little one that holds the bread and wine of the sacrament, is a powerful symbol.  It is a symbol of community.  May our coming to the table—to both of these tables—this evening strengthen us as a community, a community of Christians with Christ as our head.  Amen.

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Donkey

          This is the sermon I gave on Palm Sunday, April 17, 2011.  It was so well received by the people of my church that I thought I would post it here for others to take a look at.  I hope that you find it meaningful.

The Symbols of Holy Week:  The Donkey

Scripture:  Zechariah 9:9-10; Mark 11:1-11

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

It’s the beginning of Holy Week, that most sacred week of the Christian year, when we enter Jerusalem with Jesus in triumph, share his last meal, weep at his cross, and only then rejoice in his glorious resurrection.  Let me ask you something:  Have you ever noticed how each of those central events of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life has an object at its center?  Well, each of them does.  Today, on Palm Sunday, it’s the donkey that Jesus rides into Jerusalem.  Mark just calls it a colt, but trust me on this one, it’s a donkey.  More about that donkey in a second.  For Maundy Thursday one central object is the table.  More about that on Maundy Thursday.  On Good Friday the central object is of course the cross.  For Easter it is the empty tomb.  Each of the named days of Holy Week has an object associated with it.

All of these things—the donkey, the table, the cross, and the empty tomb—are material objects (even if one of them is an animal), but the important thing about them for us Christians is that they are much more than mere objects.  They are symbols.  They stand for something.  They point beyond themselves to some profound meaning, a spiritual meaning, a meaning that tells us something about Jesus Christ and about God.  Through them we find our connection with Jesus Christ and with God.  So in our four Holy Week services this coming week (not counting the early service on Easter morning) I want to explore each of these objects, each of these symbols.  Today we start with the donkey.    

The background of the Palm Sunday story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey is that after Jesus has spent perhaps about a year teaching and healing in Galilee to the north of Jerusalem he has made the fateful decision to go to Jerusalem.  It is hard to overestimate the importance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people.  It was the site of the temple, the seat of the religious authorities of the day.  It was by far the biggest city in the region, and it was the city the Romans worried about most.  It had been the scene of violent rebellions against Roman rule in the past, and the Romans feared that it would be again in the future.  (They turned out to be right about that, by the way.)  It wasn’t where the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate hung out most of the time, but it was where he would go, bringing a whole lot of Roman soldiers with him, during the Passover, when the population of the city swelled dramatically because of all the pilgrims coming to the temple.  So when Jesus entered Jerusalem that fateful day he was entering the center of both the religious and the secular powers of his day.

Jesus could have snuck into the city unnoticed.  After all, it’s not like his face was all over the television the way it would be today.  No one in Jerusalem knew what he looked like.  He could have done it quietly, in a way that would not draw attention to himself.  He didn’t.  Instead he rode in on a donkey—why that would draw attention to him I’ll get to shortly—to the acclaim of the crowds who lined the road to hail him.  Why?  Why would Jesus come into Jerusalem that way?

To get at an answer to that question we need to go back several hundred years before Jesus and look at those two verses we heard from Zechariah, an Old Testament prophet.  There the prophet tells of a king who is to come.  He says that the king is, or will be, triumphant and victorious; but he comes not in a war chariot or riding a magnificent Arabian steed but “humble and riding on a donkey.”  The prophet says that this king will “cut off the chariot from Ephraim,” that is, from Israel.  He will cut off the battle bow and “command peace to the nations.”  This king of whom Zechariah prophesies is pretty clearly a different kind of king.  He is humble.  He comes in not on a symbol of war, not in a military chariot, but riding a symbol of peace, a simple donkey, a farm animal not a war animal. 

When Jesus rides a donkey into Jerusalem he is acting out this scene from Zechariah.  That he is doing so isn’t necessarily obvious to us.  I mean, who knows anything about Zechariah today?  I don’t, except for these verses.  Jewish people in Jesus’ time, however, would immediately have understood what Jesus was doing riding into town on that borrowed burro.  He was saying through his action rather than through words I am indeed a king, but I am a very different kind of king.

In their book The Last Week, Crossan and Borg imagine this scene this way.  On one side of town Pilate and his Roman legions are marching into the city.  Consider that scene for a moment:  The military commanders ride in war chariots drawn by grand horses with magnificent tack.  They are animals of war, animals of might and oppression.  They make a fearful sight.  The troops follow wearing their armor that flashes in the sun.  They carry shields and spears, the implements of war.  It is a grand procession, and a fearful one.  It is Rome saying we have the power, and we’re not afraid to use it.  It is Rome saying do not dare to defy us, for we can and will crush you. 

On the other side of town Jesus is riding into the city on a donkey.  Now consider this scene:  It is a parody of the Roman military procession.  There are no implements of war.  Instead there is a humble animal from the farm.  A useful animal to be sure but hardly a grand one, certainly not a frightening one.  The donkey is a symbol of the peaceful life of the ordinary people.  His time is the time of peace, the time of plowing, the time of pulling a cart taking the produce of the field to market.  He is Zechariah’s donkey.  He symbolizes the beating of swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.  He symbolizes a world in which everyone sits under their own vines and their own fig trees, and no one makes them afraid, to use the words of the prophet Micah.

None of that may be obvious to us, but it would have been obvious to the people who saw Jesus engage in this prophetic act of riding into Jerusalem on a donkey.  Certainly Jesus must have intended people to understand what he was doing in this way.  The parallel with that passage from Zechariah is too strong to be mere coincidence.  Jesus didn’t sneak, or even just walk, into Jerusalem unnoticed precisely because he wanted to be noticed.  He had come to Jerusalem to make a proclamation.  He had come to Jerusalem to proclaim to the powers of his world that their way is not God’s way.  During the week that lay before him he would do that with words.  Upon his entry into Jerusalem he did it with his actions.

Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey was nothing less than a provocation.  It was a provocation directed to the powers of the place, to the Romans and to the Jewish temple authorities.  Later on Pilate will ask Jesus if he is the king of the Jews.  Jesus has already answered that question.  He answered it when he acted out the prophecy of Zechariah.  Yes, he said with his actions, I am a king; but I am a very different kind of king.  I am a king of peace not war.  I am a king of peacetime pursuits, of agriculture and peaceful trade.  I am a king from among the people not a king reigning over the people.  Maybe the Romans didn’t get all of that from Jesus’ symbolic act of riding in on a donkey.  They probably weren’t up on their Zechariah. The Jewish people of the city, however, surely did.  Or at least they did if they knew their Zechariah as well as a good Jew of the time should have.  If they didn’t get all that, if they saw only a reference to a king but missed the clear depiction of what kind of king Jesus is, then they missed his meaning altogether.  Maybe that would explain why five days later these same people were shouting Crucify him!

The Romans for sure and the people of the city perhaps missed Jesus’ meaning when he rode into the center of power in his world on a donkey.  Christianity has missed his meaning pretty much ever since.  We’ve seen his riding into Jerusalem on a donkey as an act of humility.  We haven’t seen it as a provocation aimed at the powers of the world.  Yet that surely is what it was.  We haven’t seen it as a prophetic act proclaiming the kingdom of God as a very different kind of kingdom from the kingdoms of the world.  Yet that surely is what it was.

So thank you little donkey, and thanks to whoever owned you for letting Jesus borrow you.  You played a role you could not possibly understand.  You became a symbol, a symbol of peace triumphant over war, a symbol of ordinary, productive pursuits over military ones.  A symbol of providing for people not conquering them.  Most people who saw you, and most people who have read about you, have misunderstood you.  As we begin our journey with Jesus through Holy Week, may we at last understand what you were all about.  Amen.

The Radical Gospel: What We Don't Get About Jesus

          In the hallway outside the Sunday school rooms in the church that I serve as pastor there is a painting of Jesus.  It depicts the Jesus saying from Matthew 19:14 (also Mark 10:14 and Luke 18:16) where Jesus says “Let the little children come to me and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”  (Let me hasten to add that this picture has been in my church many, many years longer than I have.  I had nothing to do with putting it there.)  Here’s it is:

 It’s a common theme for paintings in Christian education wings of Christian churches.  The one in my church is particularly telling.  The figures, a man who is supposedly Jesus and three children, are located in a garden with blooming tulips and gladiolas, flowers that we have here in North America but I doubt that the actual Jesus ever saw in first century Galilee.  In it Jesus is the stereotypical western image of Jesus, dressed in a white robe with long wavy hair and beard.  There is absolutely nothing threatening, nothing radical (except that he looks a bit like a 1960s hippie), nothing challenging even about him.  He is serene, placid even.  He is a stereotype that looks nothing like the Jesus of the Gospels.  Not that the Gospels tell us anything about how Jesus looked physically except that he was a peasant class Semitic man of the first century CE.  They don’t, but it’s not the details of Jesus’ physical appearance that concern me.  It is the way that in this picture he is so American middle class.  The way he is so nonthreatening.  The way he welcomes but seems not to demand anything at all in return.  He is, in other words, nothing like the Jesus that the Gospels give us.  He is the Jesus of established American Christianity.

The depiction of the children is telling as well.  They are 1950s vintage white American children.  They look like illustrations out of the Dick and Jane readers I had in grade school in the 1950s.  One of the children, the only boy, is holding what appears to be a model of a World War II vintage military airplane.  (Really!  A military airplane in a picture that is supposed to teach children about Jesus!  It boggles the mind.)  The children are white, healthy, well-dressed.  They are stereotypes.  They don’t look remotely like first century CE Jewish children from Galilee or Judea.  They are the image of America the way we wanted it to be in the 1950s.  They are the children of establishment America, for whom Jesus is just one of us who saves without challenging, without demanding anything at all.

That image of Jesus and the children would be of no particular concern if it were limited to a picture in a hallway outside some Sunday school rooms.  Jesus did say let the little children come to me, and that’s what the picture shows, albeit very stereotypically.  The thing of it is, however, that this image of Jesus is not limited to a picture in a hallway outside some Sunday school rooms.  My years in the church have convinced me that this image of a serene, welcoming, nonthreatening Jesus is the image that many, perhaps most, of the people in the church have of him.  It is the image the Christian church, at least in its western forms, has inculcated in people for centuries.  (There are problems with the image of Jesus that the eastern Orthodox churches have inculcated in people too, especially the image of Jesus Pantocrator; but that is not my concern here.)  This picture outside my church’s Sunday school rooms shows the image of the Constantinian Jesus (and of the American version of the Constintinian Jesus in particular), the Jesus of the established church whose primary role is to make people feel good and to get them to heaven, not to say anything to them about the kingdom of God on earth.  To comfort not to confront.  To legitimate the status quo not to challenge it.  To reflect the values of the culture, not to stand them on their heads at every turn.  In other words, to be a tame Jesus, safe for the established powers of the world (including the military powers symbolized by the model warplane in the boy’s hand in our picture), the servant of the kingdoms of the earth not the herald of the radically different kingdom of God.

The simple and undeniable truth is that ever since it became the established religion of empire the Christian church has distorted, even denied, the image of Jesus that anyone reading the Gospels with an open mind can (and should) get, the image we get from reading the Gospels without the Constantinian glasses that the church has so effectively put on us over the centuries.  Time and time again Jesus took the conventional wisdom of his day, and ours, and turned it completely on its head.  The instances of his doing so are too numerous to mention all of them here.  Virtually everything Jesus said and did was and is radical; and you don’t have to be a Bible scholar to see how radical he was, and is (although we do lose some of his radicalism when we don’t understand his historical context well enough).  Jesus is radical in the true meaning of the word.  Everything he said and did went to the root (radix, Latin for root, is the source of our word radical) of the beliefs and practices of his society, his culture, his religion—and ours.  Here are just a few examples taken from the Gospel of Matthew.  It’s one of the Gospels with the saying about the children that our Sunday school picture portrays, and it is the Gospel that most people read first because it comes first in the traditional order of the New Testament even though it isn't the first of our Gospels to have been written.

Let’s start with a few examples from the Sermon on the Mount.  Jesus says “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”  Mt. 5:5  In Jesus’ day it was the Romans with their legions that were anything but meek who were inheriting the earth.  The most common Jewish vision of the Messiah was of a new King David, a military ruler who would inherit the earth through anything but meekness.  Today it seems to be mostly we Americans who are inheriting the earth, and we do it through economic, political, and military power, not through meekness.  Jesus has completely upended the expectations of his world and ours.  

He says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”  Mt. 5:9  The Roman legions, who perhaps made peace but who did it through brutal violence, were the metaphorical children of the god Caesar.  The United States is today’s Rome, also seeking to make peace through a liberal application of violence.  For Jesus the children of the one true God are the ones who truly make peace through justice.  He has again turned the expectations of his world, and ours, on their head.  He says “Do not resist an evildoer,” meaning do not resist violently, then gives examples of the oppressed turning the tables on their oppressors.  (Walter Wink)  Mt. 5:38-41  In that world where violence was the norm, and in ours where violence is still the norm, Jesus has yet again turned everything upside down.

He said:  “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven….For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  Mt. 6:19-21  It’s a truly radical, revolutionary statement in his world—and in ours—where most everyone works as hard as they can precisely to build up treasure on earth and where the policies of the ruling powers are aimed most of all at building up the earthly treasure of the wealthy.  He called a tax collector to be one of his disciples.  Mt. 8:9  Jesus’ Jewish people and followers despised tax collectors, for they worked for the Romans and oppressed their own people; but Jesus made one of them a disciple, again a truly radical prophetic demonstration of God’s universal grace that defied the deep religious and political convictions of his time.  It defies the deep religious and political convictions of our time too.  How many of us would call Bernie Madoff to be a disciple?  It’s not a perfect parallel I know, but I think it makes the point.  Jesus made, and makes, disciples of the ones the world despises.

In Jesus’ day women were forbidden to touch men to whom they were not married in public.  Blood was considered unclean, and touching blood rendered a person unclean.  A woman who had suffered from hemorrhages for twelve years violated these taboos when she reached out and touched the fringe of Jesus’ cloak.  Jesus should have been outraged.  He should have condemned the woman and then gone through a purification ritual to cleanse himself.  He didn’t.  He said “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well;” and the woman was healed.  Mt. 9:20-22  We probably hear this story as a tale of Jesus’ compassion for a suffering human being, and so it is; but we probably don’t see how radical it is.  We don’t see how it flies in the face of the religious and social conventions of Jesus’ time, and we don’t see in it a call for us to question--and reject--the religious and social conventions of our time too; but so it is.

I suppose I could go on and on with examples of how radical Jesus is.  How he healed on the Sabbath in violation of the religious law and approved of hated Samaritans.  How he told parables of God’s unfailing grace for the lost—the woman searching for her lost coin, the shepherd searching for his one lost sheep, the father welcoming home his prodigal son even before the son has had a chance to beg forgiveness.  How he went not to the wealthy, the respectable, the righteous but to the poor, the excluded, the sinners.  How he symbolically overthrew the temple and condemned the temple authorities for “devouring widows' houses” with their temple tax.  Mark 12:38-44  There are lots and lots of examples. 

Yet there is one passage that perhaps more than anything else shows how radical the demands are that Jesus makes on us.  Jesus said:  “If any want to become my followers let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  Mt. 16:24-25  “Take up their cross.”  We want to minimize that line, or even romanticize it.  We want it to mean to bear whatever difficulties come our way in life with faith and endurance.  The problem is that Jesus doesn’t say “bear whatever difficulties come your way in life with faith and endurance.”  He says take up your cross.  What’s a cross?  A brutal, inhumane instrument of torture and death.  He means of course not take up your cross to inflict torture and death on another but rather to bear torture and death yourself for Jesus’ sake and for the sake of the Kingdom of God.  It is a demand for our whole lives, our entire being, everything that we have and everything that we are.  Nothing could be more radical.  Nothing could be a more radical call to follow the way of the Kingdom of God that Jesus showed us, the way of nonviolence and the way of justice for the poor, the excluded, and the vulnerable.  The way of intimate personal relationship with God, not the way of established religious authority.  The way of spurning the world’s norms and mores for the sake of mercy and compassion.  The way of self-denial for the sake of all of God’s people and all of God’s creation.

How did the man who overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the temple and drove out the sellers of sacrificial animals there ever get to be the Jesus meek and mild of so much of Christianity?  How did the Jesus who said love your enemies and do not resist an evildoer with violence, who wouldn’t even let his followers use violence to save his own life, become the Jesus of earthly armies, the Jesus of a picture with a child holding a model of an instrument of death and destruction?  How did the Jesus whom the authorities of his time, both religious and secular, saw as such a threat to their power that they had to kill him ever get to be respectable?  How did the Jesus who subverted the beliefs and conventions of his time at every turn ever get to be the guardian of the status quo that the Christian tradition has made him? 

There are of course historical, anthropological, and sociological answers to those questions.  It all began with establishment in the fourth century of course, but it certainly didn’t end there.  There is, however, a question that is more important for us than the “how did it happen” questions.  The more important question for us is:  What are we going to do about it?  Are we ever going to get what the dominant forms of Christianity have for so long not gotten about Jesus?  Are we ever going to get how radical he was, and is?  More importantly:  Are we ever going to let him radicalize us?