Violent Delights

Propers: The Fourth Sunday of Easter, AD 2022 C

Homily:

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

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

I’ve often heard it said that America was founded on the myth of redemptive violence: that is, the idea that if a good guy with a gun can just shoot enough of a certain sort of people, then we’ll all be freer, wealthier, happier. You have to make sure that you’re shooting bad people, mind you, and then you have to make sure that you shoot all of them. But if you do, then that makes you a hero. And we all want a hero to save us, don’t we?

Of course, every people, every nation, must be able to defend itself. But the myth of redemptive violence is such that, rather than war remaining a tragic last resort, bloodshed becomes instead our preferred method of dealing with the world. When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Dealing with people can get pretty messy; but killing them is usually fairly straightforward.

There’s even talk like this in certain books of the Bible. Go figure: warrior-peoples take comfort in the image of warrior-gods. When you’re under attack, you look around for a good guy with a gun—or in this case, a sling, a sword, or a spear. The myth of redemptive violence is in no way uniquely American; indeed, it seems to be a universal trope of humankind. We externalize evil in someone else, in some strange enemy, thinking that we can then kill it as easily as we kill them.

But you can’t murder the devil. And he rather seems to like it when we try.

A lot of people in Jesus’ time put their trust in redemptive violence. They prayed for the day when someone, a chosen one, would spark a holy war to finally drive the foreigners out from the sacred soil of their homeland. The people of Israel had outlasted, outlived, the greatest empires of the ancient world: Egyptians, Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, Persians, Greeks. Now along come the Romans, thinking they’re the big dog on the block. But the Jews were here before them, and will remain long after they’re gone.

It must be said that for their survival the Jewish people solely credited their God. God delivered them from slavery in Egypt. God protected them from invading Assyrians. God went with them into Exile in Babylon, breathing new life into an ancient faith. And God guided Cyrus, Emperor of the Persians and Medes, to bring His people home and rebuild the ancient Temple. All glory, laud, and honor, to You, Redeemer King.

But that last one, the Greeks—that’s the problem. See, the Greeks weren’t overcome by miracles, or by the patient endurance of Exiles. No, the Greeks were defeated by shocking human violence, of the sort that inspired scenes in Game of Thrones. Never mind that the warrior-priests who drove out the Greeks then became thoroughly Hellenized, more Greek than the Greeks themselves. And never mind that they themselves had brought the Romans in to keep the Greeks out, which is kind of like releasing wolves in order to deal with foxes.

The fact that violence had worked on the Greeks made folks think that it would work just as well on the Romans. Everyone knew the Messiah was coming, and that He would succeed where the kings and priests of old had failed. Surely, thought the zealots, He would lead their righteous war. Surely He would take the fight to Rome. And with God’s Anointed on their side, how could they lose?

That’s what Peter expected, when he drew the sword in Gethsemane. That’s what Judas expected, when he tried to force Jesus to fight. We all wanted a warrior-king. The Messiah was here to kill off the Romans, and to kill off anyone who worked with them as well—not to get killed by them! But as you well know, we had it all wrong. The Messiah has come to kill death, so that everyone might live. He does not wield violence against His enemies, for violence is His enemy. Christ has come to wage not war but peace unceasing, and thereby save us all.

Alas, we didn’t learn our lesson—humanity, I mean. For some decades, things went fairly well for the nascent Jesus movement. Things were peaceful, for a bit. Then came the first great persecution, under Nero, and we lost the leadership of the early Church all in one fell swoop: Peter crucified, Paul decapitated, James clubbed to death, and John arrested. But the worst was yet to come.

For indeed the zealots in Israel had gotten their way at long last: 40 years after the Crucifixion, they finally got their war with Rome. And they were so certain that God was with them, so certain of the myth of redemptive violence. And then Rome brought the hammer down, and they were wiped out, all of them. And Jerusalem was razed. And the Temple was burned. And the holiest city on earth simply ceased to exist. These violent delights have violent ends.

The Christians made it out. Jesus had warned them long ago about Jerusalem, how not even one stone would be left upon another. Yet it must have seemed to them the end of the world. The Temple was the house of God on earth, heaven on earth. And the pagans wiped it out. What did this mean? Where was God in all of this? And what hope, if any, could humankind have without the holy Temple?

Enter the Book of Revelation. Revelation is written in a time of crisis; to a people, to a Church, that have suffered persecution, anxiety, and terror. They want to know where God is when their entire world is in upheaval, when the sky is falling. And so John, imprisoned on Patmos, writes them a letter describing a vision he had, a vision of heaven and earth and the end of days. He writes for them an apocalypse.

Now, an apocalypse isn’t what you think it is. It’s not the end of the world. Apocalypse is a literary genre, something we see in times of crisis, like the Book of Daniel, or the “little apocalypse” of Matthew’s Gospel. An apocalypse tells us two things: first up, it assures us that whatever we’re going through, it isn’t the end of the world. There is an ending, a good one, and this isn’t it. Everything will be alright in the end; if it’s not alright, it’s not the end. Savvy?

The second thing an apocalypse does is to interpret current events through a religious and spiritual lens. It reveals God at work in the chaos all around us, “revelation” being the literal translation of apocalypse. And John’s Revelation does this in spades. The real Temple, John reminds us, was never on earth to begin with. Solomon’s Temple, the Jerusalem Temple, was only ever a sketch, an echo, a shadow, of the true Temple eternal in the heavens. That’s the higher, the deeper, reality.

The people who have died in this chaos, in this war and persecution, says John, are now arrayed in robes of white, cleansed by the Blood of the Lamb, joyfully praising Christ in heaven: Christ, who is our God, our High Priest, and our Passover Lamb. And do not overlook those robes of white—those baptismal garments—for in the Hebrew Bible, white is the garb of God. White is the garb of angels in heaven.

Once a year, in the old Temple, the High Priest would doff his colorful robes, representing the visible world, and would pass beyond the veil, beyond the Temple curtain, into the Holy of Holies, which signified heaven on earth. Now, says John, all of you have such a robe of white, all of you have access to God, all of you are as gods within the Divine Council, through the sacred Blood of Jesus. He’s the real Temple; He’s the true reality. No-one can take that from us.

And what’s more, John says, this Temple comes down to earth, heaven comes down to earth, in our Christian worship, in the liturgy of the Mass. The wonders John describes in heaven follow the bones of our bulletin. It’s the same service. We too are cleansed and forgiven and welcomed to heaven. We too hear the Scriptures opened only by Christ. We too gather at the wedding feast of the Lamb, the eternal banquet of heaven, when we come to Communion, to Christ our Bread.

One day, says John, the old heaven and the old earth will pass away, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth, one and the same, with Christ as the Light of all peoples, Christ as the river of life: the promise of earth itself as paradise regained. All of this has already been accomplished in eternity, and we are to have faith that it will be accomplished here in time. Until that day, until that good end, we are to be for the world foretastes of the feast to come, glimpses of eternity breaking into time.

That’s what happens here. That’s what is revealed. You, my brothers and sisters, are already here in heaven. Now our only job is to live like we know this is true.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.