Stamping Out Goodness – Palm Sunday
By Charles Rush
April 5, 2009
Phil. 2: 5-11
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day we begin Holy Week, in which we remember the last week of Jesus life. It is a study in moral compromise, a kind of mirror for us to hold up, so that we can better understand who we are. The same crowd that hailed Jesus as he entered will transform themselves into a mob and call for his execution when Pilate gives them a choice. The same clergymen that profess interest in learning more about the ways of peace, forgiveness, and the teaching on love will conspire to have Jesus secretly arrested, lest his popularity accidentally touch off a religiously inspired revolt against the brutal Romans. And the political authorities then act with the same Machiavellian realpolitik that Mideastern Emirs deploy in say, modern day Syria.
Plus ça change, plus
c'est la même chose…
Alas, I would like to say that I worked hard in researching
some obscure example here. However, on this score, almost any newspaper any day
will suffice.
Tuesday had a
report on the considerable divisions among the Arab leaders at their annual
summit meeting in Doha, Qatar… but the NYT reported that they had finally found
an issue that they could rally around in unison and bring them together. The
teaching of peace in Islam? no, no, no… a
mutual charity for their petro-dollars? No, no, no, please.
It is support
for the embattled Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the president of Sudan. He was
indicted by the International Criminal Court at the Hague this month for
‘crimes against humanity'. We have photographs, eye-witness testimony, taped
conversations that the army of Sudan was ordered to burn villages to the
ground, rape all the women, and kill as many boys as they could in hundreds of
separate incidents. Their crime? They are African. For the first couple years,
they massacred Christians and Anamists. But now that they've begun clearing Darfur, these Africans were
even Muslim, which illustrates that religion mattered not at all.
Said the
opening text, ‘we reject the attempts to politicize the principles of
international justice to undermine the sovereignty, unity, and stability' of
Sudan- a country not know for either unity or stability. That line appears to
have come right out of George Orwell's ‘1984'.
Then the moral
reasoning behind their righteous indignation is offered by, of all countries,
Syria, a nation consistently ranked amongst the absolute worst violators of
human rights at the UN year after year after year after year. Said President
Asad, “As for the UN's weak pretexts about fabricated crimes committed by
Sudan, we can discuss it with them after they bring those who committed the
atrocities and massacres in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq.” [i]
Fathers of
teenage boys will recognize this sad and desperate line of moral logic. Usually
we hear this early in the morning when we go out for a jog on Saturday early
and discover this large plastic bag of empty beer cans in the drive, no longer
even well hidden.
You wake Junior
up, looking very hung over, you walk downstairs. You are standing in the
driveway with Junior seeking information. Your spouse miraculously overhears
all of this from the other side of the house and scurries to the window, leans
out, and explains that the boys were actually all arrested last night when
their party was busted. She just didn't want to wake you up to tell you about
it. Heat is rising up the spine… You are just about to unload something, when
Junior blurts out, “It's not like you were never arrested Dad. Grandma told me
you raised hell.” Thanks for the support Mother… And now I'm ready to kill two
generations of my people.
The proverbial
words of Jesus, ‘He who is without sin, let him be the first to cast a stone'
used as a lame and last ditch effort deflect the bright lift of moral scrutiny,
obfuscating the entire social landscape. We Fathers of teenage boys know about this
pathetic ploy. It calls for calm control.
I believe that
my actual response was. “My beloved Son, my youth is an open book and you are
free to ask me any question about it- with or without Grandma- after
your first child is born!!! Until then, the subject is about your
behavior and you following the rules in this house.
We have many
examples of moral cynicism and moral obfuscation that exist in our world,
devised by crafty men and women to hide the actual flow of money, to hide the
act chain of command, to hide the actual responsibility for things. We all
participate in it, even the relatively virtuous. Every single leader has
huddled with lawyers, board members, around the subject of limiting liability.
You have to do it, even as you know it contains a certain morally malodorous
offense to the nostrils.
There is a line
in the Gospel of John when the religious leaders of Jerusalem are trying to
decide what to do with Jesus. They are worried that the adoring crowd will
bulge to the point that the Romans will enlist the soldiers to quell a riot of
sorts. They are worried that Jesus could incite the people and that more people
will perish as the Romans smash this insurrection. Just like our board meetings
today, they are worried about this and worried about that…
The Gospel of
John has the High Priest, Caiaphas, make this short speech to the other
leaders. He says, “Isn't it more expedient that one man should die for the
people and that the whole nation should not perish?” Isn't it more expedient?
It is. It usually is…
And, the point
of Holy Week, is to use this story as a mirror. It is not a story of rapacious
men. It is not a story of cynical men. It is all of us, every one of us. Aren't
we all expedient? Even the virtuous among us?
There is a
relatively profound scene in the movie, ‘Saving Private Ryan', that takes place
a few days after the D-Day invasion of Normandy. The men in one platoon have
just been through a thick moral fog- they have watched as some men died when
they were overloaded and their glider capsized. They watched some die running
heroically to save others. They have watched others just shot wantonly.
Meanwhile, they are all alive and trying to figure out what to do with one German
soldier they caught behind enemy lines: kill him? Drag him along? Let him go?
They all chime
in: Every life is precious; you can't kill the innocent; but if we let him go,
he'll turn tell the enemy about us and we could get killed? If we shoot him, who
will know? We don't have time for this? All those questions that any 5 of us
would ask in the same situation.
The Captain
finally responds. The Captain is a virtuous man. He wants to do the right
thing. He says, “You know what I say when one of the men under my command
dies?” All of his soldiers get quiet. “I say, ‘He had to die so that we could
save ten others… twenty others maybe… You know how many men have died under my
command since this war began?... 93… that means I've saved 930 men… maybe 2000
right? …. Right?
He starts
naming the names of the men under his command that week- Marc Offenhartz, Pete
Meehan, Greg Krieger, Alan Jones…
Other people
may be expedient, but not my child. Other people might be expedient, but not my
platoon buddy, not my spouse… Jesus taught us that each and every one of us is
a ‘child of God'. To God, none of us is expedient. Ben, Dave, Sharon, Caroline…
The Captain in
the movie has a hand that shakes. All his men notice it. Sometimes he grabs
hold of it to stop it. That hand that shakes, that moral anxiety because you
know that you are full of moral compromise and hazard- that is the price of
leadership on your soul. And when your hand stops shaking, you are either
retired or you've slipped into being an autocrat and are no longer a ‘real
leader', even if you don't know it yourself. We all have hands that shake,
nights that we can't sleep, days when we need another hour at the gym- because
we know that we are involved in complex and compromised situations and we
aren't sure that we have led honorably, even when we wanted to do it…
Some of these
things, you don't get by so easily. Some of this difficult, morally complex
situations, scar you for life. Every time I see these depicted, even in the
movies, I say a prayer for these guys. We ask so much of them. We don't just
put them into physical peril, we put them in spiritual peril. As it turns out,
you can't just turn off your conscience. It doesn't work like that.
It comes over
you at the oddest times like that haunting scene in MacBeth when the King's
wife has that spot of blood that she can't get rid of. You can mentally change
the channel but somehow this one thing keeps coming back and back and back.
We put these
guys in these situations on our behalf, so that we wouldn't have to do it. We
are indebted to them. I was riding my bike down the country lane outside of
Cambridge, England when I saw a wee sign that said, “American cemetery”, so I
pulled in, walked through the gate and there are thousands upon thousands of these
crosses, hill after hill. It is sobering unto staggering to reflect on. I found myself muttering the words of Isaiah
53 that we use in reflecting on Jesus:
Surely they have borne
our grief's,
And carried away our
sorrows.
We esteemed them stricken,
Smitten, and afflicted.
And they were wounded for
our transgressions,
They were bruised for our
iniquities,
Through their
chastisement we were made free,
And by their stripes we
were healed;
All of us like sheep have
gone astray;
We
have turned every one to our own way.
And we have laid our
iniquities upon them.
They did not
deserve this. But it was their duty and they did it. And we would not be who we
are had they not done what they had to do. The profound personal question in
‘Saving Private Ryan' is the spiritual question for all of us. At the end of
the movie, it is absolutely clear that Private Ryan is going to go home, back
to Iowa and his buddies are mostly dead. The Captain leans over to him as he is
dying himself, looks him in the eyes and says, “Earn this”.
He leads his
life back home. 50 years go by, he returns to Normandy, finds these guys
graves, remembers the whole thing, especially that haunting last command. He is
overcome with emotion, turns to his wife of 50 years and says, “Tell me I'm a
good man. Tell me I led a good life.” She can't possibly know the depth of that
question. But the truth is that this is the spiritual question for each of us.
Our lives and
everything we take for granted was bought for us by someone else. And the debt
is so big, we couldn't possibly repay it if we wanted to do. It would take more
than one life-time. So tell me that we are not idling away our time, diverted
with vain entertainments and supercilious indulgences. Tell me that we are
actualizing something that is true, something good, something beautiful-
something precious about life. Because the only way that can honor this debt is
to live lives of rich meaning… As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, I came not
that you simply have life but that you might live it abundantly. Or as the
Greeks would say that your life might be spiritually thick.
There is
something about us when we are acting collectively. We keep having these board
meetings like the Last Supper. Jesus says, “One of you will betray me”. In
other words, our problems are inside this room. They are inside all of us. It
is not ‘them'. It is not ‘out there'.
And then there
are howls of protest, “Not I”. “Surely, not I”. Like this very crafty Finnish
student we had in High School. He was here as an AFS student. He was always
breaking rules but never quite caught red-handed. I remember our soccer coach
started saying, “Jarmo, were you out at the party last night at the
cheerleaders house where everyone was drinking?” Jarmo had this wonderful
response. He would say, “Not me”… Like ‘Coach, how can you even suggest…' Jarmo
was the last to leave every time. “Not me”…
No, no, no, we
are all great guys, so who is it Jesus? Jesus says, almost plaintively, ‘he who
dips his bread in the cup with me.' That would be- everyone I think. And they
all fade away, each in their own way. Scripture only tells the story of two of
them. Judas told the Romans where he was, probably thinking that Jesus would
actually start the revolt against the Romans right then. Misguided zeal, we
don't know.
And Peter, who
is just plain afraid. But everyone fades away. At his trial, there is no one to
testify on his behalf. At his death, only his Mother is there to watch him in
that sad and lonely hour…. “All we are like sheep who have gone astray…”
“How did this
happen?” “I don't know, I wasn't directly involved. I mean, obviously mistakes
were made… but, uh, I mean, you could say we should done this, should've done
that… but, uh, I mean, I don't know, you know???
Jesus was the
embodiment of goodness and integrity. Even the Roman historians wrote about him
that he had an amazing spiritual charisma that awoke in people the desire to
live out of their higher selves. He taught us about love and forgiveness, about
reconciliation and the things that make for peace. He modeled compassion and
mercy, acceptance of others as ‘children of God' no matter your race or
education or power. We had goodness in our midst. And we killed it.
What is wrong
with us? There is something wrong with us. Maybe we didn't exactly mean to… but
we didn't exactly stop it either. We've done it over and over and over. I
dunno, there is something wrong with us. Amen.
[i]
See the New York Times (Tuesday, March 31, 2009) p. A5 as reported by Michael
Slackman and Robert Worth.
© 2009
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
