Second Sunday in Lent Genesis 12.1-8
20 February 2005 Psalm 33.12-22
Karen Wacome+, Presiding
Donald Wacome, Lay Preaching
God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. John 3.17
Finding Jesus in
the Dark
In his book Jesus and the Holocaust, Joel Marcus asserts: “Nothing can induce despair more quickly than a premature, ill-thought-out affirmation of faith.” He goes on to relate the story of:
a former inmate of
We are given the season of Lent to focus on our ongoing need for the salvation that comes through the cross of Christ. But we should not be too quick to think we know what it means, to assume we can easily move beyond its dereliction to the glory, to the resurrected Christ, the victor over sin and death, or easily assimilate it into some tractable system of thought, making sense of it as a wonderful example and symbol of self-sacrificing love, or as a transaction that satisfies some principle of divine justice, rather than entering into the despair and loss, rather than looking upon a scene, embarrassing and meaningless, from which we want to advert our eyes. To keep a true Lent is to dwell on this cross, this absurdity into which all hope and meaning sinks and from which no light escapes. That is, we are called to experience it as Jesus did when he cried out, “My God! My God” Why have you forsaken me?”
In Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl With the Pearl Earring, Griet is a young girl who takes a job as a housemaid in the Roman Catholic household of the painter Vermeer. In the cellar room where she sleeps, a small painting of the crucifixion hangs upon the wall, over her bed. Griet finds this image of the bleeding, broken man nailed to the cross disturbing, something her Dutch Calvinist sensibilities can’t cope with; so it won’t be the last thing she sees before she blows out her candle and goes to sleep, she covers it with a cloth. (As the story develops this becomes increasingly ironic as it becomes clear that it is Griet that everyone else is willing to sacrifice for their ends.)
We are right to share Griet’s discomfort with the man upon the cross. He is not easy to look at. To see him there, abandoned in the wreck of his messianic calling, is to have all we hold sacred judged and discarded. The sight of Jesus, despairing and defeated, can only condemn our hopes for a God who is in charge, a God who rescues the innocent, vindicates the righteous, and overpowers evil. It can only mock our conviction that the truth will out, that might does not make right, and the good guys win in the end. Yet part of our Lenten journey is to slow down, to wait, and to live in silence, without consolation, in the absence of explanations that tame evil and make sense of loss. It is to learn that faith in Jesus is not about being given the answers, but of receiving the possibility of living without them, trusting the one who dies in the emptiness that answers his question: “Why have you forsaken me?” It is to wait for faith even where faith fails, and nothing is left but the one in whom we would have faith if we had any. It is to seek a place with Jesus, there in the incomprehensible darkness.
To begin to find our way to the cross is to begin to recognize in ourselves the lure of an idol, not the crucified God but a God who will ensure that suffering has a purpose, and that death is not simply meaningless, a God who, as Stanley Hauerwas puts it in Cross-Shattered Christ, “must possess the sovereign power to make everything turn out all right for us” (64). Instead of this useful deity, we are called to witness Jesus discredited, abandoned by the God who forsakes the prerogatives of God, lets infinite power to do good go to waste, and lets the world do its worse, which is very bad indeed. The God who was in Christ does not destroy the evil in this world; he submits to it. He refuses to condemn the world; it condemns him, and in that condemnation lies our life, the new life that comes from God.
Like Nicodemus, that
religiously powerful, but ambivalent leader of the Jews who found Jesus in the
night, we have to ask, “How can these things be?” Nicodemus, and the powerful men he
represents—I take it that he is a back channel emissary from the religious
establishment, feeling out Jesus in an attempt to see how dangerous he is,
maybe to find out if he can be co-opted—are impressed with the divine power
apparent in Jesus’ healings; this is something they understand: “Rabbi, we
know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these
signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” But Jesus dismisses interest in these
miraculous signs; he twists the conversation in another direction: “No one
can see the
The final words are at first puzzling: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” No one has said anything about God condemning the world, so why does Jesus (or the author speaking for him: I assume that here in John’s Gospel that’s a fine distinction) make a point of denying it? Coming on the heels of verse 16, where we have just heard that God so loved the world, this seems redundant.
Perhaps Jesus wants to let Nicodemus know that even an obtuse and worldly ecclesiastical functionary like him, one Jesus has just upbraided as irresponsible and theologically incompetent, is included in that world God loves: “I’m not even here to condemn you, Nicodemus!”
Maybe Jesus, having made the analogy with the snake attack back there in Numbers 21, now wants to distance himself from it. For there, the people of Israel were saved by looking to the bronze serpent that Moses made, but what they needed saving from were the poisonous snakes God sent among them in response to their faithless complaining—yet again—about the bad food and lack of water: God was saving them from God (Numbers 21.4-9). God condemned them, though conditionally, offering a way to escape the punishment he inflicted upon them. There are, I fear, plenty of people who believe pretty much the same thing about Jesus: he is the salvation God gives us, but he delivers us from God, who, compelled by some ineluctable demand of justice or affronted honor, will inflict horrible torments upon us if we don’t (freely?!) believe in Jesus. This snares the cross in the net of what’s morally and religiously acceptable; but surely it presents us with a God who does condemn the world. So maybe Jesus tries to steer us away from this plausible notion of how God operates, toward the unmanageable truth. Handed over to the religious authorities, the defenders of the nation, the enforcers of the law, and judged a criminal, he saves us from the powers, the greater than human destructive forces of which we are willing victims. Broken and powerless, he saves us from ourselves, from our ingrained lust for control and invulnerability. Shamed and repudiated, he delivers us from our pride and our quest for unassailable righteousness. Condemned, he delivers us from condemnation.
You probably recall that there is a sequel; John has Nicodemus reappear, after the crucifixion (John 19.38-42). We find him and Joseph of Arimathea preparing Jesus for burial, wrapping the ruined body with perfumed linen and placing it in the grave. John does not tell us what moves Nicodemus to do this. Maybe he’s just working off some feelings of guilt, making amends after he’s been complicit in the killing of a man he still knows as a teacher who has come from God. But there’s hope for another, better, story: Nicodemus has seen in the crucified Jesus the God who chooses to be condemned rather than to condemn; he has found in the sordid death the life that comes from above. May we find it there too.
Amen.