Holy Week: Ending violence, Patty Griffin, and taking steps towards the power of an invincible forgiveness

It seems strange to live on this side of Palm Sunday – so much excitement and optimism about what the world could be, how things might turn out always seems to be pointed toward the positive, affirmative, and hopeful.  Yet we don’t live in an age of optimism. No, we are in the age after the possibilities of human potential, the failure of institutions that once held such promise and certainty, and the bankruptcy of irony and sarcasm.

So where does that leave us?

In many ways, we are in the same place that the crowds that gathered after the feeding of the 5,000 and the masses who gathered screaming “Hosanna!” were left with once things began to turn all-too-serious and real.  The palm fronds laid in the dirt, the merchants continued to sell their goods to anyone still wandering around, and faces turned and held in a gaze moving ever closer not only to Jerusalem, but with a flinted resolve (Luke 9:51) pointed beyond all the ‘spectacular spectacular’ and toward the end of all beginnings.

This movement brings with it panic as we shall see in the days to come.  Crowds without a leader turn into something other than human and certainly turn away from the Imago Dei within themselves.  One by-product of this vacuum of leadership is the growing sense of anxiety about our future as seen through constant acts of violence and torture.  So much of the fervor surrounding Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” in some Christian communities was this sense of a real portrayal of the violence that took hold of Christ in those last days.  Yet to watch and ultimately digest the film is to find ourselves in a space of such cinematic violence that takes us beyond the Gospel itself that it figuratively and theologically tears the flesh from the Passion story itself.  To focus our gaze on the torture and violence as our primary concern this week makes a mockery of what this painful act was about – not a sanctified snuff film, but a revoking of violence as an endorsed form of Christian reconciliation once and for all.

Since the movement ever closer to the Cross brings with it the reality of pain, violence and torture, I wanted to share some thoughts about what I think the Cross teaches us about violence. As noted by Martin Hengel in his book Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross:

The earliest Christian message of the crucified messiah demonstrated the ‘solidarity’ of the love of God with the unspeakable suffering of those who were tortured and put to death by human cruelty. – Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), p. 88.

Yet this solidarity is not an endorsement of violence. No, this drawing closer to the Cross is a movement that calls us to embrace our humanity and the humanity of others that releases us from the need for violence and seeks the restoration of persons.  To this end I love Alice Walker’s words when she says that “it is not so much a question of whether the lion will one day lie down with the lamb, but whether human beings will ever be able to lie down with any creature or being at all.” (Alice Walker, Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 173

If we agree with theologian Catherine Keller in asserting that “every entity in the universe can be described as a process of interconnection with every other being.” (From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, Self , Boston: Beacon, 1986, 5.) then we can begin a process of moving closer to the Cross with the promise of being reunited with those that sin has separated us from – for our very being is defined by what we are reconciled with, not our ability to stand alone.  The movement of Holy Week is a movement of unity amidst diversity to be sure… but is bound firmly in this call to a unity that reconciles and binds us at the deepest level to each other.

One of the contemporary classics that has provided a much needed return is seen in Yale theologian Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace.  Here Volf outlines the Church’s vocation to model radical embrace of the Other in a repose of humility and grace.  As he says  “God’s reception of hostile humanity into divine communion is a model for how human beings should relate to the other” - Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1996), 100

Volf analyses four movements of the Church in relation to reconciliation as :

• a true commitment to repentance,
• a willingness to seek and offer forgiveness,
• making space in oneself for the other to come and be at home,
• working through the Holy Spirit toward the healing of memories of violence in our time.

This call that Volf lays out is a call for us in the remaining days of Holy Week to seek, as Volf’s teacher Jurgen Moltmann states, that God mandates the “primacy of love over freedom” (Jurgen Moltmann, cited by Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville, Abingdon Press,1996), 105

Volf puts the responsibility of reconcilation and moving beyond violence squarely as the task of the Church in our time:

We can’t reach final reconciliation by the “grand narratives” such as communism or capitalism. They failed (this is what we can learn from postmodernism: Adieu to Grand Narratives, failure of emancipation). We have to try to live in peace in the absence of final reconciliation. And we have to struggle “for a nonfinal reconciliation based on a vision of reconciliation that cannot be undone.” - Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville, Abingdon Press,  1996), 110

Jesus Christ asks for repentance. He does not only address the perpetrators but also the victims. “For a victim to repent means not to allow the suppressors to determine the terms under which social conflict is carried out.” - Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1996), 116

The answer to repentance must not be vengeance but forgiveness. “In forgiveness and reconciling the victims are superior to the perpetrators and free themselves from compulsion to evil deeds” (Moltmann, 122). This is possible, when the victim sees that God’s love is greater than all sin.

To achieve real peace it is necessary not only to repent and forgive but also to be in communion. The life of the triune God is a life of self giving and other receiving love. Trinity: I am not just I, the others belong to me. In the Eucharist we are recipients of God’s grace but also his agents.

To this end, as we turn our faces toward the Cross in the next few days, let os bind our hearts together and remember that the heart of the Cross was not torture but redemption:

Let us let go of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and return to the Gospel for a moment…  As St. Gregory of Nazianzus put so well “As Christians we celebrate not our sickness, but our cure.”  We do not see the Cross and glorify violence.  We see the Cross and see the beginning of reconciliation because violence has been stripped of any possible power in the vocabulary of the Kingdom of God.

On the cross, we can see the divine embrace of human brokenness.  Death by crucifixion meant death by torture.  On Golgotha, God is completely one with the tortured human Jesus we call Lord.  In him, God has embraced the sufferings of the world and made them his own.  God has entered into unbreakable solidarity with all who are forsaken and abused. Princeton theologian George Huntsinger put together a study on this topic a decade ago entitled  Way of Torture, Way of the Cross: A Bible Study for Lent and Other Occasions (Princeton: Church Folks for a Better America, 2000). I encourage you to review some of the materials for possible use in your communities of faith – you can find the materials here: www.cfba.info

In this study, Huntsinger makes the following reflection that ties together what I have been reflecting on in this post:

The story of God’s severe mercy does not end on the cross. The Christ who died in the throes of torture could not be held by the bonds of death.  On Easter day, God said yes to Jesus and no to torture, yes to life and no to death.  The means of terror were forever banned as instruments of peace.  They did not have the last word for Jesus; they must not tempt Christians today.  Jesus allowed himself to taste torture and death to disclose how abhorrent they are in God’s sight.  He terminates the resort to torture just as he brings an end to the law (Rom 10.4).  His resurrection manifests a humility more resilient than vengeance, a faithfulness more powerful than fear, and a love that triumphs over death.  The resurrection points to a hidden divine cunning in history, the power of an invincible forgiveness that will not rest until it reclaims the world.

I love the idea of the steps we take with Christ in the next days of Holy Week as being steps that will lead us away from the ways of violence, away from the desire to control and dominate others, to lay down our broken-heartedness and grasp onto the cloak of Christ for healing and renewal, to find fellow sojourners for the journey of Passion that leads us all toward a Cross that does not endorse torture, but is a placeholder and signifier for the One who is the power of an invincible forgiveness.

One of my favorite singer-songwriters is Austin native Patty Griffin.  One of her songs that I play over and over during Holy Week is a song from 1996 entitled simply “Forgiveness” and I encourage you to play the track below and reflect on the lyrics as printed.  This call to turn away from violence and embrace the One who seeks to offer us an invincible forgiveness is worth taking a moment to consider:

We are swimming with the snakes
At the bottom of the well
So silent and peaceful in the darkness where we fell
But we are not snakes and whats more
We never will be
And if we stay swimming here forever we will
Never be free

I heard them ringing the bells
In heaven and hell
They got a secret
Theyre getting ready to tell
Its falling from the sky
Calling from the graves
Open your eyes, boy, I think we are saved
Open your eyes, boy, I think we are saved
Lets take a walk on the bridge
Right over this mess
Dont need to tell me a thing, baby
Weve already confessed
And I raised my voice to the air
And we were blessed
Everybody needs a little forgiveness
Everybody needs a little forgiveness

We are calling for him tonight on this
Thin phone line
As usual were having ourselves one
Hell of a time
And the planes keep flying right over our heads
No matter how lond we shout
Hey, hey, hey !
And we keep waving and waving
Our arms in the air
But were all tired out

I heard somebody say
Todays the day
A big old hurricaine
Is blowing our way
Knocking over the buildings
Killing all the light
Open your eyes, boy, we made it through the night
Open your eyes, boy, we made it through the night
Lets take a walk on the bridge
Right over this mess
Dont need to tell me a thing, baby
Weve already confessed
And I raised my voice to the air
And we were blessed
Everybody needs a little forgiveness
Everybody needs a little forgiveness