There is a curious scene, unique to Luke’s account of the
Passion Narrative, in which the crowd is following Jesus as he is escorted to
the location of his execution. Among the
crowd, which by now has become a lynch mob, there are a few women who are beating
their breasts and wailing. These brave
women publicly express their sympathy for Jesus right in the middle of the
blood-thirsty crowd. The contrast
between their compassion and the crowd’s blood lust is striking.
In response to their display of grief, Jesus counsels the
women to weep for themselves and their children, prophesying that the wave of
violence that is sweeping him up will soon consume the whole city. He concludes his warning by quoting a
proverb: “For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it
is dry?” (Luke 23:31).
Green wood is wet wood – it doesn’t make good kindling. Jesus is making it clear that his movement
was nonviolent. He was not trying to
spark a military uprising against the Romans.
If his nonviolent protest met with capital punishment, what will happen
when the wood is dry? The women of
Jerusalem found out 40 years later, when a violent Jewish uprising brought down
a Roman legion that raised the city to the ground.
Implicit in Jesus’ comment is a recognition that his
suffering isn’t unique, or even particularly horrific. Plenty of people were executed by being
crucified in Roman occupied Palestine. “You think this is bad?” asks
Jesus. “Wait until you see what’s next.”
Violence only enkindles more violence.
There has been a strong tendency in Christian traditions to
make a fetish of Jesus’ suffering, to treat it as uniquely awful and the
fulfillment of God’s will at the same time.
Throughout his teaching career, however, Jesus makes two things perfectly
clear. First, that his suffering and
death follows the pattern of all the prophets before him, including his cousin,
John the Baptizer (and, we might add, those after him). In other words, there is nothing new about
the persecution and even execution of those who speak out for justice and
peace.
Second, Jesus maintains that the fate of such prophets is
entirely due to the readiness of both leaders and people to marginalize and
kill them. Their deaths are the result
of a very common pattern of human violence, and not the fulfillment of divine
providence. The pattern works like
this. A prophet comes along and points
out the greed, exploitation, and violence that already is dividing and
destroying people. The prophet begins to
get a hearing, and it starts to threaten those who benefit from the status
quo. The people begin to question the
way things are, but are ambivalent about the prophet’s message and
tactics. They doubt that nonviolent resistance
will have much affect.
The authorities exploit this ambivalence, mounting a
propaganda campaign against the prophet and the movement he or she is
inspiring. They accuse the prophet of
blasphemy, immorality, treason, and insurrection. The prophet becomes a scapegoat, the bearer
of all the tensions and fears of the social body. The community begins to unite in opposition
to the scapegoat, discovering a renewed sense of social solidarity by directing
their energies to destroy him or her.
The authorities arrange a show trial and the people become a lynch
mob. The scapegoat is sacrificed to
restore social order, and everything returns to normal.
This scapegoat mechanism, a kind of sacrifice or offering to
the gods of race and nation, is given a theological or ideological veneer of
legitimacy, diverting our attention from the everyday violence, the sacrifice
of innocent victims that is simply the cost of doing business that the prophet
tried to make us see in the first place.
What is genuinely unique about the passion narrative, and the prophetic
arc of the biblical witness as whole, is not the violence it portrays, but
rather its insistence that the victim is innocent. The theological relevance of the passion
narrative is the revelation that God is entirely identified with the mission of
the prophets, and not with the perpetrators of unjust violence. The theological veneer of legitimacy is
stripped away, leaving nothing left but a pack of lies told to cover-up
collective murder.
The execution of Jesus is just another sacrifice of an
innocent victim to the gods of an unjust social order. God, the One Jesus called Abba, does not
desire the death of innocent victims.
This God reaches out to us through Jesus to become conscious of the
violent patterning of our common life, to awaken a nonviolent, compassionate
response. In waking up to this
consciousness, we find ourselves on the inside of God’s relentless love,
empowered for service and participating already in a new creation, the kingdom
of God, that builds social solidarity on the basis of compassion rather than
rivalry.
Jesus, in his walk toward death, shows us that the only bases
for authentic human community is sacrificial love, self-giving service; not the
sacrifice of others. What is more, Jesus
willingly becomes the Other whom we sacrifice, so that we might learn that our
salvation lies in a change of consciousness that allows us to receive the Other
as sister and brother, rather than as rival or scapegoat.
Which brings me back to the women of Jerusalem following
Jesus as he walks toward his death. They
share the consciousness of Jesus. They
are vulnerable to their own suffering and that of others, not denying it or
displacing it. They bear witness
publicly to the innocence of the victim until the end – and beyond. They refuse to be caught up in the frenzy of
the lynch mob, seeking relief from the anxieties of life in the projection of
guilt on to innocent victims. In their
refusal, the church is born, and the hope of the world is kindled anew – not
with the dry wood of violent sacrifices, but with the green wood of compassion.
We are living through a season in which the frenzy of the
lynch mob, the kindling of dry wood, is a very present temptation. It is easy to be seduced by simple solutions,
projecting all our anxieties on to some new – or old – scapegoats, and blaming
them for all our problems. Expel the
immigrants, exclude the Muslims, beat up and arrest the Black Lives Matter
protestors, and all our troubles will disappear! There is nothing new about this scapegoating
mechanism. It is as old as the passion
narrative, the oldest story in the book, going all the way back to Cain slaying
his brother Abel. Why do we continue to
believe that setting brother against brother is the answer?
It isn’t easy to go against the grain of what passes for
normalcy and social conformity. Even
Peter denied Jesus when confronted with the pressure of the lynch mob, the
ecstasy of sacrificial violence. It isn’t
easy to accept the vocation of the prophet, marching into the capital city to
nonviolently protest the hidden, but real daily violence of poverty,
inequality, and ecocide. It takes real
courage and faithfulness to God to march with the women of Jerusalem behind
Jesus, fully in touch with the world’s sorrow, trusting that it is possible to
experience real human communion without scapegoats.
Yet that is where we are called to be, in the space between
corrupt authorities and violent mobs: unyielding in our commitment to building
bridges rather than walls, healing victims rather than sacrificing them,
putting the common good above private gain.
When we occupy this space, we discover that God is no longer “out there;”
or even “in here.” Rather, we are all –
everyone of us – on the inside of God and God’s project of reconciling the world. When we live and worship like green wood, we
discover that Easter already is here, even as we follow Jesus to the cross.
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