Sermons
Sunday 14th September 2014, Holy Cross Day, morning
Numbers 21:4-9; Philippians 2:6-11; John 3:13-17
by Revd Chris Palmer
I don’t know if you heard the news this morning. Overnight the news came in that the Islamic State have murdered British aid worker David Haines. It’s an act so barbaric and stomach churning, so wasteful and vindictive, that we don’t really want to think about it. I know I’d rather switch off the news and not listen to those stories. But in a sense this one murder which feels ‘close’ because he’s British, simply highlights the brutality of the Islamic State more generally: not only the two America journalists whose executions were also well publicised, but countless people from Iraq and Syria in the territory under the Islamic State’s control. Maybe we need to face the one murder that fills our news in order to attend to the brutality of our world and the ubiquity of violence used to keep control.
Because when we think of the cross on which Jesus died, it was a tool of such violent control. Brutal and painful, vengeful and sadistic murder; as well publicised as they were capable of – done publicly for all to see – and used as a means of control. When we think of the Roman empire, we might think of Latin literature or Roman roads or the supposed Pax Romana – Peace of Rome. But the Roman empire was really the brutal suppression of wide territories, the enslavement of defeated peoples, and fear used as a means of control. And crucifixion was a key tool in this enterprise. Used to punish revolutionaries – we might call them terrorists – and slaves who ranaway.
But crucifixion might have ended up a footnote of history, like other cruel and unusual punishments meted out by ancient civilisations, if it weren’t for Jesus. Something happened in the crucifixion of Jesus that caused his followers to seize on his crucifixion as a sign of hope and life; to use the cross as an object of veneration and devotion; to sing ‘the cross shines forth in mystic glow’ and carry the cross in procession. It’s as bizarre as glorifying the electric chair or the gallows. We would ordinarily shrink from such a perversity, just as we shrink from imagining and hearing about the brutal death of David Haines. It’s only the hallowing of time that stops us shrinking from the perversity of exalting the cross.
But I think that the cross of Jesus is powerful because God did not shrink from the cross. That in a sense is the message of the other reading on your sheets, the one we didn’t read. Christ Jesus, though one with God, accepted human living, and in its lowest form as a slave, even to the point of painful death as a criminal. We know from the story of Gethsemane that Jesus didn’t approach death in some kind of sublime serenity – but fearful and in distress. But he didn’t allow his fear and distress to control him; he faced the reality of the world, engaged with it, and became its victim.
And in doing so, he invites us also not to be confined by fear. The two readings we heard contain the rather strange story of Moses putting a bronze snake on a pole in the wilderness. And when the people look at the snake on a pole, they are saved from the snakes that are killing them. It seems to me that the reading somehow asks us to face the reality of our lives, including our fears; to own the true nature of our problems, rather than running away from them. We are good at short term fixes, and self-preserving defences against pain – as when the Israelites repent of their complaining, in order to get out of trouble. But we rarely face the roots of our problems, the structures of sin, that control our society, community, and world.
When St John’s Gospel likens Jesus to the serpent in the wilderness, the cross to the snake stuck on a pole, he is inviting us to face the cross, not as a hallowed or religious symbol, but as a sign of the brutality of our world. And he is inviting us to own our own complicity in the suffering of the world.
This is important. I am convinced that the ways we naturally respond to the death of David Haines, the ways our political leaders will talk about it, will divorce our moments of dishonesty or cruelty from the cruelty we see in his captors. We promote a rhetoric which becomes a defence of our righteousness. Such subtle rhetoric dominates the ways we are accustomed to talking about violence and threats in our world. For instance, why is it that nuclear weapons in the hands of our enemies are ‘weapons of mass destruction’, but in our own hands are ‘nuclear deterrent’? Such language is a way of not owning up to our own part in adding to control-by-fear in our world. We are not looking to the cross and trusting.
Jesus says, ‘whoever believes in me may have eternal life.’ This believing, this trusting, is not merely trusting a good friend; it is trusting our victim. Charles Wesley speaks in one of his hymns about us pursuing Jesus to his death. Recognising that we pursue Jesus to death, that we are like those who shouted crucify, means confessing and repenting of the ways our attitudes, our words, our non-involvement, our hostility add to the suffering of our planet. And when we do so, we recognise in Jesus that our victim is our hope. [1]
This seems to me the key thing about the cross. Brutal suppression arises from the assumption that those we victimise are a threat to us. Jesus was a threat to Rome, to the Temple authorities – what a strange alliance.
And as long as we are in the mindset of victimising those who threaten us, then resurrection is a disaster. You don’t want the person you managed to silence to come back and judge you.
But the resurrection announces that the mechanisms of control through threats and violence are rejected and undone by God. Jesus returns, but not to judge; he says he came not to condemn, but to save. The early church’s preaching was startling given the role of crucifixion in oppression and empire:
- The cross is a source of hope
- Its victim proves triumphant
- Your victim is your hope.
In our western safety, in our use of economic power, our threat of overwhelming force, our complacent politics, our destruction of other people’s environment to support our lavish lifestyle, we are being called by Jesus out of our self-righteous bubble to own our failures, shown to us in Jesus, shown to us in the victims of violence today. And it is our undoing, our owning our part, that will liberate us to love God and live the life of eternity.
Notes
[1] Idea drawn from Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel. DLT, 1982. p5f.
