Sovereignty
Sermon by James W. Crawford
Palm Sunday, March 28, 1999
Hosanna! Hosanna! The liberator arrives in triumph. "Hosanna!" shout the oppressed and colonized. The long sought revolution lies at hand. Rome and its sycophants will be driven from the sacred precincts of the Holy City. With local autonomy restored, religious institutions empowered, homegrown leaders in charge, Israel will gain again its national identity. Hosanna, indeed!
Except in five days those Hosannas turn to—what?—Crucify him! Crucify him! In five days hope turns to betrayal. Jesus, the liberator, suffers a state-mandated death penalty. The religious precincts, ambivalent about this outsider crashing their party, now perceive him as blasphemer, anarchist, incendiary amid the status quo. By Friday that enthusiastic crowd lining David Street on Sunday troops to the landfill outside the city walls, cursing, mocking, spitting, shrieking, "Death and good riddance!"
And that gang of twelve, those so-called disciples, parading by his side on Sunday? Pathetic. Disappeared, slunk off, in hiding, shaken by the sentence and bloody catastrophe. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment, talk about innocents executed, just take a trip through Holy Week, Palm Sunday to Good Friday.
Who do we see in charge of that Holy Week debacle? We see Pilate, the Roman procurator, dispatched to keep the peace, secure the empire. We see the religious elite, sworn to uphold the ethical foundations of a sophisticated religious tradition and structure. On Friday, we see that Sunday crowd realizing their expectations betrayed, the surge for freedom down the drain, their lives crushed under the imperial boot. All of these designed, plotted and with furious enthusiasm collaborated in ridding their world of this fraudulent King, this heretic, this monumental fake and troublemaker. And the sign of their ultimate royal, religious and popular sovereignty, the signal of their victory? That ruthless and brutal human invention, the Cross. Humiliate the king. Delegitimize any religious claims. Mock him before any rendering of loyalty. Dump him. Defeat him. Destroy him. And just like that this world takes care of Jesus. An itch in the empire. Never to be heard from again.
Never to be heard from again? Defeat at Calvary? The Cross, the end? This morbid, decisive symbol of the powers-that-be getting their way terminal? Not on your life! What looks to be sovereign at Calvary—the forces allied against goodness—turn out to be ultimately defeated and what looks to be defeated at Calvary, is in truth sovereign. Really? Yes, really, proclaim two thousand years of confession and experience by women and men like you, like me.
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So what do we say about the Cross in light of the events of Holy Week and Easter? We say, in faith and in hope, the love of God prevails through the worst life can do to us, even when it looks as if Love fails. The Cross testifies to that!
Take this terrible war in Kosovo, for instance. . . A Holy Week War. We witness in Kosovo violence cut from the same cloth Jesus encountered in his Jerusalem demise. This Kosovo War tells us a lot about ourselves. It is not just about Serbs and Albanians, Croats and Greeks, Brits and Germans and Americans. It is about all of us human beings. This war confirms what we see at Calvary itself: hatred and violence, human desecration and self-deception, the murder we intend for and carry out against one another . . all of this still plaguing us. Things have not changed in 2000 years. The cynicism, the slaughter, the moral rationale; the asking of God's blessing by the leaders of all factions, Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, Reformed; the use of overwhelming firepower in the fond, but usually futile, hope that violence can be controlled; another episode in our bloodstained history, another horrible incident in this most horrible of centuries.
What does our faith say about such catastrophe? Is the burning of villages, the massacre of populations, the rape of teenaged girls a denial of the love and power of God? Is a Holy Week War repudiation of the ultimate rule of Divine love? No! No! If anything, the Christian faith recognizes this terrible propensity of human beings to make war with one another, to walk on one another, exclude one another, to separate ourselves from one another—yes, to kill one another. It recognizes our tendency to cloak our activity in lofty rationale grounding our choices, more often, morally justifying perceived necessity. We used to call it propaganda; we call it "spin," these days. The Christian faith recognizes our tendency to beat on one another, and the Christian faith insists from precisely this condition we need be saved. War and rumors of war show us how badly we need a Savior. Holy Week's gruesome Friday crucifixion demonstrates how perverse and deceived our hearts can be. If anything, the Cross demonstrates the depths of our tragic condition and our incapacity to escape it by ourselves. But right here—right here—lies the heart, the mystery, the magnetic power of the Cross: at this very point we discover ourselves most profoundly lost, here we discover Love's intention and means to save.
Let me put it this way. Does the name George Matheson mean anything to you? Probably not. George Matheson went blind. The woman who agreed to marry him ditched him because she did not include blindness on her agenda. And Matheson, now blind and abandoned: Cynical? Bitter? Hopeless? Curse God? Forget it. George Matheson sat down and wrote one of our most treasured hymns: "O Love that Will Not Let Me Go." How could Matheson affirm such a thing? How could he testify, "O light that follows all my way . . . , O joy that seeks me through my pain . . . , O Cross that raises up my head . ."? George Matheson could write those affirmations when he looked at the one point in human history where it appears as if God really does let us go. When Matheson looked at the cruelty and abandonment at the Cross of Christ—at the very moment life appears God-forsaken—at that moment he discovers human life is, in truth, embraced, affirmed, loved—loved! Right in the middle of what appears literally to be a God-damned mess.
Are you kidding? Loved in the mess? It is a terrible problem, this matching a good and loving God with all the evil, betrayal, arbitrary injury and self-inflicted wounds we confront in our world. The crucifixion of the innocent, this war in Kosovo. This last week, Susan Gove, the mother of a murdered girl, argued with Cardinal Law about the death penalty. I will never forget her deeply wounded and profoundly despondent rejoinder to his kind and earnest pastoral assertion that one murder does not justify another, even in the name of the Commonwealth. Retreating to sit down she wept, "My heart has been cut out. I'm troubled by God. I no longer speak to God." Are we not all troubled with God when stricken with outrage, or tragedy, an untimely death, a terrible accident, a devastating illness, a Holy Week War? Where do we turn for an answer? Where can we discover a clue?
Try the foot of the Cross. Ask the question there. "If God is good; if God is loving, where is this goodness and love when Jesus dies? Where is God power when that hate-filled mob-execution snuffs out Jesus' life?"
The clue to the answer is closer than you think. You can find it in the millions of Crosses crowning our steeples, shining through art, glorifying our music, anchoring our chancels, and yes, hanging around the necks of our loved ones, not to mention the Crosses pinned to lapels or on necklaces of you in the pews this morning. The answer speaks from this stunning centerpiece focusing our worship week after week. An instrument of execution? No! A sign of hope! A tool for torture? Hardly. A vehicle of love!
In Holy week, at the Cross, we discover God's power resides not in preventing tragedy, not in halting disaster, not in staying injury or injustice, not in intervening and single-handedly stopping our malice or curbing our stupidity. God's power resides in working through and, yes, seeking to transform the worst life can do to us, and granting us the strength and courage, the grace and patience to handle it. God's power lies in enabling us to testify with George Matheson when it looks as if the world is tumbling in and chaos and evil will carry the day, God's power enables us finally to testify and, yes, to sing, in faith, in hope: "O Love that will not let me go!"
So where is God when Jesus dies? Where is God—God's love, God's power—when the world seems upside down or our lives take a devastating hit? Amid all that denies it, and there's plenty, whether on Calvary or in Kosovo, in your life or in mine, God is there, God is here, and God's love works to restore, to redeem, to recreate. God is there, God is here all the time. Now, in this kind of world, that is sovereignty!
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