29th Sunday 1997 #2

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Twenty Ninethh Sunday, 1997 ( #2)

To be the Slave of All

The three readings today, from three fairly distinctively different angles, all have to do with the Cross. As I have said a number of times, I think the Cross is one of those maters which none of the Christian churches has done very well by. We keep trying to domesticate it or render it innocuous in one way or another. So, I think it is useful to try to elaborate further on the Cross. This passage from Mark of course is sort of a disguised reference to the Cross that is based on this notion of "drinking the cup" or being "baptized". These are both Jewish ways of saying accepting one's destiny, one's future, one's fate, so to speak; the thing that inevitably comes out of the way you live, the consequences of your life, which for Mark of course is the Cross.

But before we even talk about it, it is really important to remember that the Cross was an almost unimaginable difficulty for this early Jesus movement. It was a hard sell, to put it mildly. Crucifixion was a form of execution that the Romans took from the Persians and it was the most barbaric form of execution they knew. For example, a Roman citizen could not be crucified because it was a far too unworthy and undignified way to die. Thus, crucifixion was reserved for the absolutely lowest and most awful of criminals. So, this is what we have to keep in mind when we say, "This man, whom the Romans crucified, is the saviour of the world, he is the Messiah". This is a very difficult situation. For instance, Paul, in the Letter to the Romans, calls it a scandal, which is the Greek word for stumbling block, an obstacle, a positive obstacle with regard to belief in Jesus. We see all kinds of evidence in the New Testament of these early Jesus followers scurrying about trying to make sense of the Cross, trying to legitimize this huge absurdity existing out there which they had to somehow make comprehensible. Thus, we see all sorts of efforts being made to do this. They say, "It was the will of God", or "Jesus knew it was coming", and one of the really clever things that they did was to take this passage that was just read from Isaiah and apply it to Jesus.

The second part of the Book of Isaiah contains four poems. They are called the "Servant of Yahweh" poems. They are really odd because they all talk about this person who is going to be absolutely faithful to God, and in the course of being faithful to God he is going to suffer a great deal. The result of that person's suffering is going to be some kind of benefit for other people. Now Isaiah, - or whoever wrote this, he is called Second Isaiah, a disciple of Isaiah - had not a clue about Jesus. We do not know who he was talking about six-hundred years before Jesus arrived on the scene. However, we know that one of the extraordinarily ingenious things that the early Jesus followers did was to take those as a way of making sense of Jesus. This interpretation enabled them to speak of Jesus as the Messiah, an individual who is going to go through all this suffering and somehow out of all of that suffering everybody is going to benefit. The Jews adopted this interpretation because they did not know how to present a Messiah figure who died in such a horrible manner. They thought the Messiah was going to be a political leader, or a priestly leader, or a prophetic leader, but he was certainly not going to be somebody executed in this totally undignified way by a group of pagan, Roman foreigners. So, I would like to take a cue from this business of Isaiah, and from the fact that the early Jesus movement very quickly took it up, and examine a phrase that has become a kind of Christian catch phrase: "Jesus died for our sins".

What does it mean to say that Jesus died for our sins? Is that just some kind of statement hanging out there? We know that the Romans crucified thousands of Jews. Why is the death of this Jew so important? Why does that have anything to do with me? In other words, what are we saying when we make the claim that Jesus died for our sins? Well, it is useful to ask, "Why did Jesus die?", to begin with. This is something of an oversimplification, but not much: Jesus died because he told the truth all the time, which is always a dangerous and hazardous enterprise. Or, to expand on that, Jesus lived the truth in that he accepted every human being in his society equally. In other words, he saw the truth of their humanity, whether they were lepers, or women, or pagans, or ritually impure people, or sinners, or the poor, or the rich. It did not make any difference to him. He was able somehow to sift through all these extraneous aspects and see people in their own humanity - - he saw them as real people, instead of instances of a group or a category, particularly one that you had to avoid. And that of course is dangerous and therefore they had to get rid of him because society cannot function with people like that, because they are disruptive.

Our century is extraordinary for having many such people. For example, Ghandi believed Hindus and Moslems ought to live together. Martin Luther King believed black people and white people, rich people and poor people, ought to live together. Malcolm X, by the end of his life, believed black Moslems should be fellows with every other kind of human being. But all of these beliefs are what caused the deaths of these individuals. Rabin believed that the Palestinians and the Jews ought to get together. These people were disruptive and the reasoning behind their deaths is very much the same kind of reasoning that led to Jesus' death. So poor Jesus was killed. That ought to be the end of it, except, a large group of people started thinking, "My God, this man was a real human being in the sense that he was much more human than I am, because I am a selfish individual who keeps lying and distinguishing between people and playing favourites". And if I see the way he operated, I begin to see that I am a creep! I am inhuman in the way that I operate my life and this man was fully human because he carried off this enterprise of living the truth and telling the truth all his life. It is only the people who came to see Jesus in that way who said, "Now I see where I was wrong. And this man's life, which has offered me a whole new possible way of being a human being, has saved me from that kind of inhuman form of existence, which I now see as such, as sinful". And of course the Jewish notion of sin is always deformity. According to the Jews, sin is always a form of dehumanization. In other words, to the extent that I sin I basically violate my own humanity. That is what sin is about. We Christians have distorted this notion up and obscured it in all kinds of weird ways. Our tendency to be sexually fixated being one of many. But that is basically what sin is: the distortion of our humanity. And it is only in the light of the living and the dying of this man, above all the dying - - the Cross, that the reality of sin becomes apparent. What was the Cross? The Cross was the point at which Jesus had to continue to live out the truth of his life. Jerusalem is not that far from the desert and Jesus could have fled from his problems when he saw that things were heating up. Or, he could have gone to the authorities and claimed that his actions were a big mistake, that "this was all a big joke that I was playing and that I really did not mean anything that I said about people being equal before God, and that furthermore, I really did not mean the things I said about loving your enemies. As a matter of fact, we really ought to kill those people". No, he did not do that. That is why the Cross is so crucial. That is why Paul will point to the Cross over and over as the very center of his Gospel. And that is why it is a scandal, because it is too difficult for us to live that way. But once we do get bitten by the Jesus-bug, so to speak, once we do look at the image of the life of that man and measure our own against his, once our hearts are touched by him and our vision of who we are and who we can be is changed, then you can see how early Christians writers were so clever. They took on these "Servant of Yahweh" poems from Isaiah and said, "Yes, that fits the picture exactly, that fits the bill perfectly. By his suffering, when I come to know why he suffered, then I am saved from my own inhumanity because I see all these new possibilities for myself, a whole new way of living. I find out what it really is to be fully human by watching the career, of that man being faithful, taking the consequences of his own life even to the end". That is why the Gospel of John puts it in this very strange way: Jesus' dying was the moment of his greatest glory and the greatest glory of Jesus was to be what God intended for us human beings to be - - truth tellers, faithful to ourselves, faithful to each other, and faithful to God. So, we have to go through a kind of complicated process to arrive at what these individuals were intending when they say "Jesus died for our sins", but that is what it means. It is not some kind of cheerful statement - - "Jesus died for our sins" - - that proves that we are all free. No, instead it is me saying, "I believe that that is what defines human life, truly human life, to the extent that I am drawn to live that kind of life I am saved from everything that will make me less human".

Mark puts out another example of what it means to be human because he talks about being the boss at the end. He talks about the rulers of the pagans. The Roman emperors were in fact called benefactors. That was one of their official titles. Saviours, benefactors. Those were both official titles given to the Roman emperors. But what did they do? Who did they save and what kind of benefactors were they? Jesus thought that their ideas were completely wrong. He thought that they were bosses in the normal, repressive way, and said that "If you want to be authority figures you must act in a wholly opposite way". And that is another instance of the Cross.

I am a kind of mini-boss around this place, apart from my academic status. I am the Chaplain so I get a parking space in the reserved section of the King's College parking lot. I also get a large office, more or less strategically located. I get a large salary because I am one of the bosses and I go to all kinds of committee meetings and I am on all kinds of committees, because I am a boss. That is what being the boss means. I can even, although this occurs very rarely, tell people what to do. But Jesus disagreed. He thought that being an authority figure meant "to be the slave of all", and that was really problematic because a slave in the first-century Mediterranean world was the lowest form of life, at everybody's disposal.

So, what are we enjoining, to take this business in the last part of this passage from Mark? Is God into sadomasochism? Feel bad, I want to hit you again. No, what enables people to grow to the point where they say "I must be the slave of everybody" is only one thing in as far as I can figure it out - - if I am really convinced that God loves me than I do not have to depend on all the perks of my position. If I am really convinced I will even give up my parking place, which is no small thing around here. If I really believe that God loves me then I can do this, I can carry it off with a straight face, with integrity. And if I believe in all of this then by Jesus' death my sins are eliminated because I no longer have to demand to be a boss in order to make everybody do what I want them to do, as most authority figures typically do.

That is the Cross, and so although it seems very complicated it is not in the living out of it. In the living out of it, it seems very simple. It is difficult but at least not that hard to understand.

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RT 19/10/97