2024-03-25
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
March 24, 2024, Palm/Passion Sunday Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Mark 15:1-39 The Federated Church, UCC
When I was in grade school, I was looking through a microscope one day for a class assignment. A girl in the class noticed that I couldn’t wink well enough to look through the microscope without holding my eye shut. And she mocked me mercilessly for it. I remember feeling totally embarrassed. Several days later, though, she was giving an oral presentation in class, and while she was delivering it, I sat at the back of the classroom with my hand holding my eye shut, and she laughed so hard, she couldn’t finish the report. And in that mutual taunting I hear echoes of scripture: “Then they began their mockery” (Mark 15:18, The Message).
When I was a first-year student in college, my roommate didn’t think much of me. He regularly made fun of me and derisively called me “Twinkie.” And I felt ashamed. And while I’m certainly not Jesus, I remember how Jesus was ridiculed: “Those who passed by derided Jesus” (15:29, NRSV).
A few weeks after I began my seminary education, a number of my classmates and I got wind that the Ku Klux Klan had planned a racist rally in the small town of Scotland, CT. It seemed vital to us that we travel there to witness to another way of being. The local law enforcement offices, fearing violence, had decided to ban all counter-demonstrations, but they decided to allow us seminarians our protest because we pledged to be both silent and non-violent.
The Klan were meeting at a farmhouse on top of a hill. We seminarians lined one side of the road, silently bearing witness to the presence of a loving Christ. As the Klan walked past us on their way into the farm, one of their members spit on the woman standing next to me. And she, understandably, started to cry. It was a disgusting gesture, and my classmate was undone by it. And again I remember what Jesus was subjected to: “They . . . spit on him, and knelt down in mock worship” (15:19, The Message).
Now far be it from us to liken ourselves to Jesus. And it would undoubtedly be a travesty to take away all teasing. There are certainly some here today who thrill to the trash talking of March Madness, or whose stock-in-trade is the uproarious and artful putdown. When it’s clear that the slighting remark is done purely in jest, and is done out of affection, then it may be fun and hilarious. Not uncommonly, though, such talk is done out of spite, and it has a way of slicing and demeaning.
Degrading words and attitudes can have a devastating effect. When I was in college, I had a small role in an avant-garde play. The play’s main character was a character despised by every other character. So one day, to help the whole cast get into the spirit of the play, the director told the cast to treat the main character like dirt during the rehearsal. So we did. We sneered at him, ignored him, scorned him. And even though this was just a technique, and not something any of us really felt, and even though the main character knew this was going on, part way through the rehearsal, he burst into deep sobs and we had to stop the rehearsal. The contempt—even fake contempt—was too much for him to bear.
To hear the story of Jesus’ last day is to be assaulted by a barrage of awful events. There’s not a light or happy moment in the two chapters the gospel of Mark devotes to this story. Nothing good happens to Jesus. In the so-called “passion narratives” of the four gospels, the word “passion” means “to suffer, or endure.” Part of what’s so horrific in this story is that Jesus is almost entirely a victim. He is passive. Everything that happens in this story happens to Jesus, not by him. Rather than acting, he is acted upon. I count twenty-eight verbs in this chapter of things done to Jesus, and only one verb indicating that Jesus himself does something. And the only thing Jesus does is cry to God in anguish.
The story is a brutal litany of mockery and violence directed at Jesus. Hardly a fun story to read or to hear. And we might well be forgiven for wondering: Why in the world is this story the centerpiece of Christian faith? Why is a story of unrelieved evil the heart of Christian life, the story without which you and I simply would not be here. And the fact is we wouldn’t be gathered here today if that cross hadn’t happened, if Jesus had simply been a very good person who healed people and challenged religious pedantry and told captivating stories. If that’s all Jesus had been, he would have been but one in a long series of fascinating and charismatic characters who have long been forgotten. If that’s all Jesus had been, a wise and gentle soul, you and I would be doing something entirely different than gathering here in this place on this fine Sunday morning.
The reason Christian faith survives and thrives is not because Jesus is pithy and intriguing and helpful; it’s not because Jesus is a great teacher or a principled moral beacon—though he is all of that, and that is also important. We are here, though, you and I, because something happens in that last week of Jesus’ life that is so rich and beautiful and full of hope that we who put our trust in Jesus have been utterly remade. That’s in large measure because of what happens next Sunday, certainly. But we honor and adore Jesus not just because of that resurrection. We have been given life, perhaps just as much, by the beauty and wonder and joy of that grotesque death.
We say beauty and wonder and joy of that death—strange as that may seem—because of two mysterious and remarkable truths that we see lived out in that death. The first is this: no matter what you and I may be going through, God never leaves our side. We all know it sometimes doesn’t feel that way. Even Jesus wonders if that is true. One of the most striking lines in all of the gospels is Jesus’ desperate cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (15:34, The Message). ‘How could you leave me here to die by myself?’ is what we imagine Jesus thinking. Who of us is immune from that feeling, that feeling that God has left us all by ourselves? Who of us has not felt abandoned in the face of death or illness or betrayal?
Shortly after that cry, though, and just as Jesus dies, what should happen but “the curtain of the temple [is] torn in two, from top to bottom” (15:38). To our ears that’s an odd, and perhaps irrelevant-sounding detail. In those days, though, that curtain is the divider between regular, daily life, on one side of that curtain, and the Holy of Holies on the other side. No one but the priests were permitted on that other side. When the curtain rips, though, it indicates that the sacred, ethereal sphere previously available only to the priests is now available to everyone. The tearing of the temple curtain is a symbolic way of saying that there is no longer any separation between God and human life. God suffuses everything. God never leaves us alone. God is always present. Even, and maybe especially, when we feel desolate. No matter how empty we may feel, God is walking with us along the shadowed path.
Which is the best of all possible news in a world in which destructive forces can eat away at even the strongest of us. When Jesus is subjected to mockery and taunting and derision on his way to the cross and on the cross, it eerily reflects the world in which we live. Maybe, like me, you have been teased or whispered about for something—wearing glasses, being short or heavy or having a mole, not having a job you’re proud of. Maybe you have a boss or spouse or parent or child who’s constantly picking at you and tearing you down. And it goes so far beyond us. With the pervasive presence of sports betting, athletes and coaches are now being reviled and threatened for not shooting the three-pointer at the end of the game that will let the bettor win as the team covers the spread. Or this: local writer Leslie Kouba tells of the twelve-year-old daughter of her friends who is subject to so much taunting for living “openly, honestly, and transparently as herself, a beautiful and intelligent transgender girl,” that that revulsion has forced them to take her out of school and begin to homeschool her (The Plain Dealer, March 22, 2024, p. E1). Or this: people migrating from one nation to another are disdained by public figures as well as by countless others as not even being people at all. Taunting. Contempt.
And into that mockery and derision, not to mention the terror and war and death that rip us apart—into that world God comes. The very heart of the crucifixion is that God is ever-present in it all. The temple curtain has been torn in two. There is no distance between us and God. God is inseparably present with anyone who is dismissed for any reason—the one who is shamed by the bettor, the one who is reviled for being trans, the one who is disdained for migrating from one country to another. This is who the God of the crucifixion is—the One who is ever-present in social shunning, in dismissive contempt—in everything. Not to rescue, but to accompany.
The crucifixion is about the relentlessness of divine presence. There’s nothing we can do to escape the love of God, even, and especially, in the worst of what life deals out. That’s not all, though. The first truth of that cross is that God is always with us. The second truth of that cross on which Jesus dies is that it is essentially an invitation to you and me to be part of that very love, that transcendent, holy love, that stands against the assault and derision and needless suffering that tear things apart. We are beckoned to take a stand against the evil that cross represents.
A seminary teacher of mine, a theologian named Margaret Farley, writes this about the passage we’re attending to this morning. And while it’s academic in nature, I trust it will resonate with you. She says the story is about “suffering that is the consequence of injustice—the kind of suffering that does not have to be; that cries out for an end not in death but in change.
“Christianity is therefore not a religion obsessed with . . . pain. It is a religion of resistance and a religion of hope. The point of the cross is not finally suffering and death; it is, rather, that a relationship holds. There is a love stronger than death, that can withstand whatever the forces of evil do against it, and that can hold suffering even as it struggles to alleviate it. The God of Christians is not an arbitrary ruler who demands the price of suffering and death, but a God who makes possible all of our loves, as well as our resistance to evil. The meaning of the cross can be understood finally only within the whole of the good news of the promise of God to overcome terror, enfold us in Life, and dwell with us forever” (Feasting on the World, Year B, Volume 2, pp. 182-184). By our very presence, by our resistance to the contempt and derision and forces of death that sometimes hound us—by our very resistance, we take away the power of that ugly cross and live out the holy beauty that makes everything new. We say “No” to the forces of hateful destruction. We say “Yes” to the wonder of tender accompaniment.
Caroline Simon, a retired professor of philosophy, tells this story: “In August 2020, a chaplain called from the hospital where my brother, unmarried and childless, had been admitted. She wanted to talk about moving him to palliative care. Though COVID was raging, a direct conversation with my brother’s doctor put me on a cross-country flight. ‘What’s the point?’ my brother had asked when I told him I was coming.
“My brother died less than 24 hours after I got there. I was holding his hand as it turned cold. Holding my brother’s hand was the point” (The Christian Century, March 2024, p. 66).
Yes, that is precisely the point. In the face of taunting and illness and dissolution and cruelty, God is indeed ever-present, accompanying us through “the valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4). And in the face of needless cruelty, that same God empowers us to be the face of holy resistance, standing up to evil, and, in the midst of desolation and loneliness and contempt and death, to hold each other’s hands. May it always be so.