Palm Sunday

Jesus died nearly 2,000 years ago.  Christians celebrate it as the foundational event for salvation.  But there are several problems with our doctrines of atonement. It is practiced violently and is often used violently against those who do not conform to narrow views of what it means to be a Christian.  Christianity has been associated with the violence of bloodshed for more than a thousand years.

Ken Martin, an UFMCC pastor from Austin, relates how he as a young kid was shocked at a bloody sacrifice to illustrate the atonement of the Christ for humanity:

…it happened in Mississippi, I believe the summer that I was 8 years old. I was visiting my grandmother and aunt and uncle in Greenwood, MS. I made friends with a boy in the neighborhood near my age. His parents invited me to attend a revival with them. I believe it was in a tent or pavilion. I know the sides were open. Early in the service, the evangelist called the children forward. We all petted a beautiful little white lamb, and were reminded that Jesus was the "lamb of God." I don't remember much else except that near the end of the service the lights were turned off. When they came back on, they had placed a wash tub at the front of the center aisle with a wood cross standing in it. The lamb was hanging upside down on the cross. Its throat was cut and blood was running down the cross into the tub. That was almost 50 years ago, and that image has been indelibly burned in my memory all these years. I don't remember anything that was said after that. I do remember crying. I look back on that now and realize that incident, as well as just having to listen, as a child, to substitutionary atonement preached every week was a uniquely violent form of child abuse which I have struggled to overcome all my life.

This blood sacrifice of the lamb impresses young spectators that God’s redemptive action is violent.  We certainly would call the action of the minister as a form of child abuse.  It acted out a notion of God as abusive parent, demanding the death of a son. 

Feminist theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann rejects such a view of God when she says, "God is no hangman. God mourns this death (of Jesus)." 

God neither sacrificed Jesus nor prevented his death.  Images of blood atonement and sacrifice abound in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The ancient world understood that God required the sacrifice of what people held dearest. The sacrifice of animal or human blood crudely indicated a channel of divine grace and communion. The Hebrew scriptures make frequent mention of child sacrifice, often criticizing it as an abomination.  But there are also  stories such as the  binding of Isaac for a blood sacrifice (Genesis 22), Jephtha's sacrifice of his daughter because he vows to sacrifice the first person he meets (Judges 11), King Mesa's burnt offering of his son (2 Kings 3:27), and King Ahaz's sacrifice of his son (2 Kings 16:3) are stories of horrorific actions. Jephtha's daughter and Ahaz's son are sacrificed to a God who is conceived as bloodthirsty and demanding human blood. Such stories indicate that child sacrifice was once a part of Israelite religious practice.  The proscription against the abominable practice of child sacrifice in Leviticus 18:21 addressed a real life and death issue for the ancient Hebrews.  In the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, God is the destroyer of the first-born as well (Exodus 12:29-30, Hebrews 11:28). 

Does this mean that God is afterall a hangman?  Does this mean God slays God’s own first-born son for the sake of the world? Atonement theologies depict God as enraged, wrathful, sadistic, violent and abusive.  God could only be satisfied with the blood of the innocent Jesus for the sins of the world.  Love and sadomasochism are conflated within the theologies of the cross.  As some feminist theologians claim, God's willingness to sacrifice Jesus to a brutal death is divine child abuse.  Divine child abuse and love become coextensive in the image of the abusing God.   Does God really demand the death of Jesus?  Are there other ways of understanding the death of Jesus and God’s redemptive action?

I confess that I have never really been able to reconcile the image of God demanding the death of Jesus with the loving and merciful God that I have experienced.  In prayer, I have always found God loving, caring, gently persuasive, generous, and inviting the best in myself.  God has never been coercive, demanding, vengeful, and wrathful.  That has been the experience of many of us.

The early followers of Jesus used the imagery from their Jewish religious heritage to describe the significance of Jesus the Christ:  Jesus as the Paschal Lamb.  But they used other images such as  

the New Adam, the Son of Humanity, Son of David, Messiah, and the incarnation of God’s infinite love.  Jesus is God’s communication of unconditional love.

If we keep in mind that Jesus’ execution was public and the manner of his execution, then we understand the wider implications behind his death.  Jesus’ sentence was handed down and executed by   Romans.  Jesus was put to death on the cross for political rebellion and preaching the inclusive grace of God. The cross symbolized the cruelty of the Roman imperial system, patriarchal violence, the political infrastructure of the co-opted aristocracy, a compromised priestly aristocracy, and ultimately ruthless human behavior. The compromised priesthood was threatened by Jesus’ message of God’s coming reign; they were terrified by unconditional grace of God. Crucifixion awaited both the charismatic Christ and the revolutionary troublemaker. It was the ultimate deterrent of a political system for keeping revolutionaries and would-be messiahs in check.  People crucified died from slow strangulation.  The body was pulled down by gravity and impeded breathing.  People were asphyxiated.  In Jesus case, he was severely whipped.  He carried his own cross. He was weakened physically, and his strength was spent.  He died quickly, a painful death.

But did God will the death of Jesus?  Or did God allow the death of Jesus?  I choose the second.  God allowed Jesus to follow the consequences of his message that God’s love was unconditional.  God allowed Jesus as God allows us both freedom and free will. God’s grace is freely given and surrounds all of us.  God never demands, never forces.  God always gives us the space to respond.

Jesus’ practice of inclusive love and his message of the reign of God were a threat to the Jewish elites and their participation in the Roman imperial system.   He radically threatened the power of the  Roman imperial system and its authoritarian conquest ideology.  Crucifixion was the consequence of his message of God's reign and its confliction nature.

There are two points I want to make about redemption: 

The first is that redemption does not depend solely on the death of Jesus.  Hear me correctly.  It is the whole life of Jesus: His birth, his life-affirming message and ministry, his death, and God’s action on Easter.  This is the mystery of the Incarnation: “And the word became fleshed and dwelt among us.”  The whole of Jesus life is salvific.  Not so threatening. Don’t we remember the whole life of Jesus through the calendar year:  Christ’s birth, his discovery by parents in the Temple at age 12, his baptism, his ministry and message, his death and resurrection?  The whole story is a redemptive story; it is story about God’s redemptive activity in Jesus the Christ.

The second is the death and resurrection of Jesus.  They cannot be separated from one another.  The death of Jesus was not redemptive.  For the lethal wood of the cross was transformed into the tree of life for us.  It tells us how much God loved us.  It also reveals that God is with the suffering Jesus on the cross and with us.

Jesus’ cry of abandonment from the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—is the human question of Jesus and countless humans who suffered oppression and faced a murderous end.  Where is God?  Can God stop this violence?

God’s answer is that Easter is a resounding no human violence.  God did not abandon Jesus, neither God has forgotten or abandoned any human in history.

Let me give you three examples of God’s compassionate solidarity with suffering:

Matthew Shepard was beaten by two men. Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, with 357 magnum, and they tied him to a fence with outstretch arms.  Five days later Matthew died. There is the common practice of farmers to hang a dead coyote on the fence to scare off other   coyotes.   McKinney and Henderson sent a message to other gays.

Christ was hung on a cross again. From this murder, love triumphed in the heroic love of Matthew Shepard’s mother who pleaded for the lives of the murderers of her son.  We see glimpse of resurrection in Judy Shepard, and we know that Matthew now enjoys the full bliss and peace of God.

Where was God in the holocaust?  In Night, Elie Wiesel narrates a hanging of two male adults and a young boy in Aucshwitz. He remembers marching pass the gallows later and the light weight of the child kept him alive in an agony of pain and writhing.  For more than a half hour the child stayed alive, struggling between life and death.  One of the interned prisoners who witnessed the hangings asked, "Where is God now?" Elie Wiesel responded, "He is hanging here on this gallows."(Night 73-74)  

God identified with the suffering of people.  God has a special concern for human suffering.  Wiesel’s writings narrate the horrendous crimes against the Jewish people by Christians.  It is the culmination of centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.  Christians called “Jews”  “Christ killers.”  Ironically, the Christians kill Christ 6 million times in the Nazi concentration camps.

That God willed the holocaust shatters traditional conceptions

of the Divine and divine love.  God neither willed the holocaust nor the death of Jesus. God is the God of the living, not the dead.  God does not will death.  In fact, God has said “no” to the death of Jesus; God said “no” to the death of six million Jewish brothers and sisters of Jesus.      

Brandon Teena was murdered because he crossed the borders of gender and lived as a male.  He was a border corsser like many of us.  He usurped male privilege. Brandon Teena was “unnatural.”  Two men murdered him.  Christ was once more crucified.

Christ has been crucified in countless men and women who suffered horrific violence at the hands of other human beings.  Countless men and women died in the silence of history and have been forgotten by everyone except God.  God forgets no one.  God’s love is stronger death, it is stronger than human violence, no matter the scale of violence, no matter the new technologies of death that humans devise. 

This week celebrate the mystery of God’s presence in the passion of Jesus, his death, and his entombment.  But remember that no matter the wildness and unconditional love of God triumphs over all violence, all human attempts. 

For Christians, Easter proclaims that God is found with the suffering and the oppressed.  Easter  is not a justification of the death of Jesus.  It does not glorify the cross; it highlights the reality of the human fall to violence…The tomb is the brutal reality of patriarchal violence and death. The tomb is the brutal reality that eclipses God’s loving presence and vitiates all possibilites."  Easter is God's  "no"  to human violence in all its forms.

Resurrection vindicates not the death of Jesus but his life, message, and commitment to practice God's reign.  Resurrection is not merely the survival of Jesus but the transformation of the world.  Jesus, the resurrected one, is vindicated by God.  It was not God's will that Jesus die brutally.  It was God's will that Jesus live.  The living Christ keeps open the future for us, a future not controlled by the human fall to violence.   Is not the promise of Easter God's victory over human evil? 

Jesus is the Christ. He is a parable of God's strong assertion that human barbarism, political oppression, and dominating power relations will not triumph.  This includes the oppressive political systems that have persecuted and executed men and women with alternative sexual attractions, that murdered gays/lesbians in the Nazi death camps, that blocked effective and compassionate responses to gay men with HIV infections, and that promote heterosexist violence and oppression. God is concealed and murdered in every death of  translebigays.  God was in Matthew Shephard as he was strung on the fence;   God was present in Rita Hester, a transgendered woman in Boston as she was stabbed twenty times.  God will remember innocent translesbigays, and Easter justice will triumph.  This is God’s  promise to us in Christ.

Let me end off with the proclamation that God breaks the spiral of human violence by refusing to retaliate to human cruelty with violence. God responds with compassion and love to the violent death of Jesus by raising him to Christ.  Christ becomes God's promise of compassion, justice, and love.              

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