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| Resisting Empire 2017 |
In preparation for Easter, I tell the Godly Play “Faces of
Easter” stories during our preschool chapel services. Over seven weeks, these stories tell about
the life of Jesus beginning with his birth.
The final part of the story covers Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and
Easter Sunday.
Inevitably when I tell this story, one of the children will
ask, “But why did he have to die?” Four
year-olds know how to cut to the heart of the matter. During this Holy Week, we, too, will grapple
with the question of the meaning of Jesus’ death. It is not an easy question to answer, which
is why we return to it year after year.
I want to share with you how I am coming to think about the
answer, and I want to begin by putting the question slightly differently; “Why
was Jesus willing to die?” not “Why did he have to die?” Jesus didn’t want to
die but he was willing to die. Mark’s
Gospel is clear about that. Jesus
anticipates his arrest and death with great anxiety and grief. He prays for deliverance, and for the willingness
to discern and accept God’s will for him.
Jesus had a choice.
The choice wasn’t about how he would die. It was about how he would live. And he prayed to live in such a way that fear
of death would not constrain his freedom and courage to love as God loves. God’s will for Jesus was the same as it is
for us; not that we should die, but that we should live in the power of
love.
There is a strand of reflection on the meaning of Jesus’
death in Christian tradition which understands it as a kind of metaphysical
transaction between God the Father and God the Son: a sacrifice to restore God’s honor, which had
been dishonored by human sin. This
dishonor was so great that it could only be restored by the sacrifice of the
divine-human Jesus. God’s love for us is
demonstrated by sending His Son to bear the punishment we deserve. Some people may find this to be a helpful
analogy, but I don’t.
Demanding the death of an innocent victim is hardly a
morally inspiring image of divine benevolence.
It makes God complicit in human injustice and violence. In fact, it all too readily serves to justify
our own sacrifice of victims as the price of conventional morality; or, at
least, conventional economics, which is the same thing under empire, then and now.
We call it “collateral damage.”
To the contrary, what makes Jesus’ death meaningful to me is
his refusal to accept the human sacrifice required by empire. It is Jesus’ life that gives meaning to his
death. How was that life lived? In resistance to the forces of empire that
exploited the poor, discarded the vulnerable, and killed those who questioned
the system of sacrificial violence. Jesus
created a movement building community around sharing resources, offering free
healing and open table fellowship to everyone.
He invited people to embrace God’s covenant with Israel, the creation of
a form of humane culture built on justice and mercy that is an alternative to
empire. He called it the kingdom of God,
and announced that it was being realized here and now.
This alternative culture was a threat to the Jewish aristocracy,
as well as to the Roman imperial authorities with whom they collaborated. That threat was crystallized by Jesus’
protest march into Jerusalem, riding on a humble donkey in contrast to the
Roman governor arriving in the City in splendor. Jesus escalated the protest by nonviolently occupying
the Temple precincts, and announcing of the end of the sacrificial system that the
Temple symbolized as the center of power in Israel: part sacred cult, part central bank, and
entirely sold out to the Roman empire.
Such a protest, at a time when the City was filled with millions of
pilgrims to celebrate a festival marking Israel’s liberation from the empire of
Egypt, was just too much for the authorities.
We know how that ended.
The short answer to the question, “Why did Jesus have to die?”
is “Because he resisted empire.” But the
more important question is “Why was he willing to die?” and the answer, I
believe, is that Jesus chose to live in solidarity with the victims of empire
because he loved them as God loves them. Jesus replaced sacrificial violence with
sacrificial love. That is what gives his
life and his death and his resurrection, meaning. It shows us what God is like, and what it
means to be human in God’s image.
The first hearers of Mark’s Gospel were Jewish Christians
who had lived through the terrible sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the
Temple during the Jewish uprising against Rome, some forty years after the crucifixion
of Jesus. As “Christians,” other Jews
rejected them as heretics, and as “Jews” the Romans targeted them as
insurrectionists. They understood
persecution and suffering. They also
could identify with the disciples who deserted Jesus; not all of them had been
brave either. Mark recalls the story of
Jesus to embolden them in their resistance to empire, and to assure them of
forgiveness when they fail to do so.
That is why we tell the story today.
We remember his death so that we might share in his resurrection: the continuation of the imperfect movement Jesus
inspires to build an alternative to empire.
Robin Meyers writes,
The church of Jesus Christ today rides
the horse of empire, but needs to be thrown off. We are altogether too comfortable in this
saddle of death. Illusions about being a
‘Christian nation’ must also be undone.
Evangelicals are correct . . . when they say that the cross is the
center of our faith, but not as the mark of a cosmic bargain – rather of cosmic
resistance, the ultimate symbol of the lengths to which love will go to save us
from ourselves. (Spiritual Defiance: Building A Beloved Community of Resistance, p. 85)
Let us pray.
Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but
first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was
crucified: Mercifully grant that we,
walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life
and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
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