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.