Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
April 17, 2011 Passion Sunday
Jerry Block and Sheldon Harnick, took an old Yiddish short story about a dairyman and his daughters and turned it into a musical play in the 1960's. Producers turned Block and Harnick down for years saying that their play was too Jewish to be of interest to anyone who did not have eastern European Jewish background. However, Fiddler on the Roof became the longest running Broadway play at that time and has since been translated into more languages than any other stage play.
The popularity of Fiddler is certainly not rooted in the wide spread awareness of the travails of eastern European Jews at the turn of the 20th century. Its power derives from the way it explores such universal topics as love and marriage after 25 years and three kids. It explores how a father feels about his grown daughters getting married. It expresses what many people have felt about faith, nationalism, oppression and displacement.
It seems odd to think about Fiddler on the Roof being sung in Japanese and acted out in Tokyo but it is very popular there. Really good stories help us to express our own feelings and to understand our own lives. The classics of children's stories do not become classics accidently. They become classics because so many children feel like Jack, living in poverty and threatened by giants.... Or like little girl walking through a forest inhabited by either figurative or literal wolves.
Regardless of how you interpret the religious dimensions of the story of the betrayal and murder of Jesus, the story has the power of an archetypal classic.
It contains elements of betrayal by a beloved friend, abandonment by fickle friends and the shallowness of public opinion. It places the main character in a mortally vulnerable position in front of hypocritical religious leaders and unethical political figures. It speaks to every mother who has lost a son unjustly. To every friend who realized that they had failed to speak up or to act to come to the defense of another.
The passion narrative has also found an audience in every language, on every continent and in every century. Imagine what it would be like to read it from the perspective of a poor southern black family the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered. Imagine hearing it through the ears of the poor Salvadoran peasants after Arch Bishop Romero was assassinated. Imagine being a Hindu and reading the passion in the weeks following the murder of Gandhi.
Everyone, at some point, can see themselves in the Jesus role, as having been unjustly judged, betrayed by a friend, and misunderstood by family, lovers and neighbors. But to really understand the passion, you must also see yourself as Gov. Pilate, or Herod, or Peter or even Judas. And you have to realize that if the story were being read this morning in Afghanistan or Iraq the evil empire would not be Rome, would it?
Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote Jesus Christ Superstar after growing up in traditional religious schools but always wondering about the role of Judas in the Biblical account. Why did Judas do what he did? What was his motivation and how might he have told the story differently? In Weber's imagination, the sometimes two dimensional characters of religious accounts of the death of Jesus take on more complex and more believable third dimensions.
The famous and much more recent attempt to tell the story by Mel Gibson focuses almost exclusively on the aspect of torture and to do that seems to miss the point of the story entirely. Jesus was not the first nor was he the last to die miserably in unjust circumstances. We tell the story of Jesus because we are able to feel it at so many levels..... through the eyes of Judas who came to see Jesus as a disappointment, a narcissist who failed to do what he could for his own people.
Through the eyes of Peter who believed in Jesus but not enough to risk his own hide. Through the eyes of Pilate, who somehow seemed to sense that Jesus had integrity which the governor did not but who could not seem to bring himself to do the right thing. Through the eyes of Mary, who loved, adored, possibly desired Jesus but who still did not understand her own simultaneous love and fear. And through the eyes of religious leaders who prefer the institution to the faith the institution was created to foster.
Today we invite you to enter the story again, singing "ho sanna" with the fickle crowds who danced in the Triumphal Entry but who yelled out, "crucify him" four days later. We encourage you to sing with the apostles who were too drunk with prospects of their own importance to comprehend what was going on all around them. And we invite you to feel with both Jesus and Judas what it is to betray a friend and to be betrayed.
Obviously, we only have the time to present about half of the music from this iconic opera in our service today. We do not get to over hear the confused disciples asking what's the buzz. We don't get to see the argument between Judas and Jesus about Mary and about Judas' own decision to betray his friend. We won't have time for Pilate's pensive remembering of his dream or to witness the moral outrage of Jesus clearing the temple.
Still, I hope that it is enough to spark your memory and to allow you to remember the world's most important story again. Unless there is a cold hard place where your heart is supposed to be, you should be able to feel the passion yourselves.
A part of me wants to ask you not to applaud today because the story is, itself, sacred and deserves our respect but I know that some of today's performances will be so shocking that you will need to applaud and, frankly, we'll need a few moments here and there to get instruments and equipment ready.
We are using a mixed media today. We never do that but some of the music we judged to be crucial to the telling of the passion required orchestration and more voices than we could bring in. Let us move back and forth between the classic film and the voices of people you know, re-telling a story which defines us.
Our spiritual desire for justice, true friendship, substantive love and a meaningful life is rooted in this story which has been translated into every language of the world and remains a fixture in every culture. You and I are in this story. Our deepest pain is here and somewhere between the characters lays our greatest source of hope.
