A Liberal’s Passion
Rev. Edmund Robinson
UU Church of Wakefield
April 4, 2004

	Yesterday I was at the Mass Bay District meeting at the UU Church in Haverhill.  When I walked into the beautiful sanctuary, I was a bit startled to see the main Tiffany-style stained-glass window behind the pulpit depicting a very conventional Sunday School image of Jesus standing palms open, flowing robes and all.  I thought, that’s an unusual image for a UU church, and then I realized, wait a minute, we have a stained-glass image of Jesus, too.  I am so used to seeing it that I don’t see it anymore.

	This image reminds us that, while many of us would be reluctant to apply the term Christian to ourselves today, both of our constituent denominations began as liberal Christianity.  Today’s Palm Sunday sermon continues my quest to reclaim Jesus for liberals.  In the culture wars of the present age, when the battle for America’s future is joined, those who oppose equal rights for gays and a woman’s right to choose abortion and those who support an imperialist vision of America often do so under the banner of Christianity.  Well, here’s one minister who ain’t buying that. Jesus belongs to our side as much as he does to theirs.

	The title of this sermon is deliberately ambiguous.  The primary meaning of the word passion today is a strong emotion, but the word passion was originally a Latin word meaning suffering, and the first usage of the word in both French and English is to name the specific suffering of Jesus during his execution.  It is only in Shakespeare’s day that it came to mean emotion generally.
	Suffering is at the heart of the orthodox view of Jesus’s execution.  This is why it’s a little unfair for critics of Mel Gibson’s movie to be wringing their hands over the bloodshed and violence in the movie.  Now I’ll be that I’m the only one in this room who has actually dragged himself to see the movie, and I made myself go to provide occasion for these reflections.  Most of you have no intention of seeing it, and I am not here to persuade you out of that.   I hope that you bear with me, though because I want to develop something more than a movie review, I ant to explore how we, who generally lift up Jesus’s life and teachings and ignore his death, really feel about that death, and particularly about the suffering that that death entailed.
	If you’re making a movie called “passion of the Christ,” you would want to show suffering because that’s what it’s all about from the orthodox perspective.  Orthodox Christianity’s elevator speech, its one-sentence description which can be delivered between the third and the ground floor, is John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.”  Jesus died for the sins of humankind, his sacrifice redeems us from that state of sin. 
	This is why conservative Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, are flocking to the Mel Gibson movie and coming out saying, yeah, that’s the way it was, that’s the way it happened.  Well, Gibson’s account was based on an amalgam of the four Gospel stories of the trial and execution of Jesus, but he added in a few other details, details which he has said were supplied in a vision by a Catholic Nun in the 1830's.  OK, that’s fair game.  We believe that revelation is not sealed, so a religious vision two centuries ago can be used to fil in some of the gaps in the Gospel record – except of course that the nun in question was notoriously anti-Semitic.
	In John’s telling of the story, Pilate asks Jesus, “what is truth?”  Many people who see the Gibson movie will be convinced they are seeing the truth; to us, on the other hand, truth is something which is always unfolding.
	My problem is that the film ignores what we now know about that gospel record and how it was written.  In particular, it ignores the present realization of the anti-Semitism in those accounts, and in this it is irresponsible.
	For anyone doing historical research today, as Gibson must have done for this film, is aware that Passion plays have historically led to pogroms. According to my seminary classmate Matthew Boulton, Hitler himself, after attending the renowned Passion play in Oberammergau, Germany, declared the production a "convincing portrayal of the menace of Jewry" and a "precious tool" for his war on Judaism. Good Friday is enshrined in the ancestral memory of the Jews of Eastern Europe as the day when young Christian men would get drunk and attack them to get revenge for what they supposedly did to Christ.  This is a fact of life, and one which imposes on a filmmaker making a blockbuster movie a certain obligation to avoid stirring these feelings yet again.
	Yet in this he is not being false to the Gospels;  as James Carroll demonstrates so eloquently and in such tragic, painstaking detail in his masterly book, Constantine’s Sword, anti-Semitism is a cancer at the heart of orthodox Christianity.  Matthew’s Gospel, in particular, has the Jewish mob insisting on Jesus’s execution to an unwilling Pontius Pilate, and when Pilate washes his hands, the mob shouts “his blood be on us and upon our children.”  This is what has been called through the ages the “blood libel,” and this one sentence may be the source of more human suffering than any other in any writing anywhere.
	It is not irresponsible for the films to be true to the Gospel account; what is irresponsible is for the film to ignore the thrust of modern scholarship that says it is highly unlikely to have happened that way.
	As I said a few weeks ago, the U. Mass scholar Robert Horsley sums up the historical view by painting the Jesus movement as one for Jewish renewal.  The peasants of Galilee were oppressed by heavy taxation from two sources, the Roman Empire and the Jerusalem temple.  The Jewish King of Galilee, Herod Antipas, was a vassal of the Roman emperor who wanted to b viewed as the savior of his people, but was likely viewed by most as a turncoat who had sold the Jews down the river and lived a high life building a new capital with money extorted from the starving peasants.  Next door in Judea, Herod Antipas’ brother Archelaus had proven so ineffectual as a Roman vassal that the Emperor had deposed him and exiled him to southern France, and brought in a series of prefects to rule Judea directly in the name of Rome.  At the time of Jesus’ execution, the prefect in charge of Jerusalem was Pontius Pilate. 
	Secular sources belie the Gospel picture of Pilate as a fair-minded and scrupulous man.  As governor of Judea, he ran roughshod over Jewish sensibilities.  He tried to bring his legions into Jerusalem with their ceremonial standards including animal images, in spite of the Jewish command against graven images, and he was only stopped from doing this by the intervention of Herod Antipas and the willingness of many Jews to resist the desecration of Jerusalem to their deaths. When he wanted to build a new aqueduct for Jerusalem, he simply sent soldiers into the Temple to confiscate the Temple treasury to pay for it, creating a complete desecration of the temple.  
	Crucifixion was the characteristically Roman form of execution.  The point was to put the condemned person up high where he would have maximum visibility as an example to others.  The Roman state ruled by fear.  At the time of the Jewish revolt against the Romans of 66 CE, according to a Jewish historian, the Roman soldiers became so used to crucifixions that they used to nail the bodies to the crosses in strange poses out of boredom.
	The Jewish law did have a death penalty, but the instrument was stones, not the cross.  Leviticus says, among other infractions, that the penalty for adultery is death.  In John 8, Jesus saves a woman who has been caught in the act, from a mob who were about to stone her to death, by saying to the mob, “let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”   The Jews did not crucify those they were to execute.  When the Jewish puppet Herod Antipas agreed to deliver John the Baptist up for execution to satisfy the wishes of his wife and daughter, he did it by beheading.
	It is true that Jesus’s ministry would have been a threat both to the Jewish Temple hierarchy and to Roman rule, for different reasons.  For the Temple hierarchy, Jesus was a threat because he seemed to have a pipeline to God that bypassed them; by talking about the Kingdom of God, he was advocating a return to the time in Jewish history before there were kings or temples, when God ruled his chosen people directly.  
	For the Romans, Jesus represented a problem in crowd control.  It was Passover in Jerusalem, and the Romans had a wary eye out for anyone who could ignite a riot.  Crucifixion was not only public, but it was swift and effective in stopping riots.  Here is how Richard Horsley assesses it:
  	In Jerusalem, the situation was clear-cut and would not have required extensive deliberations.  Neither the High Priest, nor Herod Antipas nor Pontius Pilate could allow themselves to be humiliated in public by a peasant prophet who spoke defiantly of their impending destruction and roused the populace to resist their rule – nonviolently.  In the recent, celebrated case where John the Baptist had aroused the public ‘to the greatest degree by his sermons,’ Herod Antipas had decided ‘that it would be much better to strike first and be rid of him.’  Execution by beheading was the way that John the Baptist was dealt with.  But that was too respectful a punishment for a troublemaking villager from Galilee.  With Jesus in custody, utterly unrepentant, and persisting with his visions of a redeemed Israel freed from the overlordship of the Romans, there was only one order that Pontius Pilate, the prefect of Judea and faithful servant of Tiberius Caesar, could possibly give.  The people of Judea must be shown the terrible price of resistance.  And for the good of the public order, and as an exercise in imperial power, this Galilean Prophet would be put to death in Jerusalem in the most painful, public and humiliating way.”

	If it is clear in retrospect that the crucifixion of Jesus was carried out by Roman order, why do the Gospel writers picture it as a trial before the Jewish hierarchy. In fact, all four Gospels, and the Gibson movie, have Jesus arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane and taken before the high priest Caiaphas that night.  But that night would have been the preparation for the Passover, and the high priest would not have convened the Sanhedrin.  The reason the story is told that way is that the Gospel accounts were written after the failure of the Jewish revolt of 66-70, when there was an even greater crackdown on Jewish resistance than there had been in Jesus’ time.  It was a pretty gutsy venture even to write about a rebel ho had been executed fifty years before, and it is understandable that the blame for his execution is shifted from the Roman occupiers to the Jewish leaders of the time.  Had Matthew, Mark and Luke fingered the Romans as responsible, their texts would never have seen the light of day.
	Al this is widely known, and this is why it is irresponsible for Gibson simply to make a movie mirroring the Gospel accounts and presenting them as historical. 
	Moreover, even within the Gospel accounts here is a motivation that Gibson ignores: in the 11th chapter of John, we encounter this passage shortly before the account of the execution: 
“45: Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him; 
46: but some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. 
47: So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council, and said, "What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. 
48: If we let him go on thus, every one will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation." 
49: But one of them, Ca'iaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing at all; 
50: you do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish." 
51: He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, 
52: and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. 
53: So from that day on they took counsel how to put him to death. 

In other words, the Jewish hierarchy was plotting to have him killed, but not out of simple evil or malice, but to avert the greater tragedy of a Roman crackdown.  Here we have the atonement idea – that Jesus was to die for the greater good –  put into the mouth of the high priest himself.  Note however, that the greater good is not all of humanity, but only the good of the Jewish people.
	What I have said o this point is that placing the blame for Jesus’ death on the Jewish hierarchy at he time, in light o modern scholarship, is historically irresponsible in light of the uses to which these stories have been put by anti-Semites.  But there is a deeper problem with the movie, and it has to do with the glorification of suffering.  Jesus is presented in the movie as suffering more than anyone else.  At the crucifixion, there is hardly an inch of his body that is not marked with wounds, while the two common criminals on either side of him are almost unblemished.  It is as if Gibson has taken every mark from every medieval crucifixion painting and superimposed them all on the same body all at once.
	It is clear that this suffering is supposed to be heroic.  At the beginning of the movie, the female Satan figure in the Garden of Gethsemane challenges Jesus: you can’t take on the sins of the whole world, no one can do that.   In effect, Jesus takes up this challenge, and that is consistent with a conservative Catholic theology.  The moviegoer is supposed to say, look at how much God loves us because look at how much he let his son suffer for us.
	This is why the movie has such an impact on those who accept this atonement theory, and leaves the rest of us wondering.  In our tradition, Hosea Ballou broke with this orthodox idea of atonement in 1805, almost 200 years ago.  In his Treatise on Atonement, Ballou said that the idea makes no sense.  Adam’s sin corrupts all humankind, placing a debt on humanity it never could pay, so God sends his son to pay ransom for the human race by dying on the cross?  Ballou likens it to a debtor.  Let’s say I loan you money, and I come to collect it and you tell me, sorry, I don’t have it and I’m never going to have it, I will never be able to pay the debt I owe you.  And then I say, that’s OK, I’ll just pay it to myself and you won’t have to worry about it.  For God the Father and God the Son, in the Trinitarian view, are part of the same Godhead, so that when the Son pays the debt of humanity to the Father, it is God paying God’s self.  
	More recent criticism of the atonement theory in our tradition comes from this book Proverbs of Ashes, by Rita Nakashima Bock and Rebecca Parker.  Parker is president of our UU Starr King Seminary out in Berkeley, and a leading process theologian.  What they argue in this book is that the orthodox Christian view of the death of Jesus glorifies suffering, and this leads Christians to excuse or tolerate violence rather than working to prevent it or heal its wounds.  Both recount personally their experiences with child abuse, racism and homophobia, and both of them relate their experiences to the notion that suffering is good and noble because of the example of Jesus in the passion.
	Certainly the Gibson movie present Jesus’ suffering as noble.  He accepts the merciless beatings without ever breaking.  He is everything we could want in a noble victim.   In a way, as some critics have pointed out, this movie is a remake of Braveheart.
	While the atonement idea certainly originates in Paul, I don’t think this notion of suffering as noble comes from the Gospels or from the writings of Paul.  I think it originates in Christian thought with Tertullian, in the second century, who was writing to glorify the Christian martyrs.  The martyrs were held up as the supreme example of faith, and the more gory their deaths, the more it proved their faith.
	In other words, Tertullian was writing what he had to write to keep the flame alive during a time of persecution, just as the gospel writers a century earlier had been writing what hey had to write to get the story out, and to try to distinguish the Jesus movement from the Judaism that was in the process of regrouping after the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 CE.  The writers of the Gospels, in all likelihood, were not eyewitnesses to the events of Jesus’ life, and the teachings they pass on had been contained in oral tradition.
	Likewise, St. Paul, the earliest Christian writer, never met Jesus, and he tried to keep the movement alive by reinterpreting it in terms of God’s covenants in the Hebrew Bible.  Each of these writers made compromises to meet the needs of their readers and to keep out of trouble with the authorities, and what results is a body of Christian doctrine which far distorts the original mission of Jesus.
	For in my book the meaning of Jesus is to be found in his teachings, not in the way he died.  Jesus to me is first a foremost a great Rabbi, a Jewish spiritual leader with some uncommon takes on the ethic of the earlier scriptures.  He talks about the Kingdom of God in ways that fit with Jewish notions of the good old days before the oppressions of his day, but it is also clear that this Kingdom is not restricted to Jews.  Jesus reached out and was inclusive.
	All this I have said before, but what does his death mean?  My feelings about it are nicely put by my old classmate Matthew Boulton, a Christian, in a review of the Gibson movie in the Christian Century:
Jesus' flayed and bloody body, so graphically destroyed on screen, and finally so distinct from the relatively unscathed bodies of the two thieves crucified alongside him, will for most of us stand out above all other suffering bodies we have ever seen. The film effectively exalts Jesus as the one sufferer above all others. But this exaltation, to my mind, is a reversal of the true meaning of the Passion of Jesus Christ.

"Christ crucified" is not the Hero, not the strongest man. On the contrary, he is the weakest man, the least of these. There is his strength. He is not the greatest sufferer, famed above all others. He is, finally, the anonymous sufferer, in radical solidarity with every sufferer, everywhere. There is his proper fame. As the Son of God, he suffers and dies with sinners, forgotten and alone, disappearing into the thousands of Jews and others crucified under a brutal, violent, imperial regime. So he continues, even today, wherever agonies are borne among the human family.
The trouble with The Passion is that it proclaims a Braveheart Christianity. The Christ of the New Testament, by contrast, has a heart not so much brave as broken--"broken for you," Christians recall.

	Pilate said, “What is truth?”  This rings very true to me.  The Jesus who suffered on the cross is who he is precisely because of all the others who have suffered before and after him.  He is the Jew expelled from Spain, or murdered in the Holocaust; he is the African shipped to America in the hold of a slave ship; he is the Native American whose land is stolen from him under broken treaties with the Europeans; he is the Rwandans massacred only ten years ago in another outbreak of genocide.  He is everyone who has ever suffered.
	Whether he is divine or human, his suffering does not glorify suffering, or make it a good thing.  The Buddha’s first noble truth can be translated as “everything is suffering,” but the Buddha never says that’s a good thing.  In fact the ethical goal of Buddhists is to eliminate suffering though the eightfold path.
	Our liberal religion is accused of not coming to grips with suffering or the dark night of the soul.  I think there is a place for the dark night of the soul;  I think of the suffering I have been through in my life as part of what formed me.  I accept suffering as par of life, but I don’t seek it or glorify it.  
   	So the movie probably struck this liberal a lot differently than it would an orthodox Christian; I was left with a great welling of human sympathy for the pain my fellow-human Jesus went through, and an anger at the injustice of his execution.  It didn’t symbolize for me God’s love or the remission of my sins.  I’ve never figured out how an event 2000 years before I was born can forgive my sins anyway – not only the ones I’ve committed but the one’s I’m going to commit when I can get around to it. 
	Maybe it’s the lawyer in me, but I can’t help being struck by the injustice of executing a prophet of nonviolence.  When I worked for the ACLU, we had a t-shirt that read, if Jesus had had an ACLU lawyer, things would have turned out differently.  We can all do our bit to make sure there are no more unjust executions.  And one way to do that is to try to see that there are no more executions.
	I have seen an execution, I have been there as the state infused my client’s veins with rat poison; they didn’t flog him first, but he ended up just as dead.  That experience left me with a very simple motivation; to do whatever is in my power to prevent this from happening again to someone else.
	So that’s why on Good Friday I will not be in church praying, and I will not be retracing the stations of the cross.  I will be out on Reading Common from 4:30 to 6 PM with other members of the Boston North Chapter of Mass Citizens Against the Death Penalty, holding a vigil to try to ensure that this barbaric punishment never is reinstituted in this state.  I invite all those of you who feel this way to join me.  That is this liberal’s passion.
Amen.