Sermon:
April 6, 2003
Morning Services

Scripture:
John 18:28-32       
John 19:8-12

Thankfully, there are very few of them. But among the sickest people I know are the ones who believe that, in some unimaginable way, they are to blame for everything. Twenty years ago, operating under the delusion that I was qualified to try my hand at therapy, I counseled one such troubled soul. But I had to be very careful what I told her, even when we were making small talk. That’s because she found a way to take responsibility for every bad thing that happened. If I had a flat tire on my way to church, it was somehow her fault. I mean, if I hadn’t had to hurry to keep my appointment, I might have avoided the nail….that punctured the tire….that disabled the car….that lightened my wallet….that troubled my soul. Well, you get the picture. 

I think she is still alive somewhere, where I hope she lives a brighter life in a brighter landscape. I would hate to have her think she was the cause of the war in Baghdad, the ice on the power lines, the frog in my throat, or the utter ineptitude of the Tigers. Though she could be….theoretically. But I doubt it. 

What makes her interesting is that she stands as a singular counterpoint to a world filled with people who are to blame for nothing. Things are never their fault. No way. No how. It is an attitude learned early in life. Some kids survive the fourth grade by learning how to dodge the gym ball. But all kids survive life by learning how to dodge the blame ball. 

Couldn’t have been me. 
Must have been him.
Although it could have been her.
Or, quite possibly, them.
As for me, didn’t see it.
Didn’t do it.
Can’t believe it.
Know nothing about it.
Left before it.
Arrived after it.
But if I hear anything, I’ll let you know.

Mother goes out to shop, leaving the living room ready for the arrival of the photographer from House Beautiful. Three kids remain at home reading library books….doing algebra homework….translating the parables of Jesus from the original Greek. Mother comes back to find the living room in a shambles….tables upturned….milk upchucked….favorite lamp (a prized possession of the family for three generations) shattered and scattered. All three kids are reading the same books….doing the same homework….translating the same parables from the original Greek. Nobody saw anything. 

Which, of course, won’t fly. So under vigorous maternal interrogation, we move from blame denied to blame deflected. I am talking about that artful two-step that takes teenagers from “I didn’t do it” to “But I’ll tell you who did.” 

So who killed Jesus? Let’s play the blame game. Which, on the surface, would appear to be relatively easy, given that the scriptures we read and the hymns we sing provide plenty of blame to go around. 

If you read the Apostles’ Creed (as we do every fourth Sunday), you get your villain served on a silver platter. I mean, Jesus probably lived about 33 years. But if you read the creed, you learn nothing about the life of Jesus between birthing day and dying day….not one single solitary thing about the 12,045 days in between….except that he “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” Think about it. How does the creed go? 

I believe in God the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
And in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord,
      who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
      born of the Virgin Mary,
      suffered under Pontius Pilate,
      was crucified, dead and buried.

And Pilate makes a good villain. That’s because Pilate was Roman. Better yet, Pilate was (in that region) the buck-stops-here Roman. As crucifixion went, only he could give the order. Only he could do the deed. Which is why the name “Pilate” (along with the name “Herod”) survives wherever Christians gather in small groups to whisper about the mortal enemies of the faith. 

Which works, if you junk John’s gospel. For John portrays Pilate more than a little sympathetically. In John’s treatment, Pilate is portrayed as a ruler who three times tries to figure a way to keep from doing it (nailing up our Lord, I mean), and three times allows himself to be backed into a corner by others demanding the death penalty. If you read John with the fertile imagination of a preacher, you can almost turn Pilate into the thirteenth disciple (“procurator” to “admirer” in a few hours’ time). 

Still, Pilate had the power to order it….apparently did order it….or (at least) chickened out on any instinct he may have had to stop it. So let’s blame him. 

Except, his wasn’t the hands-on crime. There were soldiers who readied the scene, even as they readied the victim…..readying him to the point of bloodying him. Scripture suggests that they made a pretty good mess of Jesus before they nailed him. Which means that while many of them had whips, at least one of them had a hammer. So, in a technical sense, I suppose we should blame the guy with the hammer. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that he was “only doing his job.” But the Nuremberg trials taught us that “merely doing one’s job” constitutes neither defense nor exoneration when it comes to crimes against humanity. 

But we don’t know his name. The soldier’s name, I mean. And for the blame game to work, you really need a name. Which, I suppose, also absolves the mob from blame, even though without their shouting there might never have been a hanging. What mob, you ask? Well, how else do you describe all those people in the square shouting things to Pilate like: 

Crucify him.

We have no king but Caesar.

If you let this man go, you are not Caesar’s friend.

Given a choice between a pardon for Jesus and a pardon for Barabas, we’ll take Barabas.           

That being a Jewish mob, of course….talking to Pilate (a Roman) about Jesus (a Jew). And I could speculate out loud….as I have in sermons and classes for 38 years….as to why the Jews should turn on one of their own (or why the gospels, especially John’s gospel, should spin the story so as to make it appear that the Jews turned on one of their own). But my speculation will not wipe out two thousand years of history which, truth be told, has been harsh on the Jews….blaming them for “complicity” in the crucifixion of Jesus (that’s the milder form of the accusation), while charging them with “Deicide,” the murder of God (in a wilder form of the accusation). 

A bit of this has softened in our time. But only in our time. It was in 1962 that Pope John XXIII convened Vatican Council II, which gave us a milestone declaration known as Nostra Aetate (literally, “in our time”). Wherein can be found these words: 

Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred Synod wishes to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit of brotherly dialogues. Jews should not be presented as having been repudiated or cursed by God, as if such abuse followed from the Holy Scriptures.

Then, zeroing in on the centuries-old charge of Deicide, the Council said: 

True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ. Still, what happened in His passion cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living without distinction, nor can it be held against the Jews of today.

Then the pope removed the cruel words perfidis Judaeis….perfidious Jews….from the Good Friday liturgy. But it was not until October 28, 1965 that the Council proclaimed that it was considered “anti-Semitism” to say that the Jews killed Jesus. My friends, that was just 37 years ago. 

So, with all of that softened, who’s left to blame? We can’t allow this crime to go unsolved, can we? Fortunately, there are other options to consider. Pope John left us an out when he said we should not blame the death of Jesus “on all the Jews then living”….implying that there was some papal wriggle room to single out a few Jews then living. By name, even. 

Start with Annas, who was the Jew to whom Jesus was taken following his arrest in the Garden in Gethsemane. I suppose Annas could have said: “Hey guys, cool it. It’s late. I’m tired. This is not worth considering now.” But Annas did none of those things. Instead, he went and woke up his son-in-law (his daughter’s husband). You know the guy I mean. His name was Caiaphas. 

Now there are two things you should know about Caiaphas. First, he was a politically-powerful Jew (serving that year as “high priest” of the Jewish Temple). One imagines that he prospered in that position to whatever degree he learned to “play nice” (as they say) with the Romans. Second, Caiaphas was shrewd. You remember his earlier advice to a group of concerned Jews who came to him, fearing a Roman backlash if Jesus didn’t learn to keep his mouth shut. Concerning those fears, Caiaphas said: “Don’t you guys know that it is expedient for one man to die, rather than a whole bunch of men die?” But neither Annas nor Caiaphas went anywhere near the Antonio Fortress on Friday morning. Which was where Pilate was. Meaning that they just shipped Jesus up the line (as it were), effectively covering themselves with Teflon so that little, if any, of the blame would stick. 

I know you’re just dying to ask about Judas. Well, he was the betrayer. In the earliest surviving picture of the crucifixion we have…..a carved ivory tablet from northern Italy made between 420-430 AD….there are five figures, all of them short and stocky. Their faces have been largely rubbed away by time. But from right to left, they appear to be a Roman soldier, Christ on the cross, John (the beloved disciple), Mary (the mother of Jesus), and right behind Mary (his limp hand brushing her elbow), Judas, hanging from a tree with money scattered on the ground beneath his feet. But in subsequent crucifixion art, Judas seldom appears, suggesting that long before you and I came along, the church relegated Judas to the role of a “bit player” in the drama. 

Which leaves God as a suspect, I suppose. Or us. Tell a child that God loved the world so much that he sent his only Son, because someone needed to die in order to pay for all the bad things we have done….and before you get one step further, the child will think (although the child may not say): “Wait a minute. You mean that God killed his own son? Why would God do a thing like that? What kind of a father is he, anyway? You wouldn’t kill me, would you, Daddy?” 

And as to blaming the death of Jesus on us, there are many who have considered it, along with several who have preached it. Verse two of a powerful Methodist hymn reads: 

Who was the guilty?
Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus hath undone thee.
‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee,
I crucified thee.

To which you might say: “Hey, Ritter, don’t go blaming me. I never got anywhere near Jesus.” Which may be just the point. But few of you expect to be jailed for it. 

The fact remains, Jesus could have saved his own life. More than once. He could have listened to Peter at Caesarea Philippi when Peter recoiled at the thought of Jesus heading for an almost certain death in Jerusalem. He could have let Peter do a little more sword-work in the Garden of Gethsemane. He could have altogether avoided Jerusalem….stopped teaching (if he insisted on going)….muted his preaching….kept his hands in his pockets in the Temple….taken the back way out of the garden….blended into Jerusalem’s woodwork like thousands of other visiting Galileans….maybe even exercised whatever privilege might have been his “due” as God’s chosen one. There were a lot of ways Jesus could have stayed alive for another day. 

It was not that he could not save himself, but that he would not. Go back and read the entirety of the Passion narratives…..four authors’ worth of narrative….and see if you don’t find Jesus’ final word to be: “No one takes my life from me, so much as I give it up.” Meaning that, at the end of the day, the cross was something Jesus volunteered for. 

But why? Really now, why? I think the answer has something to do with rebuilding a bridge over the chasm….the gulch….the ditch….the great divide (you pick the word)….that had come between God and God’s children. Earlier in the service, we sang verses one and three of Charles Wesley’s great Passion hymn, “O Love Divine, What Hast Thou Done.” We did not sing verse two, which begins: 

Is crucified for me and you
To bring us rebels back to God.

Wesley’s original version read: “To bring us rebels near to God.” Which suggests the “bridge” I was talking about earlier. And there are at least five theories on how Jesus’ death builds that bridge. They are the theories of Atonement. All of them have roots in the scriptures. All of them are reflected in much-loved hymns. Individually, each is intellectually interesting. Collectively, they are logically contradictory. None of them solves the mystery in totality. I could spend an hour and walk you through all five of them. When I finished, you would be impressed with the information you received. But you would forget much of it 24 hours later. So for now, I’ll invite you to live your way into Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderful lines: 

Whose will put Jesus on the cross? God knows. But there is a distinct possibility that it was Jesus’ own magnificent will….by which Jesus offered himself for us once, and offers himself for us still. Not to satisfy some colossal Bookkeeper in the sky, but to leave no doubt about his feeling for us then, or God’s feeling for us always.

In a world where you and I figure we have done something noble and monumental by simply agreeing to meet someone half way, the cross is the church’s visual reminder of that rarest of all loves….a love that will go all the way. 

I hear a lot of glib talk about “unconditional love.” But I don’t see much. Then again, I do not expect to see much….at least on the level of mere humanness. 

• Parents love their children. But I have seen parents change the locks on their doors, so as to deny their children further access to the home in which those children were raised. And, in some cases, they were right to do so.

• Spouses love each other. But I have seen spouses serve papers on each other, pursuant to seeking judgments against each other, effectively “assundering” that which God hath joined together. And, in some cases, they were right to do so.

• Churches love their pastors. But I have seen churches say to bishops: “This pastor can do no mighty work here. So we are asking you to have him removed.” And in some cases, they were right to do so.

Every relationship is potentially breakable. All love is subject to limits and conditions. Far more than I have earned or deserved, I have been loved by many. But I live under no illusions. I know I could act in such a way….over such a time….so as to lead all who love me to dump me (and distance themselves from me). Even you. Even Julie. Even Kris. Though I pray not. 

Usually, when relationships have been severed amidst great pain, anger and recrimination, we are opposed to even the slightest hint of reconstruction. 

• Invite her to Christmas dinner, after what she did?
        Over my dead body.
  
• Invite him to walk my daughter down the aisle, after what he did?
        Over my dead body.
  
• Invite them to participate in the group picture, the team banquet, the church’s anniversary celebration, after what they did?
        Over my dead body.

When the world says “Over my dead body,” it means: “No Way.” 

When Jesus says “Over my dead body,” it means “This Way.”

Note: While I have fashioned my “theology of the cross” from the narratives from all four gospels, it should be obvious that this sermon draws heavily on material unique to John’s gospel. Many have taken John’s whitewashed portrayal of Pontius Pilate and added a few more layers of empathy in their sermons. Perhaps the most fascinating treatment of Pilate was that offered by Christianity’s literary giant, Frederick Buechner. But the mention of Pilate in the Apostles’ Creed (contrasted with the absence of virtually any other material pertaining to the life of Jesus) suggests that early Christendom may have judged Pilate more harshly than John did. Taken alone, this is an interesting subject to debate. As is the guilt of Judas, although I passed by that question rather quickly. 

Barbara Brown Taylor’s observations….which are always fascinating….can be found in a book of essays and meditations on the Passion entitled: God in Pain. 

For a short primer on Atonement theory, one might find Paul Alan Laughlin’s treatment interesting. Look for it in a helpful volume entitled Remedial Christianity: What Every Believer Should Know About the Faith, But Probably Doesn’t. It makes for a lot easier reading than Gustav Aulen’s Christus Victor. More readily available, too. 

As concerns the position of Roman Catholicism, vis-á-vis the guilt of the Jews, I am indebted to a superb scholar and friend, Dr. John Rick, for researching what I knew to be true, but couldn’t lay my hands on.