Hebrews 10 Archives - 51��Ƶ

Good Friday 2014

nancy — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 19:18:24 +0000

Readings:
Isaiah 52:13–53:12; Psalm 40:1-14; Hebrews 10:1-25; John 18:31-19:37
It’s been a hell of a Lent.
It began for my family with the diagnosis of our middle son with epilepsy after two terrifying seizures. It continued when a group of friends from seminary began, through an extended email chain, sharing with one another the trials we were facing: one friend wrote that she had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, after which another friend shared that her father had inoperable cancer, after which a third friend wrote and said “Our Good Friday came today with news that my father, too, has metastasized cancer.” In the midst of this my brother-in-law was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder. There’s more to be said, but that will suffice. I’m sure you could add to this list your own sufferings and the troubles of those you love. Several of us in this community over the last forty days have spent time in hospitals, seen loved ones sick or injured, have lost old friends or family members.
It’s been a hell of a Lent.
And sometimes I can’t help but wish God would just fix things. Just do the God-magic and make everything better. But as soon as I think these things I realize that what I am asking from God is precisely magic; I’m asking for a god who looks more like the pagan pantheon of divinities who exert power and control over defined areas of our lives; divinities who can be coaxed and bribed into interfering in human affairs. This interference, of course, in the Greco-Roman mythologies is sometimes beneficial to us and sometimes harmful, depending on the whims of the gods. You see, the very power I wish God would exert to magically make this world better is a power that is but human power writ large and projected upon a transcendent screen.
Karl Barth has urged us to remember that God’s power is not an “empty, naked sovereignty.” He adds, “God, . . . if conceived of as unconditioned power, would be a demon and as such his own prisoner.” My desire for a God who would reach in and act in a punctiliar and unpredictable intervention of sheer naked power to make things better sounds more like Zeus than Jesus on Good Friday.
Jesus on Good Friday has an encounter with Pontius Pilate in John’s gospel that forces us to rethink divine power. “Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’” Jesus refuses to answer, but instead questions Pilate about his question: “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” To which Pilate replies, “I am not a Jew, am I?” Jesus answers him, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
Jesus’ answer is yes and no. “Yes, I have a kingdom,” which presumable makes him a king, but his kingdom is not “from this world” and so it is unclear what his kingship means. Pilate’s worry, of course, is that Jesus’ kingship will be a threat to his, but could a kingship not from this world threaten a kingship of this world? Pilate seeks further clarification, “So you are a king?” Jesus answers him, again obliquely, “You say that I am a king.”
Rowan Williams interprets this exchange to mean, “The kingship [Jesus] exercises is the kind of power that cannot (not should not, but cannot) be defended by violence.” Pilate’s question of kingship is a question, then, that “cannot be answered in the language in which it is asked.”
In the City of God Augustine argues somewhat paradoxically that violence and coercion can only be used to defend relative or penultimate things. This seems odd, because one might imagine that violence, as a last resort, would only be used to defend the most important things, things that are absolute and ultimate, things like the kingdom of God. But Augustine refrains, saying that if we were to try to defend the ultimate good with violence we would only have shown that what we were defending was not the ultimate good. To inaugurate the peaceable kingdom by a show of force is, of necessity, to inaugurate something other than the peaceable kingdom.
“Are you a king?” Pilate asks. “What kind of power do you wield?,” he wants to know. Jesus refuses to respond on his terms and finally becomes silent—a silence that opens a space, an empty space, a pause, in which questions of violence, power, defence, and rivalry fade before his determination to end this competition for verbal territory. At this point of the conversation, his answer to questions of power and authority cannot be spoken but only enacted. His answer will be the cross.
And given what Jesus has said and done in the face of Pilate, I’m not sure we interpret the cross rightly if we think of it as kenotic, self-emptying—at least not from the perspective of John’s gospel. We must be careful not to conflate John’s story too quickly with the Christ hymn of Philippians 2 in which incarnation and cross are described precisely in kenotic language. In John’s gospel, Jesus is not emptying himself of power in order to undergo the cross and then reclaim power through resurrection.
If the cross is what Jesus looks like when he has laid his power aside, then we don’t really have a challenge to power as we commonly construe it—that is, as naked sovereignty. But if the cross is Jesus’ enactment of power, then all abstract, unconditioned power is shown to be fundamentally demonic. To borrow a phrase from a wonderful recent essay by our own Tony Baker, the crucifixion challenges all “unhinged power”— power unhinged from justice, unhinged from order, unhinged from love.
The cross is not Jesus’ Clark Kent disguise that will be set aside when he is resurrected and restored to his true identity as Superman. Jesus just is Clark Kent.
Cross and resurrection are the same power, the power of God to be always entirely true to who God is and the power of Christ to make that divine activity radically and perfectly transparent. This power, always present as divine energy, always present as an unfailing and unstoppable pressure toward love, is a shared power that invites, partners, and cooperates with the creation in its redemption. “He who made us without ourselves,” Augustine writes, “will not justify us without ourselves.”
What are we to make then of Jesus’ words on the cross, “It is finished”? For those of you who have taken my ethics courses, and who have perhaps occasionally fended off boredom by counting how many times I said the word “telos” in a given class period, you might be interested to know that the word “finished” in this verse is tetélestai, from the root telos—“it is complete, it is fulfilled, it has been brought to its proper end.”
Done. Finished. Or is it?
If we are not careful we can fall into the trap of reading the “It is finished” as indicating the fulfillment of a divine decision to engage in a self-imposed and self-enclosed heavenly transaction by which the human condition is changed for us but not with us.
Yet the story does go on. The blood and water that pour from Jesus’ side suggest the founding of a church through baptism and eucharist that will continue Christ’s work. As Richard Neuhaus once commented, “‘It is finished.’ But it is not over.”
The divine power exhibited in the cross is a power that invites us into the continuing work of redemption and atonement. We become, again to cite Tony Baker’s words, “atoned atoners.”
On the cross the end comes, but the end turns out to be a beginning. The unhinged power of the demonic seeks quick and forceful solutions, but the power of God that is hinged to justice and formed by love, requires patience, for it seeks not to destroy what stands in the way of progress but to transform what stands in the way of the restoration of all things.
In his poem, “Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot describes, as well as anyone, the way in which “it is finished” invites us into the ongoing work of atoned atoners.
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. . . .
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them. . . .
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.”
Amen.

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Good Friday 2013

nancy — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:24:06 +0000

Good Friday Sermon 2013

Christ Chapel

Dr. Steven Bishop

The story of Abraham and Isaac is one of the most disturbing stories in the Old Testament. Its matter-of-fact, stripped down narration heightens to its disconcerting contents. Few words are spoken in the scene, the focus is on the action. There is no reflection on the consequences or meaning of the action. We don’t know what any of the characters think or feel. There is not even a sign of a psychological or moral dilemma.
What we have is a knowing father who takes an unknowing child to an unknown place to commit an unthinkable act. Even more troubling is that the God who orders this sacrifice is the God who, later through the prophets, will condemn child sacrifice as an abomination so vile its practice brings down nations. Some have tried to recast the story so that it has to do with something other than sacrifice. But this is what it is—the words ‘offering’ and ‘knife’ are identical to the sacrificial language of Leviticus and other portions of the Old Testament. The killing intention is clear.
We are told that this sacrificial command is to be a test for Abraham. But what kind of test? We are not told, but a plausible explanation is that it is a test to prove that Abraham believes the promises God made to him can be fulfilled in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Isaac is the child of promise, the one through whom progeny will grow and land will be settled. Abraham passes the test by demonstrating through his actions that he trusts that the death of the promised child will not interfere with the fulfillment of the promise.
But this does not change the fact that the story is empty of human feeling. Compare our other readings. John’s portrayal of Jesus’ final hours of life moves us because of the dying attention Jesus pays to his mother. A compassionate and devoted person is revealed by John’s description. Even the reflections of Hebrews on Jesus’ sacrifice show pathos and attention to the human cost of suffering. In stark contrast, the narrator of Genesis presents the story with what appears to be a sense of detachment.
Abraham’s lack of reaction is shocking. His speech is sparse and without affect. Contrast his reaction to the news that Sodom and Gomorrah would be destroyed. Abraham leaps into a mode of pleading with God to be just. “Would God kill the innocent with the guilty?” he questions. “Will not the judge of all the earth do justice?” He pleads for the innocent and he appeals to God to spare the cities by basing his argument on the injustice of killing the innocent. He doesn’t just ask but he pleads and bargains and keeps pressing that fewer and fewer innocent would need to be found in order to spare the city. But here, in the matter of his own son, he is strangely, uncharacteristically and hauntingly quiet.
When I was in high school my Sunday School teacher once imagined out loud what Abraham’s demeanor must have been like. My teacher was reacting to a made for TV movie that showed Abraham wandering alone in the hills of Judea, screaming out to God and agonizing over the command to kill Isaac. My Sunday School teacher preferred the stoic Abraham, the one the text reveals, going about God’s business. This Abraham refuses to question God’s command. Sacrifice your child Abraham, just as you would a goat or lamb or bull.
Abraham is silent about the sacrifice of his son. He does not reveal it to his servants who travel with them nor to Isaac. The narrator too is silent about the sacrifice of Isaac. We do not know if Abraham contemplated what he was commanded to do. We have no insight into his mind, the very thing a narrator could give us. There are no details to give us a hint about the feeling that such a commandment would inspire: no sights, no sounds, no description of the attire of the travelers on their journey, no description of the villages they passed through or by, nothing about the heat of the day or the coolness of the evening. The monstrous event unfolds while everyone is unaware of its relentless momentum. All we get from Abraham or the narrator is a determined silent march toward death.
A vision of pathos finally emerges at the end of the scene. The knife is in Abraham’s hand ready to cut the throat of his sacrifice when an angel of God intervenes with a message from God. Abraham has demonstrated that his adoration of God knows no limits. Abraham, like the very texture of this text, was determined. He was going to the bitter end to prove himself to God, even if it meant killing Isaac. But Isaac was spared by the timely intervention of a heavenly messenger and all ends rather well.
In spite of its ending we are still left face to face with the brutality of human sacrifice. The story ends well for Abraham and Isaac but it does not end well for countless others who are considered expendable on the altars of sacrifice for reasons as unclear to us as Abraham’s were to Isaac. So often the victims are like Jesus or Isaac: innocent, young, obedient.
On this day, it does not end well for Jesus. Isaac’s sudden and divine escape from the thirsty knife of sacrifice makes it startling that Jesus hangs upon the cross and heaven is silent. There is no one to stay the executioner’s hand. No voice from heaven to stop the savage butchery that is crucifixion. And no angelic messenger to say “you’ve proven how far you are willing to go, your adoration of God is clear.” Abraham said nothing in the face of sacrificing Isaac. God says nothing as Jesus dies upon the cross. Today, when Jesus is dead, we are left, like so many who see brutality and death, who experience torture and abuse, who die as innocents, appalled and silent.

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