The Empire and the Cross

Propers: The Third Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 12), A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid.

Three times in 16 verses, Jesus admonishes His disciples never to fear those who can but kill the body. And as for the One who can destroy both body and soul—well, He lavishes His care and attention even upon the smallest of sparrows. How much more, then, must He love and care for you?

Jesus insists upon this because it’s a dangerous business, this Christianity. It is divisive, contentious. It will turn daughter against mother, father against son. “Think not that I have come to bring peace to the earth,” quoth the Prince of Peace. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Now, just to state the obvious clearly, Christ is not here advocating violence. Despite what some have published, Jesus was no zealot, no dagger in the night. Time and again in the Gospels He abhors violence, telling His Apostles to put away their swords, to turn the other cheek, to forgive those who persecute you. Time and again, given the opportunity, Jesus refuses to raise His fist in anger, refuses to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. Indeed, this is probably what got Him killed—His stubborn denial of His role as a military messiah.

Judas, I have long believed, turned Jesus over to unjust authorities and imperial structures of power in order to try to force His hand, to make Jesus fight; make Him be the warrior that we all hoped He’d be. And when things didn’t work out the way that Judas had planned—well, he hanged himself at the horror of what all he had wrought. Horribly tragic, yes. But not the actions of a man who thought that Jesus was just some guy.

Before the powers of this fallen world, Jesus would neither be soldier nor slave, never fighting fire with fire, steel for steel, but never backing down before evil either. He consistently sought out the third way of active, nonviolent resistance: the way of bold truth-telling and suffering for others; the way of justice and of mercy as one; the way of the Light shining amidst darkness, which the darkness cannot overcome.

And before anybody brings up the incident with the moneychangers in the Temple, please know that the Greek in that story clearly indicates that Jesus used a livestock whip, a cattle-goad. He wasn’t flogging people, for heaven’s sake. He was driving the animals out from an illegitimate marketplace atop sacred ground.

To take up the Cross of Jesus Christ means that His disciples are called to identify with those who oppose empire—both the imperial Rome of Jesus’ day, and all the various empires which still surround us today.

We are to stand with and advocate for the people on the margins, the used and the abused; the poor, the weak, the sick, the foreigner and the oppressed; the very young and the very old, whom society has all-too-often treated as disposable, as subhuman. For wherever there is power, there is oppression. And Jesus will always be found—God in the flesh will always be found—with the oppressed, with the marginalized, with the unclean, with the sinner. The last, the least, the lonely, and the lost: these are those whom Jesus claims, by His Blood.

And this isn’t some postmodern first-world social justice interpretation, mind you. This is found in the very bones of the text, in the Crucifixion itself. The Cross is how the empire disposes of nonpersons: slowly, cruelly, humiliatingly, as spectacle. The Cross is the worst way that the Romans could imagine for someone to have to die, and let me tell you, they had methods of execution in their playbook that you wouldn’t believe, stuff to curl your toes. And the Cross was the worst of the lot.

If Crucifixion has lost its ability to shock us today, that’s only because we’ve gotten so used to staring at it in nice, clean, respectable places over the last 2000 years.

This is what Jesus is getting at when He goes on about how, “Whoever loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; whoever loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.” He’s not telling us not to love. Quite the opposite. Love of God, love of Christ, is such that in placing Jesus first in life, all of our other loves are intensified. We love our parents more because we love Jesus; we love our children more because Jesus loves them more than we could possibly imagine. In giving Him our love, He gives us His own, which burns infinitely brighter than any mortal love found here below.

What He’s doing in this text is warning us, making clear to us all the dire consequences of faith in Jesus, of following Jesus. Taking up the Cross means risking everything for other people—for neighbors, strangers, even enemies. Don’t do this if you love your parents, Jesus says. You’ll only be bringing them sorrow. Don’t do it if you love your children, because they may have to grow up without a mother or a father. For centuries, faith in Christ remained a capital offense, punishable by death. And in many parts of the world, it still is to this day.

Maybe you think this doesn’t apply to our situation. We live in the land of the free, home of the brave, after all. Religious liberty is encoded in our very Constitution. We risk nothing by our faith in Christ. If anything, churchgoing has become sadly passé. But that’s not Christianity. That’s civil religion. And I’m afraid that all too often there’s all the difference in the world between the Christianity of Americans and the Christianity of Christ.

But don’t take my word for it. “The crisis in the U.S. church,” writes theologian Walter Brueggemann, “has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative; it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian Baptism and settling for a common, generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence.”

Now there’s a word of Law for you. Enough to convict any red-blooded American.

Jesus calls us to bear the Cross. What that means for us—what it has always meant for Christians—is that we are to identify with and advocate for the poor, the sick, the migrant, the oppressed minority, the powerless, and the forgotten. We are to feed the hungry, heal the ill, house the homeless, instruct the ignorant, rebuke the wicked, forgive the sinner, and doggedly speak truth to power. And maybe that sounds to you like common sense. Maybe it sounds like principles that every man of every faith can embrace.

Yet I guarantee that when we start acting like Jesus, people will start to treat us like Jesus. They will call us rabble-rousers and troublemakers. They will attack our loyalties and our patriotism and will say of us that we try to overthrow the good order of the empire. They will tell us that we should have no king but Caesar. And when public beatings in the streets and unjust imprisonment won’t shut us up, they will accuse us of being traitors to our country and our religion, and they will bring the full power of imperial law down upon us. Push hard enough, and you will get crucified.

But here’s the Good News: Jesus’ death was never the end of the story. In fact, with His death and Resurrection, the true story of God’s love for humankind, of the unthinkable lengths to which He will go, to hell and back, to bring us all home in Him, has only just begun. This is the foretaste of the feast to come. “For those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for My sake will find it.” The worst thing that the empire can do to you is kill you. But do not be afraid. Do not fear those who can destroy the body. For we have a God who knows His way out of the grave, who has conquered sin and death and hell.

It’s not about having to choose between being a Christian and being an American. Like it or not, we have a foot in both worlds. But being a Christian should make you a better American—or a better Mexican, a better Briton, a better Japanese, what-have-you. Being an American should not make you a worse Christian. And all too often it does. Because the Kingdom of Jesus Christ is not of this world.

Be Jesus for one another, and I guarantee that you will inspire the right people and you will upset the right people. Jesus didn’t need to go looking for His Cross; we laid that burden upon Him just for being who He is. You go act like Jesus, and you’ll find a Cross too. Make no mistake: He sends us out as sheep amidst the wolves. But have no fear. Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. For if we are united in a death like His, we shall surely be united in a Resurrection like His.

What then is there left to fear?

Fight the empire. Bear the Cross. Rise immortal.

In +Jesus. Amen.