Jesus, Remember Me: Sermon for Good Friday

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 20^th 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 Jewishness of Jesus is emphasized: instead of a loin cloth, a prayer shawl drapes his body; the crown of thorns is a headcloth; and the mourning angels usually depicted around Jesus are instead three biblical patriarchs and a matriarch. On both sides of the cross we see pogroms, with villages afire and literally turned upside down. On the left of the cross, a man flees holding a Torah scroll, while on the right a synagogue and its Torah ark are in ashes, and a Torah scroll set aflame. Refugees flee on foot and by boat. And in the center is Jesus, placed on the cross by those forces of power who ever seek to destroy anything they do not understand and cannot control or co-opt.

 

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:

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Psalm 22

Hebrews 10:16-25

Luke 22:14-23:56

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.

Walking the Way: Homily for Palm/Passion Sunday

Wow.

It’s not often you get such a wide swing of emotion in one Sunday’s readings. I want you to think about it: at the start of this service, we were rejoicing and shouting Hosanna and hailing Jesus as our king. It was easy to imagine ourselves to be walking in the way of Jesus. Twenty minutes later, we are shouting, “Crucify him!”

That’s right—“We” are shouting those things.

The immediacy of scripture is that we imagine ourselves within the stories, as one does with all great literature, whether fictional or non-fictional.

But there’s a danger in that, too. If we forget the contexts in which our gospels were written, if we forget that each one of them was written for a specific audience that was very different from us, we run the risk of getting sideways in our understanding of what actually is going on. Worse, we commit the mistake of “anachronism,” in which we place our modern context as a bracket or even a straitjacket over scripture, and we end up once again trying to “tame” Jesus and “tame” the gospel to fit our own preferences and understandings.

As I wrote in my priest’s reflection in the Beacon this week, the liturgical decision to combine observation of the joyous Palm Sunday service with the pathos and despair of the Passion Narrative into one service stems partly from the suspicion that many worshipers might not hear the Passion narrative at all if it was not observed the week before Easter. There is an assumption that a sizeable proportion of Episcopalians do not attend Holy Week and in particular Good Friday services—and honestly, that might be true.

I am hoping, however, that all of you will decide to fully observe Holy Week as much as you can—beginning with Palm/Passion Sunday today—(see? You’re off to a great start!). Then we have a kind of pause at the beginning of the week, and I urge you to spend each day with a special devotion, to contemplate the enormity of Christ’s death for us on the cross. I will provide links for those devotions on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram during the week from the “Journey to the Cross” section of the website d365.org, a collaboration between the Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

And then, please come for Maundy Thursday, with its commemoration of the birth of the Eucharist; Good Friday, recounting Jesus’s trial and execution and our meditations before our Stations of the Cross; and the Great Vigil of Easter, the holiest commemoration in our calendar (even more holy than Easter Sunday, in fact).

So you all are hopefully going to bust that myth wide open, and you’re going to experience the beauty of the Triduum—that fancy word that means “three days”—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and then the silence of Saturday until the Great Vigil helps us proclaim resurrection and reconciliation for all creation. 

I was oh, so tempted to let this Passion Narrative stand on its own—because really, what else but this story emphasizes exactly the cost of love that God is willing to bear for us? And then, this week, came the news from my home state of a woman who attempted to terrorize Jews and other targeted groups with vandalism, painting swastikas and slurs all over public spaces in central Oklahoma—including churches.

So there is one thing that has to be said. Although we didn't hear it in our dramatic version read together today, in the Bible, the Passion Narratives include language that blames “the Jews” for the death of Jesus-- over and over again. At the time of the gospels’ composition, those hearing this narrative were themselves likely Jews, and they understood this to be shorthand for “the authorities.” Those authorities at the time of Jesus’s execution were both Roman and Jewish. BOTH.

And yet the Romans do not get blamed. Against all other historical evidence we have—and there is evidence—Pilate was not some befuddled coward who was afraid of the crowd. He had absolutely no problem being ruthless in executing people without cause and did so plenty of times. The fact is that it was in the best interest of the early Jewish Christian communities to go easy on the Roman culpability in order to save their necks.

Because by the time the Gospels were written, the Romans had just gotten finished crushing a Jewish uprising in 70 AD. The cherry on top was their utter destruction of the Temple—after desecrating it first. And the gospel writers had some bitterness against the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem, who had urged against the uprising to begin with, not to mention their religious quarrel with followers of “The Way” over who Jesus was accepted to be.

That’s the context we have to remember: when the gospels say “the Jews,” what they mean is “the leaders.” But we don’t get that context. And so, over centuries, these gospels led to marginalization and prejudice against out Jewish brothers and sisters. 

As Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine noted, it’s vital to point out how much passages like these have been used through history to demonize Jewish people, to call them “Christ-killers,” to justify pogroms and hatred and violence against our Jewish brethren time and time and time again—or even to claim that Christianity is “better” than Judaism.

So come for all the Holy Week services—especially the Easter Vigil, where we will the salvation story starting with the creation of the universe through the story of the Exodus, through the prophets to the amazing discovery by Mary Magdalene and the other women who never abandoned Jesus even at the tomb.

Hearing those readings help us remember that the salvation of humanity begins from the beginning of time. God is ever making the heavens and the earth, and calling us back from the foolishness of Adam in thinking he could decide things himself. Remember when THAT all went wrong, the first thing Adam and Eve did was to hide. To think they could hide from their disobedience and the consequences of it. Just like we all do.

Yet Jesus, who is a new Adam, is not hiding from anyone. Instead, he boldly walks out to those looking to seize him. Instead of rebellion, Jesus acts out of perfect obedience, love, and unity with God. Instead of Adam choosing sin in opposition to love, this new Adam, Jesus of Nazareth, chooses to act in love in opposition to sin.

Once again, God knows his love will be met with rejection. This Adam is truly God’s son. Once again, we find the one who wants to give us everything, and we react with doubt, rejection, and fear. Those who come to arrest Jesus are seeking a rebel; but instead they find God in the shape of Jesus.

Yet we still refuse to recognize God as God. Instead WE rebel. WE want to be in charge. Yet Jesus will go willingly into custody for a crime he has not committed, and place himself in the hands of evil, of fear and sin, so that he may show that the love of God always wins out over evil, over fear, and over sin. We need to remember to hear “the people” instead of "the Jews" in the reading of the gospel passage today, because this passage in particular has been used throughout the centuries to justify anti-Semitism, and that is completely wrong.

WE are the ones-- all of us-- who put Jesus on the cross. We are there as Jesus is being questioned and condemned, and we are there as Jesus is executed although not guilty of any crime.

We are Adam and Eve, and we are also the disciples, we are the chief priests and the crowd, and we are Pilate and the soldiers. Each one of those groups represents something about us.

WE are Adam and Eve: We are the ones who run away and hide from the ones we love, and then wonder why we are alone. We are the ones who want God to be powerful enough to grant our wishes, yet weak enough to do our bidding.

WE are the disciples: We are the ones who ask to sit at the place of honor and but shun the shame of Calvary.

WE are Judas: We reject those we’ve pledged to love, betraying them when they won’t do what WE want.

WE are the chief priests and Pharisees: We are the ones for whom a thousand signs are never enough proof.

WE are Pilate: We are the ones who choose inaction in the face of wrong.

WE are the crowd: We are the ones who blindly follow our leaders, even to cheering the slaughter of innocents.

WE are the soldiers: We are the ones who take part in a thousand cruelties, both small and enormous, in the names of doing our jobs.

And all these sins add up. These sins are what put Jesus on the cross.

We want to believe that terrible events like crucifixion and injustice are the work of people who are evil. Yet the line between good and evil doesn’t run between us, it runs within us. It starts with how we respond to fear. So many of the people involved in the Passion narrative are filled with fear born out of mistrust. And this applies to us as well. We have created a society where we have elevated distrust, doubt, and betrayal to art forms, after all. When we lash out at those we love, when we destroy relationships out of dread that we could get hurt, we choose the way of anxiety rather than the way of trust—not to mention we ironically get the very thing we feared. Jesus calls us to a different way.

The Way of Jesus is the Way of trust, the Way of wonder, the Way of kinship with all people and all creation, the Way of the strong standing up for the weak, the Way of forgiveness, the Way of healing. That’s why these stories mean something to us—and this one today is the greatest story ever told.

But these stories also contain a challenge-- to be like Jesus. The challenge is to give up the way of fear. Jesus’s passion narrative as we hear it in today and always shows us not the way to die, but the way to live. Walking the Way of Jesus, in the name of love.

Amen.

Readings:

Preached at the 505, 8:00 and 10:15 services at St. Martin's Episcopal Church for Palm/Passion Sunday, April 14, 2019.