John 19
April 18, 2014
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the CCU Good Friday Service at First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Phyllis Tribble was my Old Testament professor who introduced me to the phrase, “texts of terror.” For starry eye seminarians, this was one of the most interesting classes among a host of course requirements.
“Texts of terror” are stories that you can’t believe are included in the covers of the Holy Bible. Jael, called the “most blessed of women” (Judges 5:24-27), hammered a tent peg through the skull of sleeping Sisera, an enemy general. Then there was Judith, who faked lust for Holofernes, an Assyrian commander, then prayed, “Give me strength today, O Lord God of Israel.” She then plunged his own sword into his neck (Judith 13:7). I hear gasps from you.
Then there was the wife of the Persian king, who won permission for the Jews throughout her husband’s Persian empire “to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate” as many as seventy-five thousand of their enemies (Esther 9:13-16). You can see why as seminarians, this was a popular class.
By anyone’s reckoning, these are indeed “texts of terror.” Mostly we ignore these stories and there are many others where there is violence and bloodshed, often in the name of God. During a canvass time one year, I got into all sorts of trouble for mentioning that Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead for withholding part of their cash from the early Christian community (Acts 5:1-11). “It’s just not an appropriate sort of story for the church,” I was told.
And yet this day, this Friday we call “Good,” we cannot ignore an even more horrifying story. In reading the story of the passion of Christ, his torture and death, we know that we have left the notion of the Bible as a book filled with exemplary people and a nice, admirable God. Instead, the Bible is revealed, in this story about Christ, to be a book about God’s relentless determination to love violent, bloody sinners—even if God has to die to do it.
We don’t do well with these terrifying moments of scripture. Who wants to face Elisha cursing a crowd of jeering boys “in the name of the Lord,” after which two she-bears appear and maul forty-two of them (2 Kings 2:23-24)? And God asks Abraham to kill his only child. And on this day, we come to the climatic moment of the whole Jesus story, that ominous event toward which we have been moving steadily each Sunday—God puts God’s own beloved child on the cross.
Many wonder, “How can we believe in a loving God who does or at least allows such unloving things?” How do we believe in a God who evokes such “texts of terror”?
Positive Spin
We can try to interpret these “texts of terror” in a way that makes them seem less terrible. God sent a ram to take Isaac’s place at the last moment. God raised Jesus from the dead. Thus the terrible texts become stories of rescue and resurrection. But that diffuses some of the real terror of worshiping and obeying God. And not knowing that there will be rescue, the terror of just thinking that you are doing the right thing only to learn later that you did not. That also ignores the terrible truth of the stories in which God sanctions violence: killing every firstborn in Egypt before Passover (Ex. 11:5), or ordering Saul to slaughter the Amalekites down to the last woman, child, and donkey (1 Samuel 15:3). These “texts of terror” are all there.
It is a great mystery how a living, generous God somehow gets implicated in all of this, just as it is a mystery of how God is able to take even the most terrible of terrors of this day on Calvary and weave even this into God’s purposes.
But there is no mystery that these stories, as terrible as they are, are stories about us.
We like to think that in these modern times that we have at last risen above these terrible events. Of course we think that from the safety and security of our country with Homeland Security and NSA that has produced no war here at home—though we sure know how to make war elsewhere. The violence that we generally do is from the safe vantage point of others. Unmanned drones still drop bombs. And the men and women who go overseas to fight the wars for us still come home with the terrible reminders that they have been both physically and psychologically damaged.
I know I am getting personal here but we hire others, somewhere far from our sight, to slaughter the animals we consume in gourmet dinners, all the while talking about how good and peaceable we are. I’m sorry that I may have just turned your stomachs.
Haven’t we recently gotten upset with our homeless friends just because they didn’t clean after themselves when we would be more than happy to clean after the messes that our own children and grandchildren have made? We sent a terrible and violent message when we judge people with different standards.
I suppose, like sinners of every time and place, we attempted to take refuge in our presumed righteousness, living under the illusion that if we just behave properly we are terror-exempt. Obey God and avoid picking up a sword. What is this obsession of having the right to carry around guns and rifles into Starbucks? Are we still living in the wild, wild West? Do we see ourselves more peaceful than the 11:00 PM news?
Yet we tolerate a culture where the murder rate is higher than anywhere in the world. Nearly two million of our citizens are incarcerated in this the most free country of all. Black boys and men are more likely to be falsely accused and arrested than anyone else in our society. The terrors that we do tend to be subtle, but no less terrible for the victim of our legislated, economically induced, urbane terror.
Terrifying Friday
It might be possible to tell yourself that we have risen above all that Old Testament, primitive terror. We have made progress, haven’t we? We are progressive. Aren’t we? We are good people. Are we? Until this day—this Good Friday and the story that it has to tell is terrifying.
If Jesus had been nailed to the cross by demonstrably, obviously bad people, then we might be able to walk away from the story free of implication. Yet one of his own, Judas, betrayed him. All of his disciples forsook him. A huge crowd, some of whom must have warmly welcomed him into Jerusalem during the first of the week cried “Hosanna!” now cried, “Crucify him!”
This is what these texts of terror do for us. They rob us of our presumptions of righteousness, our smug pretentiousness that clings to the lie that we are basically good people who are doing fine after all, that is, people who don’t need saving. But we are not such people, the story this day tells us. We are members of the screaming crowd who on Friday marched gaily up a hill outside of town and just happened to be there to crucify God’s only Son.
What’s to become of us? We have met the most terrifying of enemies and the enemy has our face, the enemy has the sound of our voice. What’s God going to do with us now, the terrible, terrifying mob of humanity?
We must wait until Sunday to find out.
Let me close with a story from Barbara Brown Taylor in her book, Tales of Terror, Times of Wonder.
Several summers ago I spent three days on a barrier island where loggerhead turtles were laying their eggs. One night while the tide was out, I watched a huge female heave herself up on the beach to dig her nest and empty her eggs into it. Afraid of disturbing her, I left before she had finished. The next morning I returned to see if I could find the spot where her eggs lay hidden in the sand. What I found were her tracks leading in the wrong direction. Instead of heading back out to sea, she had wandered into the dunes, which were already as hot as asphalt in the morning sun.
A little ways inland I found her exhausted, all but baked, her head and flippers caked with dried sand. After pouring water on her and covering her with sea oats, I fetched a park ranger who returned with a jeep to rescue her. He flipped her on her back, wrapped tire chains on her front legs, and hooked the chains to a trailer hitch on the jeep. Then I watched horrified as he took off, yanking her body forward so that her mouth filled with sand and her neck bent so far back I thought it would break.
The ranger hauled her over the dunes and down onto the beach. At the ocean’s edge, he unhooked her and turned her right side up. She lay motionless in the surf as the water lapped at her body, washing the sand from her eyes and making her skin shine again. A wave broke over her; she lifted her head slightly, moving her back legs. Other waves brought her further back to life until one of them made her light enough to find a foothold and push off, back into the ocean. Watching her swim slowly away and remembering her nightmare ride through the dunes, I reflected that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.
If we identified with the park ranger who appeared to have done some harsh things to the turtle that eventually led to saving the turtle’s life, how might we understand the cruel things that the disciples and the world did to Jesus? In God’s overall plan, might there be a place where terrifying and horrible things can happen that can still have a positive outcome? Jesus looks down from the cross to which we nailed him and says, “Brothers and sisters, I love you still. God, forgive them.”
On this Terrifying Friday, pray that God is turning your life upside down so that you may be saved by God’s forgiveness and grace so that God will turn you right side up. What’s God going to do with us now? We who are the terrible, terrifying mob of humanity?
We must wait until Sunday to find out.
Let us pray.
Almighty God, who for our sakes became human in Jesus Christ, give us the grace to bear the truth that confronts us on this Good Friday. May we, through honest confession of our sin, come to see the ways that we have rebelled against your will for us, despoiled your creation, wasted the opportunities that you have given us, and failed to live up to your loving desires for us.
Grant us the insight to gaze upon your tortured body on the cross and see there the truth of the depth of your love for us, the way that you take upon yourself our sin and bridge the great gap between you and ourselves.
Make this holy day for us be a day of truth, your truth. Amen.