Whew. This gut-wrenching Palm Sunday story, dramatically read by our deacon and his family, reads like a catalog of provocative questions and defamatory statements about Jesus’ identity. At the outset, Pilate asks Jesus if he is king of the Jews, and then the Gospel ends with a centurion proclaiming “truly this man was God’s son.” In between, there’s all manner of mocking and accusation and derision. While I mourn the physical violence being done to Jesus, the words strike me as equally painful. It’s as if I’ve gotten lost in the first century equivalent of a contemporary internet troll-hole. “Stop all the hate speech,” I want to plead of this Gospel account. Something cosmically tragic is happening in your midst. Can’t you all just shut the heck up?
Obviously, that’s not so easy to accomplish, then or now. If it were so, we wouldn’t all be suffering from so much nastiness in our national discourse, at a time when a little sympathy and compassion could go so far towards our collective healing. But violence and violent speech are, and have always been, the tools of frightened people, desperate to hang on to their power. Specifically in this case, imperial governors and temple hierarchy, and their military enforcers. Holy Week forces us to confront not only the dynamics of human hate and violence, but also at the ungodly fear that undergirds it.
The temptation to suppress the truth—and to stop Jesus, who embodied Truth—through hating and name calling is always so very near at hand. I’ve been reading a bit about hate speech, especially the online version which goes by the moniker of trolling. It’s gotten measurably worse this past year, fed largely by political conflict, but also by pandemic-generated unemployment. People are both anxious and have too much time on their hands. “The pandemic is making trolling behavior worse and widespread,” says to Dr. Kent Bausman, a professor of Online Sociology. “It is a grotesquely cathartic response to the negative feelings produced by events. I say grotesquely in that relief or pleasure is gained by victimizing and harassing another for their difference in opinion or feeling.”
Let me pause to say that if you never use social media and don’t know what I’m talking about, good on you. But Mark’s Gospel alone will expose us to more hate speech than we ever wanted. It’s tempting to turn away, but the evangelist clearly didn’t want us to.
And of course hatred isn’t limited to words. As we remember Jesus’ passion in a year when our consciousness of systemic racism has been heightened, we must confront our legacy of racial terror. Just this month, seven Asian Americans were massacred in Atlanta. And the recent police killings of African Americans are only the latest variation on the ugly history of lynching. Between the Civil War and World War II, lynching sometimes even took the form of public spectacle, in which whites watched and participated in the Black victims’ prolonged torture and mutilation. Eerily reminiscent of Golgotha, white attendees were even known to fight over the victim’s possessions and various relics from the lynching.
This nightmare is so deeply embedded in our nation’s story that the theologian James Cone insisted: “Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the lynching tree.”Cone understood the significance of Jesus’ crucifixion as expressing God’s solidarity with human suffering and mortality. But Cone also understood the extent to which our own salvation depends on “our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst.” Now as then.
Lord have mercy on us all. How do we stop this cycle of violence? How do we begin to heal generations of trauma? It’s overwhelming, no? Except that it really isn’t. Hateful speech—the precursor to physical violence then as now—is something we all have the capacity to interrupt. Every day. At the most basic level, we can choose not to participate in it. Or, if we’re feeling a bit more courageous, we can call it out. A gentle way to do that is to say something like “as a Christian, I don’t find that this statement helps me to love God and my neighbor.” Or we can borrow the Buddhist tradition and insist “Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?
And God has yet more to offer us, in service of transforming our human tendency towards hate. We’re about to enter into a week when the worst angels of our nature—to invert the words of Lincoln’s First inaugural address—will be on full display. Here at Trinity, we’ll have online meditations to guide us through each harrowing day. My friends, I invite you to go there. That is, don’t avert your eyes or cover your ears in the face of Jesus’ crisis. It’s in the Bible precisely so that we don’t forget what evil humanity is capable of.
The Bible also gives us a language—and indeed a spiritual practice—for coming to terms with our grief and fear, without turning to hate. Scripture is full of what’s called lament: fully one third of our Psalms are songs which express sorrow and grief. Those of us who show up for Morning Prayer every day well know that literary voice: it’s sad, but not despairing. Lament allows us to feel our pain, and the pain of others, while insisting that God set things right again. We can use this example to help us genuinely grieve, and give voice to our own longing for justice.
But finally, and perhaps most importantly, we can be silent. That is, shut the heck up, and listen to the tears and the tragedy until they are transformed to resurrection joy. I am confident of our capacity for prophetic silence: the church knows how to keep vigil, and to bear witness. We weep with those who weep, and then stubbornly refuse to let Christ suffer alone, wherever he suffers: in the garden, on the cross, in the hospital room, in the basement apartment. Which is what Holy Week is fundamentally about.
A lot of strong feelings will come to the fore of this week: excitement, anger, fear, betrayal, loneliness, visceral pain. Let yourself feel them fully. But then let them come to rest in the abject silence of Holy Saturday, so that you can experience the profound quiet of the tomb. Where—and you’ll forgive me if I get a little ahead of the story—our hope has, and will yet be, born anew.
