What does it mean to remember? Do the ways in which we remember a person or event matter?
In our everyday, secular lives, collective memory is the psychological term for the way a group of people are formed by their memories and understanding of the past. Memory forms that common identity and outlook. What we remember, and what we forget, shapes our present actions and our future in critical ways. Shared remembering forms us and unites us as a body. So it’s not just “remembering.” It is also crucially “re-membering” that we do here, understanding the events of the past as also what shape the present and the future as one people untied as a body. Memory unifies, and enriches our understanding of who we are.
This is also vitally true of our religious lives. Remembrance is, of course, at the heart of all worship. It’s at the heart of all prayer. We even hear it in the prayers that we hear coming from the cross on this day.
And it is hard for anyone of conscience to really engage in the process of remembering the events we DO re-member and commemorate on this day, especially when we are talking about things like the horrors and realities of crucifixion. The weight of memory of such terrible events can seem overwhelming.
But remember we must, if we are to understand ourselves and God’s abundant love for us. Yet what does it mean to remember?
I ask this question on a day that is a day of particular holy remembrance for both Christians and our Jewish kindred, as Passover begins tonight at sundown.
Both Good Friday and Passover are particularly steeped in remembrance. “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I am commanding you to this memorial,” our Jewish kindred will intone tonight, gathered around a table, remembering their deliverance from certain destruction and death. And we too, gathered here, remember our own deliverance, and our own debt of gratitude to Jesus for his devotion to the cause of love as the only thing that can overcome death.
Today, even as our Jewish kindred gather together to remember and re-member their deliverance from slavery and death, we remember today Jesus passing over from life to death on a cross. We remember his death this day—as devastating as it is—but also remembering that in both our remembrances and our Jewish kindred’s remembrances, death never has the final word.
Thus we consider again the power of remembrance.
On the cover of our Good Friday bulletin there is a special image. It is a painting by the great 20th century master Marc Chagall entitled “White Crucifixion.” It is meant to remind us of the Jewishness of Jesus, and of our solidarity with people of faith across the spectrum of belief. The Jewishness of Jesus is especially important to remember on this day, at a time when some people are seeking to limit our full understanding and remembrance of the past.
I ask that you look at that image for just a few moments with me right now, and see what it is attempting to call us to remember on this particular day especially.
Chagall was born into a devout Jewish family in what was then the Russian Empire. At that time, Russian Jews were limited by law in where they could live throughout Europe. This concentration enabled targeted outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence to take place throughout the centuries.
Jews were targets in Christian Europe for nearly two millennia-- in part because of a misguided understanding of the Biblical texts used on Good Friday that appear to place the blood-guilt for Jesus’s death on the Jewish people. An idea that is a lie, one of the most devastating lies ever told: the lie that some people deserve their suffering, and that their suffering actually benefits others somehow and is therefore, necessary. That’s an easy position to take when you aren’t the one doing the suffering, isn’t it. That’s why tyranny throughout history is founded upon people placing restrictions on others that costs them nothing and that they would never tolerate on themselves.
By the time Chagall painted this painting in 1938 from where he lived in France, the Nazi party had been in control of Germany for six years, and in those six years, the Nazi scapegoating of the Jews had become brutally evident. In 1936, the Nazis opened the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, and in 1937 they opened Buchenwald. The year 1938, the year of Kristallnacht and of this painting, made clear the perils of Jewish identity in Europe. And of course, the next seven years would see the attempted extermination of the Jewish people at the hands of Nazi-led genocide. And even though Hitler and his henchmen were no Christians, they co-opted German Christianity with their National Church, and they found a ready source of support from Christians who had been taught that the Jews had killed Jesus.
“White Crucifixion” is a critical turning point in Chagall’s career, and is a daring and profound political as well as artistic statement denouncing war and religio-racial hatred. Russian pogroms and the rising Nazi Holocaust are equivalized. Chagall equates the suffering and threat to the Jews with Jesus’s crucifixion.
The wonderful Jewish New Testament scholar Dr. Amy-Jill Levine in her commentary on the Passion Narratives, makes this profound but simple statement:
“Memory can provoke ethical responses.”
Memory forms our decisions about how to live a morally grounded, reverent life, in other words—and of course that is the very point of a life of faith. Faith is about how to live.
Dr. Levine’s reminder places an obligation within us to go more deeply below the surface, on this day of all days, because remembrance on this day has often been fraught with peril and even bloodshed between Christians and Jews, based on a lack of understanding of our texts that describe Jesus’s passion and death. When we look at the entire story of Jesus’s betrayal and death, we see that he was executed by the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire alone, on a trumped up charge of which he was, as even the centurion noted, innocent.
Jesus’s real “crime” was the crime of telling the truth in a world in which lies predominated. Lies that came at the poor and marginalized like a sledgehammer, designed to keep them beaten down and helpless to resist. Lies like calling Rome’s terror tactics of mass crucifixions all necessary in the service of so-called “greater good,” in this case the misnamed “Pax Romana,” or the “Peace of Rome.”
Jesus was executed for daring to critique the injustices and cruelties of Empire and our tendency to give in or claim helplessness to those cruelties rather than resist them. Jesus died for proclaiming an upside-down kingdom in which God’s values were foundational, rather than human calculations of power, cruelty, and exploitation, for offering hope to those who were the least of the least within that Empire. Hope, like memory, can be a dangerous thing. People have died for less.
So back to memory: as we contemplate the passion narrative we just heard, in all its pathos and heartbreak, we also hear a plea to remember. Did you notice it?
It comes from the lips of the so-called “Repentant Thief,” the one who traditionally was executed on Jesus’s right hand side. Tradition even ascribes a name to him: “Dismas,” a name that comes from the Greek word for sunset. On the other side of Jesus, tradition has assigned the Unrepentant Thief the name “Gesta,” which comes for the word for complaint or moaning. And indeed, that thief on the left not only complains and moans to Jesus, he repeats Satan’s temptation of Jesus in his challenge and mockery of Jesus’s powerlessness at that moment when all three hang above the barren landscape. “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us, then!” he moans.
But the Repentant Thief, hanging on the right hand of the crucified God, rebukes his companion. Rebukes him, and claims that both of them deserve their fates for their crimes. He then addresses Jesus straightforwardly.
‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’
Jesus immediately assures this repentant sinner that that very day he will be with Jesus in Paradise. Despite his crimes. Despite how he had lived his life up until that point. Despite whether he had checked the right religious boxes or not. All the evils he had done-- those will be forgotten, wiped out by his acknowledgment and his repentance, and his faith even at the gates of hell on earth.
The good news of today that we are called to remember is how very much God loves us. How much God calls us to the honest work of remembrance and the brave work of repentance. Jesus shows us that love in his outstretched arms and his forgiveness.
That amazing and abundant grace is what we are called to remember this day—to remember, and open ourselves to despite the cost, so that that memory and its ethical command may transform our lives just as it did the life of that Repentant Thief, even at the last. But beyond the hope it offers us, we are today also called to remember the reality of humanity’s cruelty to humanity—to remember and stand against injustice, and persecution, and dehumanizing others or scoffing at their pain or perceived powerlessness, as they Unrepentant Thief did.
And so today, at the foot of the cross, may we join together in this prayer: Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.
And may we ever dedicate ourselves to remembering and re-membering within our own lives the gift of forgivenenss and salvation offered to us by the love of God, made visible in the suffering Christ on the cross.
May we re-member and denounce attempts to place the blame for that suffering anywhere but where it belongs: on our own wayward tendency, as both individuals and as communities, to close our eyes to the suffering of others. Including suffering we either cause directly, or that is done in our names, as we confess every time we gather.
May we allow our remembrance to transform our relationship with God, each other, and with all of creation.
Amen.
Preached at noon and 7 pm on Good Friday, April 15, 2022, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.
Readings:
Note: The Passion Gospel read was adapted as a script and to address the appearance of anti-Judaism in the text. A copy of the script can be found here: https://poemspsalmsandprayers.blogspot.com/2022/04/script-passion-narrative-from-luke.html
Citations:
Amy-Jill Levine, Witness at the Cross: A Beginner's Guide to Holy Friday, pp. 37-49.
Henry L. Roedinger III and K. Andrew DeSoto, "The Power of Collective Memory," June 28, 2016, at Scientific American.
Images: "White Crucifixion," Marc Chagall, 1938, at the Art Institute of Chicago, photos mine.
For further reading on the appearance of Anti-Judaism in the passion narratives, please see Louis Weil, "Anti-Judaism Issues in the Scriptures for Holy Week," March 19, 2013, at Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music for the Episcopal Church.
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