Sometimes we can become immune to the horrors of evil. Although we’re in the Easter season, the gospel passage takes us back to Jesus’ farewell discourse, as he anticipates the death he will suffer. We know this story, and like, to a lesser extent, the stoning of Stephen, it’s a story that is so familiar to us that it starts to lose its horror. And yet they are both stories of unthinkable violence and cruelty. We can make Easter very tasteful. But Easter is not about beautiful liturgy. Easter is about Jesus covered in blood and bruises and spit and condemned to a death that is as degrading and humiliating and disgusting as it possibly can be. And I don't imagine that stoning someone to death would be easy either, especially a healthy young man like Stephen. He wouldn’t have died after a few rocks and a few bottles. This kind of cruelty takes effort; it’s an act of will.

The same is true today. Sometimes the atrocities of violence in the world start to seem commonplace. News stories lose their edge. We pray for peace and reconciliation without stopping to cosider the sheer brutality of conflict. It’s the end of Christian Aid Week and the stories featured are ones of extreme and horrific violence. 2 million people lost their lives in the 40-year conflict in South Sudan. Of families and individuals forced to hide in the bush from military ambush as they tried to return to their home in South Sudan, after fleeing to North Sudan during the conflict. Of being shot at, of hiding in an unforgiving landscape, drinking only stagnant water, seeing terrible things. Of Columbian communities scarred by years and years of fighting; of memories of bodies floating down the river, and still subject to the fear of being displaced from their land. Just imagine for a moment how frightening it would be to leave your home in a hurry, unable to take anything with you, knowing that soldiers were all around. Of children like Edile, whose story I told to the children, subject to post-traumatic stress disorders after sometimes seeing their parents being killed. Of Iraqi families, having lived through genocidal tribal destruction in the 1980s which was complete that they were unable to identify individual homes when they returned to their communities.  These are the realities of conflict.

But sometimes there are stories that interrupt the cycle of conflict. They speak of different possibilities. They say that the violence ends here.

Just as we can become immune to the realities of violence, so we can become immune to the reality of good. The CAW stories tell of south Sudanese families supporting one another, of people risking their own lives to help returnees negotiate safe passage from north Sudan. Of the creation of humanitarian zones in Colombia, where displaced families can gather and feel protected from further displacement. Of Iraqi communities rebuilding themselves, building reservoirs and greenhouses, and lobbying their local government for essential services such as a tarmac road and electricity.  

These are stories of people and communities choosing the break the cycles of violence that we can so easily become overfamiliar with , and choose to build futures of hope, confidence and entrepreurenial spirit. One lady, Anoon, says ‘We can now begin to forget.’

This echoes the story of Jesus that tells us that all the hatred and fear and conflict in the world do not have to have the last word. In Jesus we see an end to the cycles of violence that put him to death. He does not retaliate to the hatred he encounters by perpetuating it, but instead absorbs us and offers peace and forgiveness to those who have put him to death.

This is entirely counter to human nature. In the gospel reading, Jesus speaks of the works that he does and the even greater works that will follow by those who believe in his way. Sometimes when we look for miracles, for great works that demonstrate Christ’s life and presence, we look for something very dramatic. And yet choosing to live peaceably, to put an end to violence is both great and incredible.

Jesus is a peacemaker. Although he warns of troubles ahead, he speaks peace and reassurance. And Jesus created peace by giving up his life. He receives our hatred and our violence and does not return it. This is totally counter to the way we usually deal with human anxiety, where blood has to be shed. Someone has to be killed. Someone has to be blamed, accused, attacked, tortured or imprisoned, or there has to be capital punishment. We think it is our job to destroy the evil element. It creates religions of exclusion and violence. It creates holocaust, a word that chillingly means sacrifice.

There are two ways of understanding Easter. One is the sin has to be balanced, or paid for, with more pain. An angry God needs placating, needs a sacrifice. The other is through forgiveness. In showing that the violence ends here, in offering peace and forgiveness Jesus resets the engine.

This threatened to put a great deal of established religion out of business. His life, his death and his resurrection is in opposition to the retributive ethic of an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth. He takes up an alternative tradition: ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice’, he repeats from the book of Hosea. With the wounds of all the cruelty of the world in his hands he offers his disciples peace.

But it’s not a peace that we necessarily want. It’s much easier to perpetuate cycles of violence than to break them. Throughout his life the grace that Jesus has offered has produced scandalous unfairness in human terms. We have the story of the labourers who all get paid the same no matter when they show up for work. But when we get to forgiveness, the implications get far harder, far more revolting. If the love really never stops, if God really does long for every lost soul, then in principle God regards as forgivable a whole load of stuff we really don’t want forgiven thank you very much. People who use airliners to murder thousands of office workers. People who abduct 200 Nigerian schoolgirls. People who torture children for their own gratification. And God is apparently ready to rush in there and give them all a great big hug. We don’t want that. We want justice, if not in this world, in the next. We want God’s niceness reserved for deserving cases, like, for example, us, and reliable process of judgment put in place to ensure that the child-murderers are ripped apart with red hot tongs.

And so the cross, God’s spanner in the works of pain, the interruption by God to the cycle of human violence, can end up simply as an excuse for more pain, more violence. Perhaps our understanding of the cross depends on whether we are willing to understand the people in the Easter story – the people on the street and the soldiers, Pilate and the governors and all those who mock and bruise and spit on Jesus -- are just the front row of a crowd that also contains us. If we let ourselves see that the story is the story of everyone’s culpability (and consequently everyone’s redemption), then we know that those who happen to be up at the front of the human crowd are not acting in some exceptionally wicked way: they are just behaving like people. It’s hard to accept our own destructiveness at the best of times, and the story raises the stakes to a dreadful level, offering us a bleeding image, written on a human body, of what it means for us and the world to go on as we usually do.

The cross shows us a pattern of being that is about refusing to hate or humiliate because that would be to continue the same pattern and reciprocate the violence. The cross is about how to stand against hate without becoming a part of the hate.

And is that not a fundamental question for all of us? How do we oppose the evil, the hurts, the betrayals, the abandonments, the disappointments in our lives, the people who let us down, the people who turn against us, the people who misrepresent us, who tell lies about us? How do we stand against them in a way that we do not become a mirror image of the same thing?

The peace that Jesus offers is far from a glib or easy peace, but it is the way of God: ‘I am the way and the truth and the life.’ Living the way of Jesus is living a path of transformation, of becoming holy, of knowing our dignity as God’s people to empower us to new ways of being and acting in the world. I worked at CA for nearly seven years, and when I started working there I thought, in very arrogant language of ‘giving something back’, of ‘contributing’, of ‘making a difference.’ I can honestly say that I received far more than I gave. Stories like the ones of CAW, of choosing to hope, or choosing to forgive, of choosing to build new lives, of choosing to end the cycles of violence are, for me, deeply inspiring models of holiness, offering us a different way of living.

In a minute we will share bread and wine, and be joined to the act by which forgiveness and transformation came. We will eat the end of cruelty and shame. We will eat amnesty for whatever our own brand of hatred and violence we have brought to the dinner table. We will eat grace. And as we do that, perhaps we can allow ourselves to give thanks for the places where that grace is so visible in the world. Perhaps we can allow ourselves to be transformed by it.

Notes

I have continued to do some writing in a voluntary capacity for Christian Aid, and some of this sermon is taken from a piece I wrote for their resources for Christian Aid Week (https://www.christianaid.org.uk/secure/CAW14OrderResourcesForm.aspx -- see sermon notes for 18 May)

This also uses materials from:
Fraser, G. (2007), Christianity with Attitude, London: Canterbury Press (pp16-18)

Rohr, R. (2008), Scripture as Spirituality, Cincinnati: St Anthony Messenger Press (pp193-195)

Spufford, F. (2012), Unapologetic, London: Faber & faber (pp173, 179 and 201)