Cycles

Pilate asked him, "So you are a king?"

Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."

Pilate asked him, "What is truth?"

-John 18: 37-38a

The behavior of Jesus during the passion is puzzling to most people who are not Christian, and to many who maintain only a shallow connection to the label of Christian.  The Gospels make it abundantly clear that Jesus did not crave or seek after anything like a title or a crown.  On several occasions the people, taken up with enthusiasm for his power and teachings, "tried to make him king."  He does not accept the honor.  Also, he is deliberately evasive when people, including Pilate, try to sort him out in this way.  Pilate would know what to do with a rival (read a king other than Herod, who the Romans accepted and tolerated as a useful puppet), he does not know what to do with the truth.

Jesus has knowledge of the truth, and he knows that being a king will not help.  He knows what kings are and are not capable of doing.  In the deep story or meta-history of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures there is a persistent theme of God trying to convince people that they need no other Lord.  The three primary monotheistic religions all have this at their core. The people of Islam say, "There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet."  Christians and Jews both revere the first commandment of the Torah: "Have no other Gods before me," which Jesus phrases (in a rather direct quotation of the Mosaic law) in the form of "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength.  For whatever else we might disagree upon the unity of God is pretty important to all of us.

Which is why Jesus avoids "kingship." If he were to be the "King of the Jews," it would be, in fact a demotion, and more than that, it would lead to a catastrophe, a war that cannot be won.  The Kingdom of Heaven doe not work the way of earthly kingdoms, and for good reason.  Look at the way kingdoms or "principalities and powers," as they are sometimes called, work out for us.

What has transpired over Easter weekend in Sri Lanka is yet another exhibit of how our earthly kingdoms, even and especially our religious "kingdoms," are antithetical to God's love and grace.  It turns out that the bombings of churches and hotels that cater to "westerners," was a retaliation by radical Muslims for the Christchurch mosque shooting sin New Zealand. Another salvo in the global culture war between East and West, between perverted exemplars of Christianity and Islam. On some level this is a complicated global drama, on another it is a very old and very simple story, with some very dire consequences.  The first murder in the Bible was committed by Cain, because he was jealous of his brother Abel.  God loved Abel's sacrifices of meat, and did not love Cain's sacrifices of crops. The premise on it's face is absurd, the scriptures tell us that God does not desire or require burnt offerings and that what God wants is our love.  Our jealousy of others, particularly on religious grounds, is stupid and dangerous. It always has been.

It is idolatry, it is loving a small god who is simply not god enough to be the Creator of all things.  This is why, when Pilate says, "So you are a king?" Jesus says, in paraphrase, "That's your word, your idea, not mine.  I'm about the truth."  Kings do a lot of killing to be kings, even good kings.  Kings have to constantly inflict violence on others to remain kings, even if they are just, there are always some enemies and infidel out there that need a good smiting.  Jesus says, "love your enemies," that's a terrible idea for a king.  Jesus knows something about the cycle of violence, that evil feeds on itself, one violent act begets another.

We went to the United States Holocaust Memorial yesterday.  It was my second visit, and while I remember the crushing sorrow of considering the victims from last visit, what struck me yesterday was how thorough the curators of the museum are in telling the stories of the Nazis themselves.  It is important to remember that the monsters in the worst tragedies of our history are, in fact, human beings. I found myself staring at the parades of soldiers carrying Nazi flags, at the crowds of people shouting "sig heil." And I thought about how easy it is to dehumanize them in the same way that they dehumanized the Jews and the homosexuals and the various other "problem" groups.  The museum does a good job of presenting the rise of Nazism as a response to suffering, people were willing to accept the brutality of Hitler and his ranks because they were experiencing deprivation and the failure of the Weimar Republic in the wake of World War I.  They were ripe with the need for a scapegoat (one of the many symbols that Jesus embodies more so than a king, the Lamb of God).  The people that the Nazis were able to vilify were groups that have been historically easy to treat this way, the Roma (gypsies), Jews, Gays, handicapped and disabled people.  This is not a new phenomenon, but because of how things were in the world and because of the fearful advances of technology, and because most of the world was caught up in their own problems (think Great Depression), the old story played out again, this time Cain was an entire nation.

What Jesus did when he went to the cross was voluntarily submit to being Abel, instead of becoming Cain.  A king would and will always be jealous for his kingdom.  Even the "good" king, in his drive to be benevolent to his subjects will be a scourge to his enemies.  Christ cannot and does not play the Game of Thrones (sorry, had to slip that in there), where you win or you die.  He plays the game where he dies, and he wins.  It's the only way out of the cycle you see.  If he wins he will become a tyrant, perhaps a tyrant like no other, look at Hitler for an example of someone who was able to convince people that they had some sort of divine cause to cleanse the human race of impurities (sin).  This was, in point of fact, the goal of the Devil's temptation of Jesus in the wilderness: to get him to claim power and take authority over the "kingdoms of the world."

If he had taken that road, the cross would not have been on it, but he also would not have been able to show us a way that can get us out of this endless cycle of violence and revenge.  We cannot, indeed we must not, assume that the way of Jesus is going to work for everyone, "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." I think it would be great if everyone did listen, but in the process of enforcing that, we would inevitably become something that is anti-christ.  If you doubt it pay attention to the response of the churches to the Nazis, and now to Islamic extremism, do they seek truth, which must include justice, mercy and love somehow, or are they easily led into fantasies of vengeance and purification?  Are they willing to go into the darkness of the tomb without trying to inflict their pain on others, or are they willing to "fight?"  Will they endorse violence in the name of the "king?"

For those that belong to the truth, the attack on churches, particularly on Easter Sunday, is such an amazingly futile act of evil. It would be comical if it wasn't so tragic. My hope is that we (all of us) will listen to the voice of the crucified and risen Lord, and not try to exact revenge. Honestly, there's a good chance that some "christian" leaders in this country are already beating the war drum against Muslims.  It's a horror, Cain still wanders this earth. Let's break the cycle of violence here, and let's do it for the sake of the Risen Lord.

Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright.

I own golf clubs, but I'm not good at the sport. I watch golf casually, as in the Masters at Augusta National and sometimes the US and British Open if I'm not doing something else.  But over the past two decades I have watched Tiger Woods with much more interest than I actually have in the game of golf.  I'm not alone.  Over the past decade, as Tiger has struggled through troubles of various sorts, something rather unlikely has happened, he became an underdog again.
For those of you not familiar with the saga of Mr. Woods, and I'm sure there are a few of you, Tiger was a golf prodigy, who appeared on a TV show when he was barely school age, with his father Earl.  Earl cultivated Tiger's talent for what is perhaps the world's most difficult game, and by the time he was a teenager, Tiger was already roaring towards being a professional golfer.  When he emerged from the amateur ranks, everyone already knew about this kid, they had been talking about him, they had been waiting for him, like he was the chosen one.
Even in his late teens, Tiger was good; he hit the ball long and had a killer instinct that brought people who didn't care a lick about golf into the crowd.  All of the sudden, galleries at the tournaments were full to busting with people who did not look like the typically white, middle-aged men who were the nearly exclusive patronage of the sport.  Tiger Woods, half black, half Phillipino, young and as driven as the other sports icon of the age, Michael Jordan, was a nearly instant sensation, even before he won his first tournament.
It is a rare thing when a phenomenon actually lives up to the hype, especially in a game as complicated and ephemeral as golf.  Tiger was dominant in a way that the world had not seen, not even in the likes of Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer.  As Tiger hit his prime, the field seemed to wither, the sports media wondered not if, but when Tiger would catch Nicklaus's seemingly untouchable record of 18 major wins. He did seem dominant in a way that is only comparable to Michael Jordan and the Bulls of the mid 1990's, it was not if, but by how much Tiger would win.  He racked up win after win and honestly it seemed like it might just go on forever.  The other top tier golfers were just going for the scraps that Tiger left behind, while golf as a whole was very suddenly at or near the top of the heap in terms of visibility and popularity, and it was ALL because of Tiger.
If you think that is an overstatement, the next chapter proves that it was not.
Earl Woods died, and Tiger's world started to come apart a bit.  I suppose it might have been at least a little predictable, Earl had so much to do with making Tiger who he was.  Tiger was married to a model, Elin, he had a couple of kids and everything seemed to be so very perfect, but he was also addicted to sex, and engaging in serial infidelity.  As a very wealthy man, and perhaps the most famous person in the world at that particular moment, it was rather inevitable that such behavior would come into public view at some point.  Tiger was also beginning to get older and experience problems with his knees and his back.  His violent, powerful swing had consequences.  His enormous wealth and success did as well.  His marriage fell apart, seemingly at the same time as his body.
Now it wasn't about Tiger on the golf course, it was Tiger in rehab, Tiger in surgery, Tiger getting arrested for being found by the side of the road in a drug induced stupor.  When he finally did show up on the course he was profoundly average by professional standards.  He missed cuts, he couldn't seem to hit it straight, and he often had to withdraw for physical reasons.
They still talked about him on the TV though, because his fall was nearly as compelling as his dominance.  Over the past decade, as Tiger wandered in one wilderness after another, the sports-talk guys never gave up the chatter.  Will he ever win again? Will he ever be "Tiger" again?  For most of them, the answer was no.  And so the most dominant golfer ever was turning into a footnote, a walking shadow of what he used to be, and his back kept getting worse, to the point where golf became a secondary consideration to merely being able to walk.
After a surgery, where the prognosis was a bit of a toss up, Tiger's back was stabilized.  Last year, he started to show flashes of the old Tiger.  He had spent most of his thirties mired in futility of one sort or another, but now in his early 40's he seemed to be emerging from the wilderness.  Still, he might never be the Tiger we all remember.  Last week he proved those who thought that wrong.  Tiger won the Masters tournament yesterday, after posting four straight rounds under par, which at Augusta National is practically a superhuman feat.  Tiger had the look that he used to have, and the field melted in front of him.  Those of us that watched him 15 years ago recognized that act, and we remembered why he is so very important to the game and to our very culture.
It is not just that he won a tournament, or even that he won a major tournament, it is that he came back from the edge of destruction, he battled back from near irrelevance.  The greatest golfer the world has ever seen somehow became an underdog again, and yesterday on the 18th green of Augusta he shrugged of that mantle with a flex and a roar, and became Tiger again.
I honestly don't know why I care, but I do.  It is human storytelling, it is a saga in real life.  Watching him hug his children, who cannot remember when the last time their Dad was the best golfer in the world, actually got to see that, indeed, he was, and experience the hope that he might just be again, it is somehow a holy thing that we all get to share.  Tiger's entire life has been lived in public, for better and for worse.  Those cheers that carried him off that golf course yesterday were, I think, more for a man who has overcome his own ruin as they were for a man who got his golf game back on track.  I know that the catch in my throat was not about the significance of the game, but about the remarkable ability we humans have to overcome, even when everything falls apart.
Thanks Tiger, you have made it worth the watching and the waiting.