The Choice
Matthew 16:24-17:8
Transfiguration
February 15, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
This is a hard text. We can see that it was hard for the disciples and it's hard for us. For one thing, the text is relentlessly political. The story is set in the sight of Caesarea Philippi, a Greco-Roman city built by Herod the Great in honor of the emperor. It embodied in its stones all of the things Jews hated about the Roman occupation. Jewish wealth was squeezed from Jewish peasants and artisans, taken to Caesarea Philippi where it disappeared and was used to fund Jewish oppression.
Roman troops were stationed at Caesarea Philippi and the local population had to provide them with food, so peasants and artisans were squeezed some more.
A Greco-Roman city attracted, not surprisingly, Greeks and Romans as well as other pagans with their demands for unclean foods, their loose morals, and their polluting idols and temples.
It was in this space, charged with political tension, that Jesus posed the question to his disciples, "Who do people say the Human One is?" The answers that he got in return were: John the Baptist, Elijah, and Jeremiah.
Each of these people had famously meddled in royal politics in God's name. Each of them had suffered the wrath of a king. Each of them had refused to yield.
Then Jesus asked them who they thought he was and Peter the Impetuous said what they all were thinking: "You are the Christ," that is, God's anointed. There had been others with the title of "anointed" and the one thing these figures all had in common was that they were all kings, from Saul and David through Cyrus, the Persian emperor who overthrew Babylon and let exiled Jews return to Judea. Peter said this in the shadow of the city that projected Roman political and economic power in Roman Palestine. If anyone had overheard, Peter would have been arrested, tried, and executed for treason, a political crime. And Jesus agreed with him.
And, speaking of execution, when Jesus describes his own future, he sees that he will be crucified, a form of punishment used by the Romans for those who resisted Roman authority.
Peter, as we know, was shocked because he could not imagine that, in a showdown between the emperor and God's anointed, it would be God's anointed who would be put to death. Peter was wrong about that, not because Jesus believed that religion and politics do not mix, but because he misunderstood how power worked in the religion of Jesus. Jesus' strategy was not to avoid politics, but instead to make a show of how theologically bankrupt the Roman regime really was. This strategy required that Jesus provoke a violent response from Rome to show that Roman power had nothing to do with justice--as it claimed-- and, therefore, that Roman power was illegitimate even on its own terms.
Every political system-- ours no less than the Romans-- has a theology. There can be no separation of politics and religion because politics always has its own religion. As someone who values the separation of church and state, I get really uncomfortable when I hear someone talking the way I have been talking. So you can imagine how uncomfortable I am that I'm the one who is talking like this! So, Jesus is set on a course that will trigger an accusation of treason and its associated punishment. That's bad.
But it gets worse: Jesus requires of his followers that they, too, will set their lives on a collision course with the reigning regime, a course that will trigger the regime's response. "Live your lives so that you risk crucifixion," Jesus told his would-be disciples. And, with shaking knees and sweating palms, they did just that.
But that's not what we want. So, we do what we do. We set about making this text not say what it says. We make it say something else instead. We say of something, "It's my cross to bear," something annoying, like a snoring spouse, or even something painful, like an arthritic knee or chronic headaches. Make no mistake, some of us really do struggle with pain that can't be helped, real suffering that may call us to live into it with hope and real courage. But that's not what Jesus means when he says that we must take up our cross if we want to follow him. Jesus means that, in the confrontation between God's dream and the way things are, we place ourselves on the side of God's dream, even if we have to do it with shaking knees and sweating palms.
Of course we'd rather avoid that if we can, so we imagine that Jesus' dramatic words are only for the religious superstars, the occasional martyr, like Martin Luther King, Jr., or Oscar Romero, people who insisted on God's dream so loudly, so persistently, and, above all, so publicly, that the regime had no choice but to kill them. But I'm not so sure we can wiggle out of it so easily.
On Wednesday evening Carol dragged me-- rather willingly, actually-- to hear Michel Martin speak at Luther College. Martin is an African-American journalist. She's also a woman, in case you thought that maybe she was a man from France. She works for NPR and used to be the host of Tell Me More, now, alas, canceled, one of the worst programming decisions NPR has ever made. She talked about race and gender and how social change is happening all the time, and how we are a part of it and that our daily decisions hinder it or help it along.
After about forty minutes, she finished her prepared remarks and there was time for questions. A brave student was among the questioners. She began by observing that other speakers at Luther on the subject of race had been activists who had left the impression that college students need to drop their plans-- and maybe even drop out-- to do "activist-y" things instead. But, she noted that it looked like Michel Martin had been able to be a positive part of social change and still have a career as well as a life.
Ms. Martin's response was that life gives us all sorts of chances to be on the right side. We don't really have to seek them out: they'll come to us. She recounted an experience she had while working for ABC early in her career. She and a crew were sent to interview a boy who had been horribly abused by his parents by being chained in the basement of his family's home. He had only been discovered because his older sister had broken the family rules and had brought home a friend who told her father who happened to be a deputy sheriff who investigated and so the parents were arrested and the boy's life was saved. Martin arrived with her crew at the grandparents' house where the children were staying. The camera was set up and the boy was mic-ed. She was ready to start the interview when she noticed that he was shaking like a leaf. She decided in that moment that she was not going to force this child to re-experience the trauma of his abuse for the sake of a news story. She said, "We're done. We're not going to do this. Go play with your friends."
In the confrontation between God's dream and the world as it is, she took her stand with God's dream against the regime that told her to get the story at any cost. The regime has ways of fighting back, of course. Her producer was furious. She expected to be fired, to have to find a new job, maybe even a new career: crucifixion in one of its modern forms.
It happens to all of us, to each of us. We hear a friend insult someone by saying, "That's so gay!" We can let it go. We can pretend we didn't hear it or that it doesn't do any real harm. Or we can face it head on. We can speak up and disown that sort of gay-bating insult. There is a risk, of course. The regime of homophobia has its own forms of crucifixion and we may lose a friend.
An employer may require us to look the other way when they do something illegal. And then we have a choice. We can go along, feeling badly about it, maybe. Or we can face it head on. We can refuse to go along, or even report it to the authorities. But that may come with its own costs, its own form of crucifixion.
Our lives are full of chances to stake our stand with God's dream or not, to stand with the powerless, the disadvantaged, the excluded, and the spat upon, or not. We can stand with God's dream or we can stand with the way things are. If we stand with the way things are, then we'll probably get along in the world. We'll keep our friends and our jobs. If we stand with God's dream, though, we may pay a price, a big one, maybe. But we'll be following in Jesus' footsteps from Caesarea Philippi, to the mountaintop, to Jerusalem, to the cross, and to the tomb and beyond. It is after all God's dream and while is is a long time in coming, it will not fail, and, if we choose it, neither will we.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
No comments:
Post a Comment