Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Amen.
My brothers and sisters, here we are at the last Sunday in Lent, a good four weeks into this season of quiet and reflection and we are poised just seven days before Passion Sunday. It seems like only a few weeks ago we were crowded into the greenhouse at Taft Farms on Christmas Eve. Epiphany flew by and now we are getting ready to make the journey to the cross.
It is just at this point that I am particularly grateful to the Psalmist who reminds me this morning that there is no act of piety or sacrifice—not even a super-human effort I can make that will clean my heart. I admit my limits and allow myself to lean in to the Psalmist’s prayer for a pure heart. This is echoed in the reading from Jeremiah which tells us that our hearts are exactly where God wants to write his way for us to live together. We are reassured that this way of living together will always include God’s forgiveness because nothing we can do will ever cause God to abandon us.
The Gospel passage from John today begins on the day that Jesus enters Jerusalem, so liturgically we are getting ahead of ourselves. It is also a few days after Jesus had raised Martha’s and Mary’s brother Lazarus from the dead. The word was out all around Jerusalem and a lot of people were coming to see the resuscitated Lazarus and the man who had raised him. Wouldn’t you want to see something like that? The temple authorities notice this and opine that “the whole world has gone after him!”
Maybe this is what has drawn the Greeks who are in town. “Sir, we want to see Jesus.”
Or maybe they have heard about all the signs that Jesus has been performing and sense that there is some new authority in the Temple that will allow them to be included as gentiles in the worship life there. In fact, we know that after the raising of Lazarus the chief priests and the Pharisees called a council meeting because if Jesus continued to go on performing signs that undermined their authority, there was a strong possibility that the Romans would use the disturbances as an excuse to shut down the Temple and destroy the nation. No, no, they could not risk that crisis again. Caiaphas, the high priest that year, said to the council, “You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” So from that day on, John tells us, they planned to put him to death. A politically expedient death.
It makes me wonder what the Greeks were hoping to see. For you and I know that if you really see Jesus you must be ready to see him take the shameful place of the victim we need to blame.
“Greeks!” I want to shout. “You have no idea that you are asking to see the very worst of human behavior! Can you bear to look at someone who is obviously innocent refuse to fight back just so that we humans can see how we have used death to unite us?”
“Greeks! Can you bear to watch when no one steps in and protects him? Did you not just hear him say that it would be necessary for him to die at the hands of an empire and those who are afraid of it? Were you even listening?”
“Oh, Greeks, can you really bear to watch Jesus to the end of this sickening liturgy of our sacrificial political ethics?”
Two thousand and fifteen years later, we might ask ourselves the same question. Are we ready to see Jesus all the way to the end of another Holy Week? Are we ready to see our victim and confess that we probably would not have stuck with him either?
It is so easy to get pulled in to the powerful dynamics of violence, especially when the blame is conveniently falling on someone we want to believe is responsible for the mess we are in. Furthermore, if we were to end our denial of the truth and dare to speak out, the accusing finger could very well point to us next! In other words, can we really take a look at Jesus without seeing ourselves?
In February this year, the Equal Justice Initative1 released a long-awaited report that documents 73 years of over 3900 lynchings of black Americans in 12 southern states. From 1877 to 1950, lynchings were used to terrorize a population to enforce a racial caste system in the South that kept financial and governmental power in the hands of white people. It fueled a mass migration from the Southern states of over 6 million black Americans from 1915 to 1970. It is hard to read and look at pictures of the public lynchings—innocents, charred and hanging from a tree or a hastily constructed gibbet, their torturous deaths cheered on by families who brought picnic lunches.
In my family archives there is an 8×10 black and white glossy from the late 40’s of a black man hanging from a tree, with my grandfather, a deputy sheriff of Mississippi County, Arkansas, looking at the camera with a large group of men. My impression was that he was the “law” that was called to investigate the lynching. I did not want to gaze at the picture, but its image still haunts my memory.
The more truth I learn about the gruesome decades of racial terror that united and empowered the white-controlled governments of the South, the more deeply I experience the shame of being a bigoted white teenager and the more my heart longs for a way to heal the barely acknowledged wounds and scars of both victims and perpetrators that transcend generations.
Do I really want to see Jesus and see his face in the people I define myself over and against? Can I bear his pain and my shame at the narrowness of my heart?
In 1943 a 16 year old boy was drafted into the German army and survived Operation Gomorrah—the firebombing of Hamburg—only to be sent to the Dutch front where he watched the slaughter of his young friends and after four days of no food, surrendered to an English division. He was sent to a prison camp in Belgium where real night terrors began when the doors were locked and faithful Nazis tortured their countrymen who spoke ill of the Reich. Eventually in 1945 he was sent to Scotland to a labor camp and given a Bible and the kindness of a local family. He did not know when he would be repatriated after the war ended in April. His world was grey and uncertain but he read the gospels over and over and found solace in the suffering of Jesus.
At some point pictures of the concentration camps were posted and the truth of what had happened seeped into his consciousness: “We saw ourselves through the eyes of the Nazi victims. Was this what we had fought for?” He felt a profound shame at having to share in shouldering the disgrace of his own people. He continued to read the gospel accounts and he felt growing within him a conviction about Jesus: this is someone who understood him completely, who was with him in his cry to God and felt the same forsakenness he was living in. “I summoned up the courage to live again, and I was slowly but surely seized by a great hope for the resurrection into God’s ‘wide space where there is no more cramping … I read the story of the passion again and again for preference in the Gospel of Mark.”2
This young man became one of the most influential theologians of our time, Jürgen Moltmann who wrote Theology of Hope in 1964. In his autobiography A Broad Place, he writes that it would be three more years before he would be repatriated to Germany but during those years he and other young prisoners were miraculously provided with an education from the YMCA and British Student Christian Movement who, he wrote, came to meet them with “so much readiness for forgiveness and hospitality.”
During this time, a group of Dutch students also visited Moltmann and his fellow student prisoners. Moltmann writes that he was frightened to meet them because he had fought against them in Holland. When they arrived, they explained that Christ was the bridge upon which they had come to meet him. Without Christ, they said, they would not have been able to speak to him of the horrors they experienced at the hands of the Nazis. Moltmann realized at that moment that he too could step out on that Christ-built bridge to confess the guilt of his people and ask for his heart to be freed. “For me it was an hour of liberation. I could breathe freely again and felt like a human being once more.”3
Perhaps this year, when we travel to the cross with Jesus, all the way through Holy Week, we may discover that seeing Jesus is the only way we can learn to tell the truth about ourselves. Like the young Moltmann, we may come be found, and seen, and discovered by a love so great it is capable of pulling us—yes, even us!—into the broad place of being liberated from the fear of telling the truth about ourselves.
You see, the burden is on Jesus to get us to trust God and relax.4 Jesus’ whole ministry was about creating faith that God loves us. Jesus was sent to let us know that it is not our goodness, or our special efforts to follow a well-structured pathway to life that makes God loves us; it is because he loved us first that we are even able to be good.5
God knows that we have a terrible “identity hunger” that makes us feel safe. He knows that these primitive tribal notions of identity are built over against another which make it difficult for us to reconcile, empathize, and love others.6
God knows the whole world—every human being—needs the resurrecting power of forgiveness from the victim to be able to live again, because there is not one ethnic group anywhere on earth which is not inclined to build its unity at the expense of a social “other.”
Do I want to see Jesus now? Do I want to see the one who opens up a new way of being together by forgiving us and enabling us to forgive others?
Do I want to look at the one who could love me more than I could possibly love myself? The one who could create a new a new heart in me?
I stand with you, brothers and sisters, at the end of Lent, on the brink of Passion Week with this question, trembling, and full of wondering what it might mean to see Jesus this year.
Create in me a clean heart, O God. And renew a right spirit within me. AMEN
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1 http://www.eji.org/lynchinginamerica
2 Moltmann, Jürgen. A Broad Place. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009) trans. Margaret Kohl.
3 ibid, p. 34.
4 Alison, James. Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice (Book 3, “The Difference Jesus Makes”) This concept is developed in Essay 5, part 5: “Turning round the equation: Jesus’ ministry as creating belief for us”) (Glenview: DOERS Publishing, 2013)
5 see Joseph Ratzinger’s comments on the tension between ethics and grace , p. 61-62, Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Doubleday, 2007)
6 Recent scientific inquiry into this human dilemma is reported in the New York Times 3-19-15, in a report by Jeneen Interlandi, “The Empathy Gap: Can Mapping Neural Pathways Help Us Make Friends with Our Enemies?http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/magazine/the-brains-empathy-gap.html?_r=0