Father, forgive them
– not yet, Jesus. Give us time.
We are in no hurry for new life.
Give us time to think about what we have done,
to consider how we might compensate
you and one another. Give us time
to find the perfect sacrifice,
scapegoat or self-immolation,
either way, give us time to reach a settlement,
God, for, you see, we do not want to owe you,
but rather, to own you
– for they know not what they do.
Every Palm Sunday we start off well enough, praising God and waving palms in the air, waving at the passing traffic, throwing blessings around like confetti. Within the hour we have become the baying pack hounding Jesus to the cross, and to his grave.
If only we could keep the palms for today, send the Passion to its place on Good Friday, celebrate next Sunday the joy of Resurrection, scattering our blessings again, waving to the neighbours passing by, praising God with loud hosannas. We could almost pretend it didn’t happen. Even Jesus wanted to skip this part if it were possible.
We are in no danger of crucifixion. For us, the worry is becoming the baying crowd. We can blame mob mentality, peer pressure. The thing is, we know that those things do not absolve us from morality. In evolutionary terms, our social instincts were designed to promote safety, happiness, health and wellness: to support our goodness to one another. If those influences have turned malignant, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
While the very stones would resound hosanna if we were to fall silent, they would not call out for his blood. Stones don’t do that. Only we do that.
I heard an author interview on NPR the other week. Alex Abramovich wrote about finding his childhood bully, all grown up, running a bike club. It’s a California bike club called the East Bay Rats, so the material is not necessarily suitable for a Sunday morning at church. I won’t describe for you the violence that took place: suffice to say, an outsider, a gutter-dweller crossed the bikers. One man decided to punish him. Abramovich says,
[it was] very horrible to watch and horrible to think about and horrible also to think that I could’ve done something to stop it in real time. And I didn’t realize that in real time and didn’t do anything to stop it, so not a proud moment for me.
DAVIES: And the recycler survived, got up and walked away?
ABRAMOVICH: You know, I turned around and I thought I was going to throw up when I saw them ride over the recycler’s body. And when I turned back around, the recycler was gone. I was expecting him to be lying on the cement with broken bones, but he had scampered away. The next time I saw Trevor, Trevor said, you’d be surprised. Crack heads are surprisingly resilient, and I said I wish I could’ve done something to stop it, and Trevor said you could’ve. All it takes is someone saying stop. [emphasis mine]
All it takes is someone saying, “Stop.”
It couldn’t be the victim of the violence: he was voiceless; his humanity, any moral influence he might have, had already been dismissed in order for the attack to take place. It couldn’t be the biker: his brakes had already failed.
All it takes is someone saying, “Stop:” that someone would have to be a bystander. It would have to be one of the crowd. It would have to be one of us.
Peter failed to show up at the Pavement. He was lost already in his own spiral of shame. What of the others? What of the people cleansed of leprosy? What of the parents whose children had been wrenched from the jaws of death, of the people who had cast their cloaks on the ground, singing praises and welcome a week before? They all were silent now in the face of partisan power plays, the cry for a sacrificial lamb, a scapegoat, innocent blood in which to wash the hands of the guilty. Did they think the stones would cry out for them?
Our bishops met a week ago, and they released this “Word to the Church”:
On Good Friday the ruling political forces of the day tortured and executed an innocent man. They sacrificed the weak and the blameless to protect their own status and power. On the third day Jesus was raised from the dead, revealing not only their injustice but also unmasking the lie that might makes right.
In a country still living under the shadow of the lynching tree, we are troubled by the violent forces being released by this season’s political rhetoric. Americans are turning against their neighbors, particularly those on the margins of society. They seek to secure their own safety and security at the expense of others. There is legitimate reason to fear where this rhetoric and the actions arising from it might take us.
In this moment, we resemble God’s children wandering in the wilderness. We, like they, are struggling to find our way. They turned from following God and worshiped a golden calf constructed from their own wealth. The current rhetoric is leading us to construct a modern false idol out of power and privilege. We reject the idolatrous notion that we can ensure the safety of some by sacrificing the hopes of others. No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, we must respect the dignity of every human being and we must seek the common good above all else.
We call for prayer for our country that a spirit of reconciliation will prevail and we will not betray our true selves.
That we will not betray our true selves.
That is the danger of the Passion for us today, on this day. We are not – that is to say, most of us are not – in danger of crucifixion. We are, with Peter, with the silent shame of the lepers in the crowd: we are in danger of betraying Jesus. We are in danger of betraying ourselves.
We cannot change the path of the story that lies before us during Holy Week. That crowd has spoken, and we will walk with Jesus to the cross, into the tomb. We will, at the end, find resurrection.
We can still change the path of the story that lies before us this Holy Week. We can be the voice for the voiceless, crying, “Stop.” We do not have to betray Jesus; we do not have to betray our true selves.
We are not in danger of crucifixion. Grant then, everlasting God, that this day we fall into no sin, nor run into any [other] kind of danger; but that we, being ordered by thy governance, may do always what is righteous in thy sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, 57)
He returned.
I can’t get over that: he got away, he got free, he came home. Then he returned,
to the scene of his slavery, to the landscape of his discontent, to the house of his enemies.
He returned,
not for revenge, but to drive out the poison which had imprisoned him,
to run off bloody oppression,
to lance their guilt with love; with prayers for his persecutors, vipers though they may be.
As though Eve were to return to absolve the serpent;
Adam to glue the apple back on to the tree.
God grant us the grace to love those who persecute us; to persist in love when hatred seeps its poison into the very ground upon which we stand. Give us the patience to rest in the knowledge that you will, in time, make all things new, even us, even our enemies, even so. Give us the passion to make a difference while we wait, waging prayer against despair, outliving death, outdoing cunning and guile with the innocent wisdom of the gospel. Amen.
From the edge of the cliff we see no horizon.
Earth, air, water merge, solid state
dissolves, breath condenses, dessicates;
we lick salt out of the sky.
I drive him to the airport.
Lumbering hulls filled with gear
and stuff; jet fuel, too fast, too high,
caught in time, never soon enough.
Once upon a time, fear of falling
over the edge kept us close to home.
Now we are unafraid even to fly,
although still to die.
We want too much. We want
to reach beyond the fall,
to find solid ground beneath us, the days
when earth bleeds into heaven
I have anointed people for death, and I think Mary was right to get in early, because when I return, a few days later, or a week, I do not come bearing precious nard.
The Cassock
I carry dust in my pocket:
a mess of dirt and ashes with the faint whiff
of burnt palm nestled in my hand
in a black film canister, the kind that’s gone extinct
now. I am ready in confessional clothes,
armed with dirt and ashes and a dust-dry mouth,
a pocketful of earth to fill the grave.
A ghost A ghost
is following me; is following me;
she makes noise to be where she makes noise to be where
there should be nothing to see; there should be nothing to see;
she makes patterns in deep water she makes patterns in deep water
from which nothing emerges from which nothing emerges
clearly; she trips me, tricks clearly; she trips me, tricks
me, traps me, tracks me traps me, tracks
me, I try to out me, I try to out
run her, out run her, out
fox her, out fox her, out
wit her, sweat her wit her, sweat her
out. But when I step out out. But when I step out
of the shower, I am afraid to wipe the steam from the cold, damp mirror.
Poor, jealous Judas, love-lorn puppy,
eyes stinging from the stench
and from the memory: “See
how he loved him!” they said
when Jesus wept,
and now this woman spilling fragrant
death all over. Her sister
rattles the plates on purpose.
Mary, rapt face hidden by her hair,
rolls at his feet.
Poor puppy, Judas, always attention-seeking,
pants, “Teacher! She’s doing it wrong.”
Martha hollow laughs. Lazarus ghosts.
Poor, jealous Judas, his passion betrayed,
swears his own lips will kiss him the last.
Only then will they understand;
maybe then they will weep to remember
how Judas loved him.
_____
Poor, jealous Judas, love-lorn puppy,
eyes stinging from the stench
and from the memory: “See
how he loved him!” they said
when Jesus wept,
and now this woman spilling fragrant
death all over. Her sister
rattles the plates on purpose.
Mary, rapt face hidden by her hair,
rolls at his feet.
Poor puppy, Judas, always attention-seeking,
pants, “Teacher! She’s doing it wrong.”
Martha hollow laughs. Lazarus ghosts.
Poor, jealous Judas, his passion betrayed,
swears his own lips will kiss him the last.
Only then will they understand;
maybe then they will weep to remember
how Jesus loved him.
It is such a familiar story, and one which we love: God running to us, skirts hitched up, “my child! My child!” It is all the good news that we need. We were dead but are alive again, by the grace of god, the love of Christ.
But the first ones to hear Jesus tell the tale did not have any such tradition of layers of interpretation. Just for a few minutes, I want to see if we can set aside the Sunday school children’s bible picture of the father God running in the road, and hear the story of an ordinary family, as though for the first time.
A man had two sons, the one who left, and the one who stayed away.
Thirty years ago, or so, I was still at home finishing school. My brother was living in a land to the west, working drudge shifts in a fancy hotel. An acquaintance reported seeing him lately in town. Nonsense, said my father; he is working out west in a fancy hotel. But then my parents got to thinking that it had been a while since they had heard from him, and when they tried to call the fancy hotel, he was no longer living there, or working there. Some trouble over drugs, the manager said. For a week or two, we wondered where he might be, whether the neighbour had truly seen him, and not some ghost that looked like him.
We found him, in the end, because in his desperation and degradation and drug famine, he broke into the pharmacy at our doctor’s surgery.
There was no feasting at his return; but there was some kind of relief, resolution. My brother, who might have been dead for all that we know, was alive, and kicking; and although there was no fatted calf, there was a bail-out.
Or am I conflating his infinite cycles of exile, disgrace, and restoration; his many returns from the dead?
I read this parable, and it is impossible not to recognize the addict in the younger brother. Even as he is coming home he is working out how to get around his father, calculating the angle that will get him off the hook, because he is hooked. And even then, reading him, his blessed return, it is impossible not to weep for the ones who never made it home.
Last year, according to figures from the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office, deaths from heroin overdose totalled 183, or one at least every two days. Add in Fentanyl, oxycodone, other opiates, and the death toll rises to 279, in Cuyahoga County alone, in 2015. In one graph, Euclid is second only to Lakewood as a suburban site of overdose death. In another graph, Parma throws out the curve and Euclid is third; but we are head and shoulders above the next-placed city, and this is not a competition we want to be winning. We are our brothers’ keepers, are we not?
There are some things we are beginning to get right, in spite of our Pharisaic impulses to self-righteousness and morality plays. “Just say no” is so much easier to say from outside of the spiral of addictive disease. But there are some things we are beginning to get right: zero tolerance is beginning to give way to an understanding of acquired tolerance, and the dangers of overdose after withdrawal and treatment, when that tolerance has dropped, and the same dose that used to do it for us now is deadly. Zero tolerance is not, anyway, a good Christian response to chaos and crisis. Healing sounds more like the Jesus we know.
It is easy to be bitter, to remember that when black bodies were dying of the same addictive, predatory disease, the answer was to declare war, waged less against drugs than against drug addicts, as it happened. It is worth noting that cocaine still accounted for 109 deaths in Cuyahoga County in 2015. It is worthy to point out that more than 75% of people dying from heroin are white; and in the face of that crisis, we are willing to extend our tolerance, even beginning to venture out to meet them on the road, to catch them with our naloxone kits, to save them. Those who were dead are alive again.
But one who was dead is alive again, and may we all learn to live again. I don’t know that I have the right to say so, but I am trying to be honest with you.
I have wondered, this week, how we are called to respond to the family crisis unfolding around us. I have not always been able to do much for my own elder brother. None of us saves the other; but God, who is the father and mother of us all, loves each of us beyond understanding, beyond all reason.
That, I think, is what we have to offer. That is the good news that should send us flying out, skirts hitched up, to forestall the one who is lost on his way to death. One way or another, there is always a place for you in God’s house, we should tell her, your own home. One way or another, we tell her mother, his father, one way or another there is welcome, there is food, there is life. And we will do our best to leave our own baggage in the fields, and come into the light with the lightness of love hitched up to join the feast.
Amen.
_____
Further reading:
Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (HarperCollins, 2014)
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010)
Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Orbis, 2015)
Waiting
for the God to come
home; if I saw her
on the road would I run,
hitching up my skirts,
fire up the pyre,
melt the golden calf,
sacrifice my unbelief,
my cold soul
on the altar of her passion?
over the water 