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1. Jesus is Condemned to Death by Pilate
V. We adore you O Christ and we praise you.
R. Because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.
How many others have heard the state bureaucrat say, "We cannot tolerate you. We cannot help you. The world will be a better place without you. You must die." What goes through the mind of the victim when he or she hears, "You are to be executed!" Over the centuries many who have claimed to be followers of Jesus have stood with the historical “community of executioners”—kings, presidents, governors, judges, soldiers, police, wardens, hangmen. Jesus himself stood with the historical “community of the executed.” He did not stand with those who say, “You must die.” He stood alongside those who are told, “You must die.” Capital punishment is not what Jesus taught. It is what he suffered.
But, Pilate washes his hands and says, “I am not responsible.” The scientist who makes a part of the instrument that when discharged sends hundreds or thousands to a fiery death says, “I am not responsible.” Christians in the Third World are beaten into oppression, while Christians in the First World live off the fruits of that oppression and say, “I am not responsible.” The affluent Christian who spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours a year on sports, alcohol, fashion, drugs and entertainment says to the billions of people caught in the unrelieved miseries of poverty, hunger, disease and injustice, “I am not responsible.” More than Pilate have washed their hands as the suffering Christ was condemned to death.
— The First Station, from Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love, by Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.
Often during my annual reading of Stations of the Cross, my mind goes to two other texts:
One is the spiritual "Where You There When They Crucified My Lord?" Few of us are actually present at executions or other state-sponsored acts of terrorism, but to the extent they happened without resistance from us, "were we there"?
Many of us who care about peace, social justice, and environmental sanity have great ideas about what others should do. We say that oil companies should stop drilling, for example, but oil companies invest in what they believe they can sell us, not in our slogans. Does our own behavior confirm their hopes? As for state-sponsored terrorism, every Christian who lets the government (any government) tell us who our enemies are, is in danger of joining Pilate rather than Jesus.
The other text is from the Russian Orthodox priest, doctor, and writer, Anthony Bloom. In an earlier blog post, I quoted from an interview in which the interviewer asked Anthony Bloom, "...How do you assess the position of Christianity in the contemporary world with all that is going on in it?" His answer:
... In its rejection of God and the Church, the world says, "You Christians cannot give us anything we need. You don't offer us God, you offer us a worldview. And it's a moot point if God is not at its core. You give us instructions on how to live, but they're just as arbitrary as the ones other people give us." We ourselves must become Christian—Christians according to the example of Christ himself, and his disciples. Only then will the Church obtain, not power, that is the capacity to coerce, but authority, the capacity to say words that make the soul tremble and that open up the eternal depths within any soul. It seems to me that this is our current situation and condition.
Maybe I'm coming at this situation pessimistically, but, really, we're not Christians. We confess faith in Christ, but we've reduced everything to symbols. So, for example, I'm always struck by our Good Friday service: instead of the cross on which a living young Man dies, we have a wonderful service. Maybe I'm coming at this situation pessimistically, but, really, we're not Christians. We confess faith in Christ, but we've reduced everything to symbols. So, for example, I'm always struck by our Good Friday service: instead of the cross on which a living young Man dies, we have a wonderful service that can move us but that actually stands between us and that rude and ghastly tragedy. In place of the cross we've substituted an icon of the cross. In place of the crucifixion, we've substituted an image. In place of a retelling of the actual horror of what happened, we substitute a poetic/musical reworking of the story that can move us but that actually stands between us and that rude and ghastly tragedy.
Of course that reworking does reach us, but we so easily begin to get a taste for that horror, even deeply experiencing it, being shaken and then regaining our calm, whereas the vision of a living person who is murdered is something quite different. That remains as a wound in the soul, you don't forget it; having seen it, you'll never again be the same as you were. And that is what dismays me. In some sense, the beauty and depth of our worship must break it open, and must lead every believer through that opening to the terrible and majestic secret of what is actually happening.
(An earlier and more complete quotation is in this post from July 2019.)
Many Christians (maybe in particular many Protestants?) are ready to remember that "rude and ghastly tragedy" in terms of what Jesus on the cross did for each of us individually. And they're not wrong. But as Charles McCarthy urgently pleads, the rude, ghastly tragedies have not ceased! When the church goes beyond seasonal piety and claims the authority to take on that "terrible and majestic secret of what is actually happening" then and now, we will no longer want to hide and claim that we are "not responsible."
I'm reminded of the dream that the social justice activist and the evangelist will find powerful new modes of partnership. Here's an area where I think we Quakers can learn from the wider church. How might this partnership take shape in your church or meeting, in your community, in your family? And mine?
Jeremy Morris invites us to "scratch a Russian liberal...."
The foundation of democratic justice is to be judged by one’s peers. I’m merely pointing out that the main ideas of the ‘opposition’ amount to pretending that transitional justice can be achieved without courts in a make-believe space where they, the good Russians, have complete dictatorial power. This is symptomatic of their fundamental unseriousness and a trap for oppositionists because the implication is they support a Japan 1945 scenario. And this cuts to to the heart of competing ideas about lustration, which are always part and parcel of realistic and achievable ‘transitional justice’ (a big academic and practitioner topic of research). Ekaterina Schulmann is absolutely correct on this: lustration involves compromises. That’s right folks, a first for this blog: me and Schulmann agree on something.
Be part of Friends World Committee's work for justice and peace.
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