Remembering the Martyrs: Challenging the Powers; a Good Friday Sermon

By Chris Miller, Eastern Region Coordinator and Chaplain / Coordinator SCM at York
Homily at Trinity College Chapel, University of Toronto
Good Friday (April 2, 2010)

It is finished. Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. It is finished. Hope is finished. Life is finished. The possibility for something new is finished. Community, table fellowship, service, healing, miracles, a chance at a new life tomorrow: all finished. All closed in a tomb behind a massive stone. Violence and death win out over peace and life.

Jesus’ arrest at the beginning of the passion narrative is a scene not all that unfamiliar to anyone who has stood up for principles of justice, peace, and has challenged the powers, has challenged the status quo. A group of soldiers, officers of the Empire, and the temple police, religion and state collaborating to shut down the voice, the movement, the life emerging amongst the people that has become a thorn in their side, or a little rock in their shoe.

But Jesus and his followers were more than an annoyance, to the temple authorities and to the Romans – they were a direct threat. Not because they were going to rise up an army and engage in armed revolt: its important to note that, as we heard this morning, Jesus’ last command given to the disciples, while he was still a free person, was “Put your sword back into its sheath” and his last action was healing the ear of one of the soldiers – aiding and abetting those about to arrest him, healing them. Yes, Jesus and the disciples were a great threat, but for another reason, because they offered a different life, a community, a way of living. Through transforming symbols and meaning, they stripped the unjust powers of their authority and pointed the way to true just uses of power. They showed the “authorities” for what they were and helped people see the oppression they were living under at the hands of both a corrupt religious elite who turned the temple and religious life into an exclusionary community, a way to extort money, and a centre of power, and an occupying military force, belonging to one of the most brutal regimes ever known to have existed.

Jesus challenged the religious authorities – he picked grain and healed on the Sabbath reminding people that it exists for the release of suffering, he challenged traditional religious understandings by constantly presenting new interpretations and new ideas, he broke purity codes by touching sinners, and the impure – those with leprosy, the haemorrhaging, foreigners, the poor, sex workers, the lame, and the possessed. He challenged societal norms by eating with outcasts and collaborator tax-collectors, converting people to justice, peace, the Kingdom of God as he went travelling with a wayward band, he proclaimed blessed are the poor, the meek, the mourning, the hungry, the insulted, the peacemakers, and the pure in heart. He challenged the Roman Empire and all its might – first by teaching followers to carry the bag an extra mile – Roman soldiers were allowed to have non-citizens carry their gear one mile, but no further in order to not annoy and inconvenience the local populace too much, making them carry it any further brought dire consequences and punishment to the soldiers, so what does Jesus say, ‘carry it another mile also’ – shame the soldier, put the soldier at risk of being in trouble, so much so that they fear even asking the locals to carry it the first mile. The very title given to Jesus ‘son of God’ was a title used by the emperor, considered to be a reflection of the divine on Earth and to become another god of the pantheon upon death, the preaching of a new Kingdom, a Kingdom of God, a new reign, a new beloved community, a Kingdom, as Jesus instructed Pilate, that unlike the Roman Empire, is not of this world – a new political order in direct contrast to the Empire, a place and an existence where the first shall be last, where all shall be fed, where war, bloodshed, division, discord, and disunity, all those marks of the Empire are no more. Where women and men are fully equal, where culture, race, ethnicity, status and citizenship are not dividing lines or sources of power, where the poor are lifted up, a kingdom of life, a place where love reigns, a community where justice is realized. It is this Kingdom, this new world emerging out of the old, springing forth in life out of the death of the Empire that so challenges Roman authority, the symbolism of a new community, of new life, of a different way of being, of a new Kingdom are such a challenge to the powers that the most violent solutions are used to maintain the status quo: imprisonment, arrest, torture, whipping, flogging, and crucifixion. He was killed upon the cross, for showing and living out God’s preferential option for the poor and marginalized, for living out his mother Mary’s prophecy that the mighty have been cast down from their thrones and the lowly have been lifted up, that the rich have been sent empty away and the poor filled with good things.

Holy Week is bracketed this year by the the anniversaries of three martyrs of the twentieth century who took seriously Jesus’ vocation explained to Pilate, “To testify to the truth,” who followed the command Jesus gave the disciples ‘take up your cross and follow me,’ and for each of these three it led to death. One week ago, we marked the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who transformed the church in El Salvador from an Empirical corporate-state chaplaincy to a strong voice for the poor, for the labourers working under harsh conditions on farms they did not own, who as they demanded their rights were met with violent repression. On the 23rd of March, 1980 Romero preached a homily, directed at rank and file soldiers, broadcast throughout the country in which he said:

“Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination. …In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression”

The next day, as he elevated the wine while celebrating mass in a hospital, Romero was taken by a bullet through the heart.

Two days from now, April 4th, marks the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. – assassinated in Memphis for reminding the world ‘that all people are born equal,’ for rising up in opposition to the Vietnam war, an American imperial war fought on the backs of poor young people who could not get draft exemptions, and for proclaiming that “I have a dream” and “I have seen the mountain top.”

Lastly, one week from now, we mark the sixty-fifth anniversary of the concentration camp execution of Deitrich Bonhoeffer by the Nazis. Bonhoeffer would not let the evil empire of national socialism, of fascism and totalitarianism, corrupt his faith. As a leader of Germany’s Confessing Church, he lived an underground life, he made an alternative community in a secret seminary, and joined the resistance knowing full well what would come. He writes “My calling is quite clear to me. What God will make of it I do not know… I must follow the path. Perhaps it will not be such a long one… I believe that the nobility of this calling will become plain to us only in times and events to come… Wherever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death.” For Bonhoeffer, that call, the prompting of Christ, took him to the gallows where he was hanged just days before the fall of the Nazis.

These three are but a drop in the ocean of those women and men, known and unknown, who followed Christ’s command and call, who testified truth, who took up their own crosses, who laid down their life that others may live. Following them and following Christ as we preach and live a Kingdom that contrasts, that challenges today’s empires, we are hear the call that comes to us today as we meditate on Christ’s arrest, trial, torture, and execution.

In a few moments the crucifix will be processed and placed at the front of the chancel step and we will be invited to meditate upon it, to come forward and to kiss the base of it and Christ’s feet. We often have a tendency to domesticate the cross, to remove from it the horror associated with it. If as, Jesus reminds us in Matthew 25, that he is found in the sick, the lonely, the naked, and most of all for today’s context, the prisoner, then as we meditate upon the cross, think also of the tools of death used throughout this world and throughout history, stones, axes, guillotines, gallows, like those used to hang Bonhoeffer, the syringes of lethal injection, and the firing squad’s and assassin’s rifles, such as the ones that took King and Romero – for they are reflections of the cross. They reflect in the contemporary world the action of the cross – death that others might live. They reflect the violence used against the innocent, against voices of prophecy, against those who have chosen to follow Christ. – They, like the cross are violent weapons of power. As the anthems are sung, we ask ourselves, how far are we willing to go? Will we speak out for the poor, will we say blessed are the meek, will we live a different way, do we risk a life cut short by the gallows, by the rifle, by the cross or do we join with Simon Peter and say “I do not know this man,” or even worse the crowds that shout “Crucify Him! Crucify Him! We have no king but Casear!” The cross of Christ calls us to give up our own selves, to live the unknown. The cross of Christ calls us to death.

And it is upon the cross, at the hands of power, that the Godself took on death, entered that most vulnerable experience, felt pain and sorrow, saw the tears of Mary his mother, of Mary Magdalene his companion, of his neighbours, and of the beloved disciple, it is from the cross that he proclaims forgive them, they know not what they do, and from the cross that he calls out for wine in thirst, and on the cross that he echoes Psalm 22’s cry of anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”

In fear, the disciples already having denied Jesus went on the run afraid for their own lives, their hopes dashed, their movement, their community come to an end. Mary cried, and Joseph, the secret disciple lays Jesus in a tomb. They went away in fear not knowing what was next for they saw that:
This is the wood of the cross on which hung the saviour of the world.