The Innocent Victim

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Palm Sunday — Cross Series Final March 20,2016
John 12:9–16

Good Morning. We’re so glad you’re with us on Palm Sunday. This morning always begins in noisy fun and happy crowds. The shouts of Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Cheery children carefully handing out palms, the few who are “free” among us sometimes sway and clap, singing praise. Palm Sunday begins in the “best” of crowd moments.

But a crowd turns into a mob on a dime, doesn’t it?

This election year with political rallies and throughout 2015 as people gathered to mourn the violence throughout our country and the loss of black lives especially, I have read the news accounts with a sense of foreboding. I’ve watched as political crowds became mobs shoving and sometimes slugging the random individual. I’ve felt the tensions in protests — the free-floating ions of charged with barely suppressed rage –waiting to find landing pad.

It doesn’t take much. As Mark Antony knew when by sheer eloquence he turned the crowd mourning dead Caesar into a mob rioting against Brutus. You can see Palm Sunday — the triumphal entry into Jerusalem through many lens, but at least one of them is how malleable mobs are.

Today is the final Sunday in our Lent series on the cross. We’ve looked at some of the different ways people have understood the crucifixion of Jesus. The death of the Son of God. Jesus bears our sins, he carries our infirmities, he liberates us from the power of evil, he shows us the love of God — people throughout the centuries have expressed all these understandings of the cross.

In the 20th century another understanding has been stated — the 20th century is often called the bloodiest century in the history of the world. This model is something called the Final scapegoat, or the Mirror model, of the cross.

Advocates of the mirror model see the cross emerging from this sea of violence in which we live. It starts not from a theological perspective but from an anthropological one. Rene Girard, the French philosopher most identified with this was trying to understand our bent toward violence.

Very simply put, Girard saw human society as sanctifying violence.
 We want what someone else has. But they have it. What do we do? We get violent. Rivalries develop. Societies need a way of relieving the pressure of this increasing rivalry and violence so we developed scapegoats. A victim is sacrificed, lynched, or crucified.

That placates us for a while….but the bent of desire and violence and rivalries will spill over again. And another victim will need to be found, The violence will once again need to be justified: This person, this people group, must die or be interned, or be deported — we say — and the cycles will start again.

I’m not trying to get political here — but it’s very easy to see how this mimetic framework, this scapegoat model, finds a very comfortable home in our 21st century psyche. It’s Muslims who are our problem. It’s the Rich who are our enemy. It’s the welfare queens. It’s the________.

Into this mess walks the sinless lamb of God. The innocent One. The Son who died at the hands of a crowd that had turned into a mob. The Perfect one who said, It. Is. Finished.

Girard writes that in Jesus crucifixion, God is holding up a mirror. We look at Jesus on the cross and what we see are our own systems of violence and scapegoating reflected back at us. The moral bankruptcy of our own bloodthirstiness is shown for what it actually is.

There is no justification. Jesus rips the curtain from our barely suppressed anger and says this is what you are doing.

“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up” Jesus says to Nicodemus in John 3:14. Months later in our text today from John 12, Jesus repeats it: Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. "And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself."

In raising the snake Moses was healing them through the very thing that had made them sick. The venom that had been the drink of death, now in God’s power became the drink of life.

Likewise Jesus’ violent death — the death of the innocent son upon the tree becomes in God’s power, the tree of life.

Oppressed people have understood this instinctively. From James Cone the great Black theologian who wrote, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. To Jon Sobrino and Gustavo Guiterrez from Latin America.

Where there are crucified victims there is found the crucified Savior of the world.

“Theologically speaking, Jesus was the first lynchee who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on American soil. He was crucified by the same principalities and power that lynched black people in America. Because God was present with Jesus on the cross and thereby refused to let Satan and death have the last word about his meaning, God was also present at every lynching in the United States….Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus.”

That’s a tough word for people in power.

But in the barrios of Central America and in the slave homes of the south and in the migrant homes of the west, Jesus was one of the Crucified peoples. One of those others spit on and disregard and scapegoat.

Jesus himself kept moving to those people. He kept going closer to the places of death and the areas of danger. It keeps holding up the mirror to our disgust, our disdain.

The demoniac who lives among the tombs, the unclean woman who was socially isolated, the children who were disposable, the putrefying body of the dead Lazarus.

These are the people Jesus moves toward — all the while the threats and violence against him increases. Getting so bad that in John 11,the chapter right before our reading this morning, when Jesus decides to respond to Mary and Martha’s request by going to see their brother Lazarus, even the disciples know that this isn’t going to end well. As Thomas puts it, we might as well go with him to see Lazarus, so that we can die with him.

The oppressed know that Jesus was coming for them to bring them life. Jesus knew the danger each act of life was going to bring. He knew just how costly it was to show people the kingdom of God. For every miracle of life he did, he knew there was an opposing reaction of death. And the epicenter of that opposing reaction was ironically in Jerusalem, the seat of religious power.

When he rides into Jerusalem on that afternoon Jesus is making it clear that he’s not going to avoid dangerous places or dangerous activities if that’s what it takes to bring the kingdom of God near. Jesus has already determined that nothing is going to stop him from bringing God’s life to those who are dying to experience it.

There was no place too dangerous, there was no activity too risky; there was nothing that would be asked of him that Jesus wouldn’t do to bring God’s life to people.

Even the impending certainty of his own death won’t stop Jesus from going where the victims go. Eating where the victims eat. Sleeping in the open fields where the homeless sleep.

This — is where the son of God is found.

The Son of God lived on the edge and always, always, always — to the end and beyond, he asked his followers to follow….him….there.

I once had a class with a catholic priest who had spent two plus decades on his life living among the poor in Peru. We got to be friends and I once asked him what do you most miss about being there?

“Jesus,” he answered.
Jesus?!? But Jesus is everywhere!! I sputtered. He made a kind of twisted, sad smile. “It’s very hard to see Jesus here.”

I’ll let that sink in. We who live in the land of 78 cereal selections, and move from our heated and a/c homes to our cars to our business. We who have health care and dental care and corrective lens. We who worry what restaurant we should chose and debate what the dead chickens on our plates were fed. I know the ire that rises in your heart because it rises in mine too. Hey my life is tough too! I’ve got stress! I’ve got anxiety!

Wait. Just wait for a minute. And hear that message for what it is — Jesus goes to the people you and I pass by without a thought. Jesus is among not the victors but the victims; not the ones with their names on the building but those who are sleeping in the shadow of it.

And we can explain that away in any way we want. Of course Jesus was poor! Everyone was poor. Of course he was marginalized! He was a Jew in a Roman state. Sure. True. But you and I both know Jesus went further than that.

***
 You know I often get calls from people, or meet with people, who wonder why

they are not experiencing the power of Christ, or presence of Christ in their lives. And sometimes I try to gently probe by asking them to tell me about where they are following Jesus in their lives. ’cause if you are following Jesus, he must be close enough for you to see him. Generally, that’s where the breakdown occurs. They can’t actually name any places in their lives where they are following Jesus.

What does this look like?

Following Jesus in going into dangerous places, but it also means doing things that can seem threatening or vulnerable for us. It means our pride must get in the back seat. It means our defensiveness or our perceived wrongs, even the things we are right about, are all put in service to Christ first. to follow Jesus means that we must love first.

Being the first one to extend the hand of blessing;

• Being the first one to right a wrong.
• Being the first one to forgive.
• Being the first one to open your home to others.
• Being the first one to setting aside your ambition for God’s kingdom.

But following Jesus is also unmasking the powers of this age by bearing witness to the alternative kingdom of God. It’s living by a different set of values than the ones set by advertisers and copy editors. It’s running our businesses and doing our jobs by standards of fairness, respect and honesty that trump the bottom line.

When Jesus rides in on a donkey, the palms traditionally waved as a sign of military victory were laid at his feet. You sharp eyed readers out there likely noticed that the gospel of John changes the order of the Palm Sunday processional. The other writers note that Jesus came in on the donkey and in response the crowds throw down their palms. But John wants it to be clear. The people, hearing Jesus is on his way, throw the palms down first. It’s an action that says, “Hail to the mighty victor, the one whose military might will dominate and destroy!”

And in response to their expectations, the Son of God mounts a lowly mule. Indicating, I’m not that kind of a savior.

The people thought they wanted a king who would dominate, but what God knew they needed was a king who was going to heal them by his wounds; rescue them through his suffering and redeem them by his death. This would be God’s plan for salvation.

You want to be closer to God? I do. I want to live closer to the dangerous God. The Savior who thinks of others first. The one who is willing to be mocked because he loves too much. The one who is wiling to wear a crown of thorns, not only willing, but who embraces the crown of thorns if that will bring forth the Father’s radiance.

I know not all of us need to hear the drum beat of denial, of sacrifice, of following Jesus into a dangerous place but some of us do, and it’s to those I talk to this morning.

• I’m talking to those who measure out our conviction and love for others in thimble-fulls rather than gulps.
• I’m talking to those of us who are looking around for validation and value while standing at a distance from the marginalized.
• I’m talking to those of us who silently judge first, quietly demanding that others prove they are worth loving before we open ourselves to them.
• I’m talking to those of us who like to talk a better game than we are prepared to live.

I know who I’m talking to — I’m talking to myself.

And I know that when I wonder why Jesus doesn’t seem as present, as real and as dangerous as I find him in the scriptures, when I look at this cross and I don’t feel the pain that oppressed people feel then I only have to ask myself one question: where I am I following him?

Where are you following him this morning?

On Palm Sunday Jesus saddled up — and rode into the belly of the beast. And today, Jesus still rides. Throughout all the earth — in dangerous places, doing dangerous activities, always moving closer to the suffering of the world, always offering the kingdom of God.

Brings hope & expectation to a land of oppressive realism;
 Reveals the abundance of God’s love to starving and thirsty people; Proclaiming freedom of forgiveness to captives; and Unmerited grace to people given to stingy miserliness.

And he turns today just as he turned to his disciples again and again and asks, Will we go where he goes? Will we follow him?