Text on the Second Sunday in Lent, March 7, 2004
Luke 13: 31-35
What is the point of the passion of Christ? (The real one, not the film.) What is God’s end, or purpose? To say “to save the world” begs the question, how that man’s appalling execution can help the world. Or me. Not every death of an innocent does the world much good. Why is this one different? At least this much must hold true: for his death to be something different, the man himself must be something different and new on earth. To give a sense for this something new, Christians name him “Son of God” and “Christ.”
But how do you know this? a passerby might ask.
Well, he was raised from the dead, the Christian might answer.
Then why the suffering? asks the passerby. It seems that this resurrection would be miracle enough for your Son of God, if you believe it. What is the point of the passion?
One thing all the gospel accounts portray clearly is Jesus’ certainty that he is called to Jerusalem to undergo whatever ordeal awaits there. When some concerned Pharisees warn him to flee, he declares his unwavering purpose, “to finish my work.” What is that work? What is the end of this passion? On your answer to this small question turns the world.
Two very different answers would have the world turn on two very different axes. One answer is this. Jesus suffered in my place. I deserve such punishment, but he took it on himself so that I don’t have to bear it. The other is this. Jesus is the “pioneer and perfecter of our faith,” as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it. “It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.” (Hebrews 2.10)
According to the first portrait, in which Jesus bears all the world’s sin on his back, it does not matter how he passed the ordeal, only that the awesome deed “was done for us.” In this portrait, you can’t be Jesus’ follower, ultimately, for he is going where and doing what you never can. The gulf between the Savior and the saved is absolute. Bearing the world’s evil is his job. Your job is to be grateful, and to return weekly in your weakness, asking mercy from the Judge, slowly increasing in confidence that he forgives everything, anything. Is this portrait a license for sin? Only the actual behavior of Christian adherents can supply an answer.
According to the second portrait, the point of Christ’s passion is to perfect the pioneer of our salvation; to reveal the path of salvation, so that we may take that path too. Here there is no gulf between Savior and saved. Again, from the Letter to the Hebrews: “It was fitting that God should make the pioneer perfect through sufferings, for the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. This is why Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters.” Now, this portrait of Jesus in the wallet of your life is no license to sin. Your job is to become like him, to follow him, not to bow and scrape to get another hall pass to go and sin some more this week. The Apostle Paul says, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.”
The portrait of Jesus in the film The Passion of Christ is of the first kind. Mel Gibson’s patterns his Jesus on the Hollywood action hero who saves people with powers you will never wield. Somehow, this comes as no surprise. Mel’s Messiah suffers appallingly, to be sure. His body is shown submitting to the violence in the same manner that all creatures suffer abuse they cannot escape. His whole demeanor is anguish that this ordeal might end, and, after duly uttering the familiar “last words,” he finally expires. But nothing in the movie hints of transfigured suffering. There is no sign of a path that the pioneer is perfecting. There is nothing new or different in the being of the man and nothing for you to learn how to do, for this is a portrait of the first sort, where the gulf between your sin and Christ’s passion is absolute.
But Christian faith persistently calls people to a higher vision of themselves, their path, and their pioneer. In the 1930s, Iulia de Beausobre was submitted to torture in the gulag of the Soviet Union. In her autobiography, The Woman Who Could Not Die, she tells how she came to life in extremis. Alone in her cell between sessions with her tormentors, she engaged an inner conversation between herself and what she called “my Leonardo.” One day, her inner Leonardo spoke to her of the possibility of transforming her suffering at the hands of “them.”
Princeton theologian Diogenes Allen concludes: “Through the very intensity of her suffering, through the being stripped of all that has hitherto constituted her personality—her past, her future hopes, her appearance, her temperament, her likes and dislikes—de Beausobre enters into the presence of Christ.” De Beausobre says even more: “The tone of fortitude shown by the tortured is very different when they think of themselves as members of the mystical body of Christ… Any and every deed of ugliness can and should be redeemed and transfigured… In all ordinary circumstances, a man must participate in the deed done if he is to participate in its redemption.”
How startlingly clear is the path of de Beausobre, following the pioneer. How bright, too, for a moment, is lamp unto our feet, shining on our path. This is the way that establishes our selves as children who cannot die, as we undertake to learn how to give over our past, our future hopes, our temperament, our likes and dislikes … in order to take part in the redemption of the world as it is, not as we wish it were. The movie now out there pulls the shade on light so bright as this. If you go, go ready to decide for the whole world which portrait of Jesus you are ready to lay by your heart.
Delivered at Central Presbyterian Church
Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps 2004
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