April 18, 2014

Clay Nelson

Good Friday     John 18:1-19:42

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Today we are meditating on an event that changed the world, sometimes for the better and sometimes not.  But either way it was a significant change.  Anyone who has been involved in trying to bring about any kind of social change knows how difficult that is, and that Jesus did it by dying makes it all the more remarkable.

Think of society as a garden, full of a rich diversity of productive plants in beneficial relationships with each other. Think of culture as the soil they are embedded in, from which they draw essential nutrients, and to which they contribute their own stuff for its enrichment.  Social change movements, at their best, want to fix a world dominated by exploitive relationships. In Jesus case, Roman occupation and Temple enforced purity laws.  Most social change movements work from the ground up, focusing on the soil itself, since this is what creates and sustains the dominant relationships. After all, culture shapes the very ways we see, hear, feel, taste, smell, breathe and think in both the most mundane and the most transcendent ways we live our lives.

The problem with this analogy and this theoretical approach to social change is we are the soil as well as the fruit of the plants. We both embody our culture and reproduce it season after season. It's inside us and out there, always. This makes attempting social change by focusing on the soil an exercise in futility. Here is an example:

In Argentina 50 workers took over abandoned factories and revitalised them under worker control.  Once they had taken over the factories and began to organize to run the business, they hit a big wall.

They called in a consultant to help them.  He began by going around the room asking them to describe their situation and concerns. By the time he got to the seventh person, a lot of people in the room were crying. This person put it very eloquently, “We took over the workplace; the owners and the upper management were gone, because they didn't want to be a part of a workplace that they thought was going to fail. And we took it over and made it work. We were so excited. We made our wages equal. We instituted democracy. We had a workers' council. We made our decisions democratically. And after a period of time, all the old crap came back. All the old alienation came back, and now it just feels the way it used to feel.” He concluded, “I'm afraid Margaret Thatcher was right, there is no alternative.” This is why they were crying.

The problem was the basic assumptions we have about life, we received from the culture that raised us. It is embedded in us. It is the ground of our cultural being. These Argentine workers were attempting a radical transformation of their lives and the world around them, and they hit a wall. That wall wasn't "out there," but inside them. They had run full force into their own passivity, the very passivity that had been an integral part of the hierarchic system they were working to transform. They had come square against the fact that they were the problem as much as the oppressive owners were. And, to boot, they didn't know what to do about it. Their first reaction was to capitulate to the only way they had of making sense of their predicament: “Maggie was right.” That is, they fell back on a deep belief their society had enculturated into them from the moment of their birth.  This recognition that it was their own internal complicity with the powers that had oppressed them liberated them to move from passivity to passion.  They began to transform themselves.  This enabled them to breach the wall. It changed the way they experienced work, their workmates and themselves. The factories succeeded.

It was this wall John was trying to break through with his version of Jesus’ Passion.  It is not even close to an historical account, and to read it that way is to miss that it is a work of art painted by a Jewish mystic responding to his cultural situation and his desire to change it.  Everyone in it represents the cultural context the Johannine community is facing about 70 years after the crucifixion, from Judas to Peter to Pilate to Mary to the Beloved Disciple.  Even Jesus has become a symbol.

To understand this version of the Passion it is important to understand the culture it was created in.  Remember, our Christian faith was born in the synagogue. The first Christians were Jews who only wanted to expand Judaism to include Jesus, just as such figures as Isaiah, Hosea, Amos and Micah had been included. That is why they kept trying to relate Jesus to Abraham, Moses and Elijah.

The tensions between the old tradition and new possibilities were not always comfortable, but they were tolerable until external pressures were brought to bear.  In 66 CE the Jewish-Roman War broke out in Galilee.  When it expanded to Judea, the Romans in 70 CE destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple.  At that moment Judaism entered a struggle to survive.  By the time hostilities ceased, Judaism had lost its national home, its holy city, its Temple and its priesthood.  It could no longer tolerate a revisionist movement that sapped its energy and challenged its boundaries.  At that point the Johannine community was forced to flee.  Tradition says it went to Ephesus.  There they tried to re-enter the synagogue but tensions with the orthodox led the leaders to expel them in 88 CE.  A movement that had sought to define itself as an expansion of Judaism now found itself completely outside that framework. This created a wall in the community. Some equated the Jesus experience with the God experience, but others found that difficult.  They could affirm that Jesus was the fulfilment of Jewish messianic expectations but they could not overcome their enculturation to accept the oneness Jesus claimed with God. They would eventually return to the synagogue, while those who stayed John describes as beloved disciples.

Finally, this fragile faith community had to endure and embrace a culture hostile to their religious views. The exploitative and oppressive Roman Empire viewed them as a threat to Pax Romana, and persecuted them harshly. In the face of that cruelty, there was no longer any real hope that Jesus was returning anytime soon to destroy the oppressor and establish his kingdom.

This is the culture the Fourth Gospel was created from.  In the light of it John’s passion sums up the new vision of Christianity his Gospel has laid out.  His purpose is to bring us into a dimension of life that we have never known before. He gives us a Jesus who offers us new life, a new consciousness and a new doorway into the mystery we call God.

He does this by using mostly historical figures in the telling of Jesus’ final week to represent the situation being faced by the church in his time. What the mystic artist paints is not just an external drama, but an internal drama as well.  All the characters have counterparts in the human psyche:

Peter with his wavering between darkness and light represents all of us as we struggle internally to be born into a new consciousness of what it means to be fully human.

Pilate represents not only the external powers and principalities that seek to control and oppress us, but internally he symbolises our desire to survive in the face of them.  While he sees the truth that Jesus is beyond his power, he succumbs to the threat that if he releases Jesus, he is not Caesar’s friend.  He has to choose between Jesus and survival.  The instinctual human drive to survive decides.  Internally, Pilate has not absorbed the idea that to gain our life we must lose it.  We cannot participate in the new life Jesus represents without doing so.

Mary is outwardly a symbol of the Jewish people who rely on tradition to protect them.  They are walled off from a new understanding of their faith that Jesus represents.  Internally, they seek security in a dangerous world.  Seeking security and seeking a new consciousness are not compatible.

The Beloved Disciple is a mythological character, an archetype, who, like Lazarus, has passed from death to life.  He lives in the light.  He has been transformed into one fully alive.  He knows that, like with Jesus, the life of God flows through him.  He is a new creation and the first citizen of a new Israel.  He sees, believes and understands.

At the other end of the spectrum of response to Jesus is Judas Iscariot, a literary figure, not a historical one, who John uses to represent darkness.  He is the darkness to Jesus’ light John begins his gospel with, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” He is the part of us that says no to all the possibilities that Jesus represents.  He is unable to move from darkness to light, from death to life. It has been suggested that in Jungian terms Judas is Jesus’ shadow side, which he embraces by shining the light from within it.

Without Judas in the story, darkness isn’t darkness until it is greeted by light.  Death is not death until it is confronted by life.  We do not know who we are until we are met by who we could be.

Through this imagery of dark and light, John’s Jesus invites us to step out of our craving for security and our compulsion to survive to embrace the darkness; to transcend it that we might enter a new consciousness that reframes all the values our culture has planted within us.

As we gaze upon the cross, let our eyes then turn to the labyrinth.  It is a symbol of the internal journey we must all take to find a life free of domination, exploitation and fear.  While not straight, neither is it a maze.  It is a pathway through the cross where our true humanity can be found - one with the divine mystery. That discovery changes everything: How we see each other, our purpose, the world, and ourselves. What we have to remember with the Argentinian workers is we cannot get there passively. It requires passion. Amen.