Roger Ray, pastor
April 1, 2012 Passion Sunday
Those of us in progressive churches, along with our predecessors in the Liberation theology movement, are primarily motivated by the ethical and social justice teachings of Jesus. Evangelicals and most traditional Christians, as is evidenced in the traditional creeds of the church, are not as interested in what he said as they are interested in what was said about him as a sin offering who repaired their relationship with an angry God.
But, to be honest, neither of these two camps get everything they are hungry for out of the gospels. The oldest of the four gospels, Mark, is only 16 chapters long and nearly half of it describes events that take place between Palm Sunday and Easter. Why does Mark use so much precious space in telling us so many details of the events around Jesus' death?
The easy answer is that his agenda was not our agenda. Written right about the time of the Roman holocaust against the population of Israel and the final destruction of the Jewish temple, Mark seems at greatest pains to hold Jesus up as an example of martyrdom.
There would eventually be an all out persecution of the young church but at the time Mark wrote, church martyrs were probably fairly few in number but they were the first saints and heroes of the church.
I grew up with Sunday School teachers telling me that early Christians met in the catacombs of Rome because their persecutors would not come into the graves to molest their meetings. But the truth is that the catacombs became places of worship because the bodies of the martyrs were found there and early Christians came to pray at their tombs and leave tributes to them.
Mark wanted his first readers to be encouraged and emboldened by the fact that Jesus had known that going to Jerusalem would mean dying but that he went with conviction and courage where he was betrayed by his own people and executed by the government.
What Mark could not have known is that he was writing one of the most powerful archetypal stories in all of human history. The passion narrative is a story that immediately jumps inside your heart, not because it is Jesus so much as because we have lived that story. Jesus loved and trusted Judas. He is positioned right beside him at the last supper and yet, for reasons of his own, he betrayed Jesus.
When we hear that Judas kissed Jesus in the garden we don't see some dark bearded Arab kissing another dark bearded Arab..... we immediately think of someone we loved who hurt us as deeply as they possibly could have.
We see ourselves in the place of Jesus, sometimes we see ourselves as Peter, turning his back on his friend, as Mary, confusing the lines between friend, follower and lover. We have stood before Pilate or Herod, or we have stood in judgment of an innocent person, eating their flesh through gossip.
Mark's passion narrative tells such a powerful and universal story that even though they want to put their own theological spins on it, Matthew, Luke and John feel compelled to copy almost every line of it.
For Mark there is no virgin birth, there are no resurrection appearances and most of his recounting of sermons, miracles and exorcisms serve only as a lengthy introduction to the story he really wants to tell.... That the world's greatest teacher of compassion, love, justice, mercy and forgiveness was rejected by his faith community, his family, friends, countrymen and he was killed by his government but God would not stand for that injustice and the Holy One refused to allow death to be the last word.
So for me, the most powerful aspect of the story is just that.... Not that it tells me beyond dispute what happened to Jesus because as history, we can be no more certain that that than we can in any other narrative of the ancient world, but it is the message of the story that gives us hope.
When someone you loved betrayed you, you probably felt like you were going to die. When you realized that you could not trust your government. When your church refused to accept you, when your family went totally nuts, when you discovered that your best friends were entirely unreliable and you couldn't think of a single reason why you would want to live another day.
Mark says, that's when God stepped into your graveyard and said a Divine, "not yet.... You don't get to end his beautiful life." Resurrection is not something that happened one Sunday morning at daybreak 2000 years ago because in the community of faith, it is something that happens every day.
Resurrection gives us the hope to survive betrayal, adversity, a corrupt judicial system, an unreliable friend or an unreliable church and we rise up to kick at the darkness again until it bleeds daylight.
