Siegfried & Evil Jesus

Fafner, by Johan Egerkrans

Lections: The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 22), AD 2026 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.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig came very close to converting to Christianity. Many of his friends had. But on the brink of Baptism—and having undergone a powerful spiritual experience at Yom Kippur—he chose not to enter the Church, because, he said, the Christian soul is forever divided between Siegfried and Christ. And that always stuck with me.

For any non-Central Europeans out there, Siegfried is the dragon-slayer, the great Germanic hero of the epic Nibelungenlied, and of Wagner’s magnum opus Ring Cycle. For Rosenzweig, Siegfried represents the national, the mythic, the realm of earthly power—whereas Christ is the antithesis of this. Christ comes to us “from the outside,” as the Redeemer, the source of an alien grace, universal in scope, who calls all of humanity, all of Creation, together as one in His Body. And we can’t have both, Rosenzweig said.

Either we choose my tribe über alles, or we find God in the poor, the despised, the condemned. Due to this, our Christian souls remain eternal pilgrims, estranged from ourselves; because half of us wants Hercules, and the other half wants Mister Rogers. And that’s a powerful insight. It elucidates the conflict betwixt Christian nationalism and Christian orthodoxy in our society today. And it reveals to me the conflict within my own heart as well. For indeed, I too feel the pull of “might makes right.”

In the infamous words of ancient Athenian democracy: the strong do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must. Little wonder Tertullian asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

Last week we told the tale of Christ rechristening Simon Peter. “You are Peter,” our Lord proclaimed, “and on this Rock I shall build My Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” Simon, you see, had just confessed Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the Living God; the long-prophesied “one like unto a Son of Man,” hidden in God’s eternal presence from before the world began; the Savior of us all.

There is joy in Peter’s voice, and joy in Christ’s response. Their people had waited for 600 years, more than half of a millennium, for God’s Anointed cosmic Priest and King to inaugurate the Kingdom of Heaven and to liberate God’s people. 600 years of suffering, of Exile, of hope and humiliation, culminating here at last in Jesus Christ our Lord! Can you imagine how that must’ve felt, the vindication of Peter’s faith? Americans haven’t waited centuries for anything; I get upset at two-day shipping.

Having thus, at last, unveiled His identity and purpose, Jesus then openly tells His Apostles what must happen next: that He must go to Jerusalem, where He will undergo great suffering at the hands of the leaders of their people, and how He will be killed—only to rise again on the third day after His death. And this must sound insane.

600 years since their kingdom had been conquered, and what had they been promised? What had the Prophets foretold? A ruler sent from God! A conqueror of the world! A King bedecked in heavenly glory, sword afire, eyes aflame, come to right our every wrong! And for one fleeting moment here at Caesarea Philippi, that had seemed in Simon’s grasp. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father in Heaven.” What a time to be alive!

But then Jesus kept on talking—about rejection, humiliation, and agonizing death. No, no, no, that’s not in the script. This isn’t how things are supposed to play out. We didn’t sign up for death. “God forbid it, Lord!” sputters Simon Peter. “This must never happen to You!” And who could not feel for Peter in this moment? Who would not have said the same thing in his place? Centuries later, when the barbarian lord Clovis, King of the Franks, first heard the story of Jesus’ Crucifixion, he bowed his head in sorrow and lamented, “If only I had been there with my Franks!” God forbid that this should happen to You, Lord.

At this, Jesus turns to Simon—whom He had praised and renamed just a handful of verses before—and cries, “Get behind Me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.” There’s nary a breath between Tu est Petrus and Vade retro Satana.

Peter wants what all of us want. He wants Siegfried. He wants the warrior, the conqueror, the dragon-slayer. He wants Jack Reacher to place his massive muscly mitts on maleficent men and to break them. Don’t we all yearn for that, deep within? I know that I do. I love stories, movies, books wherein terrible things happen to terrible people; where the casually cruel and the vicious receive their just comeuppance; where good is strong and swift to save. Peter wants righteous violence, Just War, earthly glory. Don’t you think he’s earned it? Who’s here to say that he hasn’t?

Get behind me, Satan. For you are setting your mind not on the divine but on the human.

Christ is not the strongest within the set of the strong. He is not the most powerful among the ranks of the mighty. He is of an altogether different order. He is the Word and the Mind of God, through whom all things were made, and without whom not one thing was made. He is not simply powerful; He is the Source of all power, the Power that makes power possible. Do you think He’s come to swing a sword? To curl the hands that shape reality into fists? Christ has come to transcend violence, to take it all within Himself and to drown it in His love.

He has commissioned Simon Peter as the Rock, the one prophesied to topple the fourth empire and hand it over to the saints, as found in the Book of Daniel. But how will Peter do that? Will he raise an army, wage a guerrilla campaign up and down the Holy Land? Others will try, and they will fail, catastrophically so. No, Peter will conquer Rome the way that Christ has conquered Hell: on a cross. He shall lay down his life out of love, and thereby claim Constantinople.

Back in seminary, I used to have this admittedly adolescent running gag. Every time some politician or preacher would say or do something utterly reprehensible in the name of our religion, I would then pipe up, “Evil Jesus strikes again!”—the idea being that the Jesus thus proclaimed proved himself so nakedly antichrist that it’s as if an imposter, a false messiah, a dude-bro evil twin, had taken our Lord’s rightful place in American Christianity.

I still think that, whenever people twist the teachings of the Nazarene to justify cruelty, bigotry, warfare, racism, jingoism, militarism, mass incarceration, needless execution. “Evil Jesus strikes again!” Because, again, that’s what we want. We want the tough guy on our team, not the dead man on a stick; the carbine, not the Cross. Forgive our enemies? Why, who wouldn’t rather flay them alive? But it’s a lie. It’s false; it’s evil, the illusion of strength; a weak man’s impression of the strong.

You know—all the dictators and the tyrants, the robber-barons and the conmen, who so dominate our news, and send our armies out to war, and hoard wealth beyond the greed of any dragon, they’re all going to die, most much sooner than they’d like to think. And they’ll have enormous funerals and people will pretend to care. But no-one really will, and they shall be quickly forgotten. So much for Siegfried. For what does it profit a man to gain the world yet lose his soul?

But a life lived in love, in confident humility, in selfless generosity, in a strength so strong it’s gentle, that’s the kind of life that changes the world, that changes hearts, that shines forth for all to see the grace of Jesus Christ. And yes, I am talking about Dolly Parton. For she who seeks to save her life will lose it. But she who loses her life for My sake will find it. Peter learned his lesson. Now must we as well. Let us pick up the Cross, and follow the Christ, and never fear death again.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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