The Passion – Rev. David Mundy
Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 26:14-27:11-54
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What a cast of characters in our extended gospel reading for this day!
Some of them are well down in the credits with titles such as “elders,” and
“servant girl,” “centurion” and “bandit.” Others get name credit such as
Barabbas and Joseph of Arimathea, even though we don’t learn much about them.
Still others have much more
important roles including disciples Peter and Judas, along with Mary Magdalene. This drama has been around
for so long that we have grown familiar with these characters, both from the
gospels and from centuries of legend.
Tonight the British Broadcasting System will begin a four-part dramatic
television series which will take viewers through the last days of Jesus’ life
in what it hopes will be a fresh and illuminating way. The culmination of the
series will be next Sunday, which of course is Easter, and it will celebrate
the resurrection.
This Passion, as it is called, is an ambitious project for a
public broadcaster – it’s hard to imagine that our CBC would attempt it
– and we’re told that it will be quite different from Mel Gibson’s very
successful and excessively violent The Passion of the Christ.
The first three episodes will be built around three of the key figures
whose names we have heard so often in relation to the last days of Jesus’ life.
While we can’t watch the BBC series –at least not yet - it seems to me that on
this Sunday of both palms and passion we might consider these three characters
in our great Christian drama as well.
The most significant of course is Jesus of Nazareth, the peasant from
Galilee whose message of a new and peaceful way for the world becomes such a
threat to those in power that he is executed as a criminal on the cross of
Golgotha. We will come back to Jesus.
So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing,
but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before
the crowd saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves .
. . ”
One of the others is Pontius Pilate,
the Roman governor of the minor but troublesome region called Palestine.
For much of the twentieth century a small group of scholars insisted that
Pilate never existed, that he was a literary invention of the gospel writers.
Then a stone tablet was found during an archeological dig which verifies that
Pilate was a flesh-and-blood human being who did rule during the time of
Jesus.
While Pilate was not the Emperor or Caesar of the Roman Empire, he was
expected to keep the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, in a land with a reputation
of being difficult to govern. Too much religious fervour and too many
insurrectionists. Judas may have been one of the Zealots who wanted to
overthrow the government. It sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it?
Even though we could come away with the impression that Pilate didn’t
really want Jesus to die, all the evidence suggests that he was ruthless and
would do anything to protect his own interests and those of the empire.
In the second half of the twentieth century we stopped speaking of
empires, but we replaced that term with “superpower.” With the demise of the
Soviet Union the world was left with one superpower, our neighbour to the
south. Many of us have been watching with great interest as the most powerful
nation in the history of this planet chooses leaders for the political parties
as an election approaches. One of the three candidates who remain in this
gruelling process will become the next president of the United States, with
greater influence than any Roman emperor or king or queen ever had.
You may have noticed that the candidates avoid speaking about the mess
in Iraq, yet in the past couple of weeks the debate has been centred around who
would be able to best answer the crisis phone call at three o’clock in the
morning. In other words, the real “push-comes-to-shove” role of the president
is what he or she might do as Commander-in–Chief during a crisis, the crisis of
war, rather than the important business of governing during peace. So often it
appears that the Pax Americana is the peace which is maintained through
military power.
In our Christian drama Pontius Pilate represents the way of military
might which often appears to be the only solution to the problems of humanity.
In the twenty-first century that perception may exist more strongly than ever.
Then those who had seized Jesus led him to
Caiaphas the high priest . . . When morning came, all the chief priests and the
elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death . . .
The second episode of the B.B.C. Passion will look at Jesus’ world
through the eyes of the high priest of the temple, whose name was Caiaphas. We
do know that Caiaphas was a real person who was in the role of high priest.
About twenty years ago an ossuary, a bone box with human remains inside was
discovered by archeologists just outside Jerusalem with this priest’s name
inscribed on it and it is considered to be genuine.
Caiaphas had a demanding role as
a religious leader who had to appease the faithful and at the same time work in
collaboration with the powers of occupation. It was a delicate balancing act
with both groups showing little patience. The high priest was supposed to be
appointed for life but the Romans didn’t abide by this tradition. Herod, the
other Roman ruler whose name we know well, installed and deposed seven
different high priests during his 33-year reign, so there was no job security.
When Caiaphas says in the gospels that it is better for one man to die than for
the whole nation to be destroyed, it is a pragmatic and realistic statement.
In every age religion, including the Christian religion, gets its hands
dirty because it lives in a grimy world of politics and economics and
power. It would be foolish to think that
this was not a reality and there are plenty of examples. During the Second
World War the Roman Catholic church turned a blind eye to some of the
atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime.
But even here in supposedly benign Canada with its justice-seeking
United Church there is evidence of grave injustice from a time when governments
and churches collaborated to create a residential school system for native
children. If it was suggested today that Native children, or any group of children,
be forcibly removed from their families, often without notice, and taken to
schools hundreds of kilometres away we would be horrified. If a plan was
revealed to force immigrant children to
give up their language of origin and abandon their customs on pain of physical
and psychological punishment we would be shocked. Yet this is what happened in
our country, “for their own good” we assumed.
Our United Church is currently involved in a countrywide tour of
Aboriginal and church leaders from several denominations who are listening to
the stories of those whose lives were affected by the residential schools. As a
denomination we have apologized and paid millions of dollars to those affected,
but these are only steps toward mending what was broken.
In our drama Caiaphas serves as the reminder that religion can be
co-opted to do what may seem like the right things for the most practical and
yet destructive reasons. If we think back to the beginning of Lent, Jesus is
tempted in the wilderness to do just this and yet he resists the temptations to
abuse political and religious power.
In their book called The Last Week Marcus Borg and John Dominic
Crossan speak of the domination systems that politics and religion represent,
the “business as usual” way of living which comes to be understood as normal.
When we live in the midst of these systems, it is hard to imagine what the
alternatives might be.
Which brings us back to Jesus.
Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the
Jews?” Jesus said to him, “You have said so.”
It couldn’t have been a satisfactory answer from Pilate’s perspective
but it is clear that both he and Caiaphas knew full well the threat that Jesus
represented. Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem is deeply critical of the political and
religious status quo and so is everything else that happens in this week. When
we speak of the passion of Jesus or the passion of the Christ, we are referring
to the emotionally and spiritually challenging days which lead up to and
include his crucifixion. From the procession of palms to his last hours Jesus
is in the midst of the crowds who struggle to understand who he is and what he
represents. Jesus hears the adulation of crowds today and their derision on
Good Friday. During this week Jesus will express his passionate anger and
tenderness and sorrow in the midst of the numbness of the other forms of power
which this world worships as idols.
Today and throughout this week we look upon this peasant from a
backwater of the empire and decide he is
the glue of the universe. We hear Jesus offer a new edict which says
that we are to love one another as God loves us. We see Jesus ride the donkey
into Jerusalem and stumble his way toward Golgotha with the cross on his
wounded shoulders and realize that he is the
true power of his nation and every nation since then. The biblical
scholar Walter Brueggemann claims that God and Jesus issue their own press
release that says:
The newly ascended power has decreed that there
is more than enough, and greed is inappropriate in this world of God’s
generosity.
Here is a new act of legislation of the government of God that say,
Perfect love casts out hate, that we are not
free for vengeance but must leave such matters to the wise Father.
Here is an edict from the government that says,
Do not fear for I am with you and the world
will hold.
Today we are encouraged once again to decide who we will follow. We can
all pray that we are just crazy enough and passionate enough to join Jesus once
again wherever that may take us. As we leave worship this morning we can live
the drama of Christ’s Passion in the year 2008.
There is another reading from the New Testament for this day, a hymn of
the early church found in the letter to the church in Philippi which says:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—— even death on a cross.