Palm Sunday B, April 9, 2006
Rev. J. Edwin Bacon, Jr.All Saints Church, Pasadena, CA

The Christian Faith invites us to contemplate the crucifixion of Jesus for one full week every year – a holy week of seeking the meaning of the cross for our life.  I have serious questions about two traditions of meaning and want to offer a third meaning for our times.

The media have been full of one meaning of Jesus’ execution this past week through articles and TV programs about the discovery of the Gospel of Judas. The meaning that the Gospel of Judas elucidates for Jesus’ crucifixion comes from a belief central to Gnostic religious practice – that death was an opportunity for people to escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came. The account in the Gospel of Judas relates that Jesus refers to the other disciples, telling Judas "you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." By that, scholars familiar with Gnostic thinking said, Jesus meant that by helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus. (NYTimes article)

Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics, said in a statement, "These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse — and fascinating — the early Christian movement really was."   (NYTimes op-ed piece, April 8, 2006) I agree with Professor Pagels that now is a time when we need to have some fresh air breathed into our understanding that Christianity never was and cannot be now a monolithic religion where everyone believed the same thing about Jesus.  Setting aside for today the issue of whether Jesus asked Judas to betray him, suffice it to say for this morning, I do not believe that the deep meaning of the crucifixion is Jesus’ throwing off the prison of his material body.

Nor do I embrace the traditional notion that Jesus’ execution was a cosmic transaction between a distant offended God the Father sending Jesus to die in our stead as a scapegoat to placate the divine anger for the sins of the whole world.

There is a third option which goes to the heart of God, from my way of thinking.  As we contemplate the cross this morning and throughout this week I offer for your praying this prayer found in the Prayer Book for Morning Prayer.

Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching out our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you, for the honor of your Name.  Amen.

For me, Jesus’ death on the cross is the logical extension of Jesus’ inclusion of everyone at his table.  

From the first day of Jesus’ public ministry we see how Jesus was choosing the prophetic tradition among all the traditions in Scripture as his road map.  The prophetic tradition holds that everyone is in God’s family.  Every human being is sacred.  No one is politically or religiously expendable. There is a democracy of souls. The prophets claimed that there was a way to measure whether a community or society or government had moral integrity and justice.  That measure was whether the most vulnerable were cared for.  The prophets always lifted up as emblems of the most vulnerable, widows, orphans, and strangers or aliens.  Jesus carried forward this theology and ministry by saying that when we extend compassion to the least of these, we have literally encountered him.  We have encountered God.

According to our friend, Dean Brackley, the source of humanity’s great suffering is greed and contempt, idolatry of power and violence, addiction that goes unaddressed, culpable blindness, refusal to welcome the stranger or to forgive.  (Brackley, Dean, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times, p. 181)

Jesus preached that.  He lived that. Where people were being crucified because of those sources of suffering, Jesus gathered them around him for solidarity, healing, forgiveness, and empowerment.

Jesus joined the human race in solidarity with us all – particularly those who are targeted in life, joining “humanity’s procession, shouldering the consequences of our moral failings….  The point of Jesus’ life is God’s solidarity and love." (Brackley, Dean, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times, p. 181)

Brackely writes, “In joining the human race Jesus endured the consequences of its sin like everybody else.  Does that mean that he died to pay our debt to a vengeful God?  No.  It means that, instead of exacting the Law’s just condemnation of sinners, God preferred to join with sinners and share with them the burden of sin.   (Brackley, Dean, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times, p. 181-2)

So when we say, “Jesus died for us” that means not that Jesus paid our debt owed to a vengeful God, but that God in Jesus joined us sinners and shared with us the burden of sin – the burden of our greed, power idolatry, violence, addiction, culpable blindness, refusal to welcome the stranger, our refusal to forgive, our refusal to interrupt the cycle of violence but rather perpetuate it in war, occupations, and the death penalty.  Jesus was so deeply in solidarity with us that he challenged the powers that were saying that there was a political-religious system that was crucifying the least of these and that he was willing to be crucified as a public challenge to a crucifying system.

God’s solidarity with us is so complete that in Jesus, God enters those moments when life is so painful and so lonely and so confusing and so crucifying that we even think that God has abandoned us.  Jesus’ identity with us is so complete that he says, “God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The cross is not about sacrifice.  The cross is about solidarity.  The cross is about someone who loves us so much and forgives us so much that he goes to the cross for us.
James Alison says, “That’s a very different picture of God … there is no violence in God, no wrath, no desire for retribution, no need for vengeance or satisfaction, that’s purely our problem. And what Jesus was trying to get across to us is I’m taking you at your very worst, and showing you that even so, you don’t need to be frightened... (“Encounter” on Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio National, English Catholic theologian James Alison interviewed by David Busch.)

We live in crucifying times. Brothers and sisters are being crucified all around us.  We are called to take up our cross and follow Jesus to live in solidarity with the least of these because that is what God does.  And gazing at the cross of Jesus as a symbol of self-giving solidarity rather than sacrifice can give you and me strength in our call to stand with those who are being crucified by an immoral war, by oppressive occupations, by genocides, by absence of health care, by homophobia in the church and in society.  Our gazing upon the Cross this week can empower us even to participate in civil disobedience as Jesus did – if that is called for – and to die our own crucifixions like Jesus and Bonhoeffer and Martin King, if that is what is called for.

Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace:

Jesus on the cross frees us from being victims in life because he the victim hangs there being crucified, representing God’s solidarity with us in our own crucifixions AND he is forgiving. So we can gaze on the one who is both crucified and forgiving. We can participate in this memorial supper given for us as a reversal of our amnesia of his treating crucifying experiences with a love that both holds accountable and forgives. Then to the extent to which we can allow ourselves to be forgiven and empowered, there is neither fear of death or shame and we can walk in his path without fear, encouraged and empowered not to be frightened of telling the truth, of not living by unhealthy, oppressive, violent, war-mongering, fear-mongering, victimizing, immature, ego-centrism in either our leaders or ourselves. seeking our own fame and glory, and dehumanizing myths.

I believe the Cross is neither about being seeing our bodies as material prisons from which we need to be freed, nor as instruments that will send us to eternal damnation unless there is a scapegoat to be scarified.  Rather, this world, our lives, and our bodies and lives are embraced by God’s love and forgiveness and transformed by Jesus’ self-giving solidarity with the whole human family on the Cross.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. (George Bernard Shaw - A Splendid Torch)

May you this week know the universal embrace of God in Christ for yourself and for all humanity so that we can pray, “So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching out our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you.  Amen.

God’s Healing Embrace in Crucifying Times