The story and themes of this night within the Christian tradition has something to reveal to us about our long march toward peace. In short, it’s not a straight path.
We’ve heard it said that peace begins at home. That if you don’t have peace in your being, an inner tranquility, then it’s impossible to bring peace to your relationships, your communities, and by extension the world.
But I’ve had more than one person tell me that there is no way they could have peace of any sort when they were living in a corrupt and warring nation, where every day was a test of physical survival under threat of death. The only way to personal peace was by removing the external threats to every other kind of peace.
So this peace thing goes both ways. It’s not a straight path or a simple equation. We are all on this path toward peace. We all would like to see it happen as intimately as within our own emotions and very bodies, to as far away as Somalia or South Sudan or Syria or Afghanistan – and everywhere in between. We’re all walking this switchback trail together in one way or another.
The story of this Friday in our tradition sees the arrest, trial and execution a man who’s political, economic, social and religious teaching threatened the abusive and unjust power structures of the time. I’ve attended plenty of Good Friday church services in my life that have read, re-enacted, and paid homage to this story with melodrama and sadness; who’s purpose is to interpret this story of execution as the death of god and the snuffing out of the light of goodness in wait for its triumphant return when we come back on Easter. Those sad and melancholic observances are the result of centuries of theological gymnastics that the christian church has done to layer this story with cosmic meaning, turning the tragic death of a respected and beloved leader into an opportunity to bring acclaim to a god who’s in charge, who has everything planned, who controls the very destinies of our life and death.
I’m not interested in any of that tonight. In this story of the systematic ending of a man and his teachings, we catch a glimpse of what it means to be committed to peace. We have the opportunity to learn in this story how we bring our honest and raw humanity to the work of building peace. How we use even the most ruthless and awful challenges in our lives as building blocks to creating something else, something new, something worth living for.
So let’s go back to the beginning of this Friday story:
This group of friends are confronted with a tense, anxiety-ridden night when the authorities were coming to arrest Jesus, and like anyone in that situation, they exhibited a whole range of responses: Denial, incredulity, wanting to retreat, wanting to fight, anger, acceptance, the whole gamut. So it’s no surprise when someone from among the group pulled his weapon, lashed out with a violent act and sliced at the guard’s face.
And Jesus’ response is telling and perhaps an embodiment of his entire ethic, his whole mode of being – “those who take up the sword, will perish by the sword”. It’s the premise behind all non-violence. Aggression leads to more aggression; fighting leads to want to train to be a better fighter; brutality on one side breeds brutality in retaliation; Seeing violent behaviour normalizes it and gives birth to an affinity for it. Violence begets violence. Pick up a sword, or a knife or a gun against another, and it births a cycle that’s awfully hard to stop.
This narrative goes on beyond the short scene we heard tonight to Jesus’ arrest and questioning and ultimately execution, but the same attitude continues: when accused of this, that and the other, Jesus remains silent. He knows what countless defence attorneys since know: having the accused testify on the stand is risky business. He knows that in a corrupt system, there is no end to the ways that a suspect’s words can be twisted to mean whatever the prosecution wants them to mean. I love that in the version Nancy read tonight, that there’s an acknowledgement of just who’s system they’re all working in: Matthew puts these words in Jesus mouth: Day after day I sat in the temple teaching and you didn’t lay a hand on me…but this is your hour.” This is your show…your names on the marquee. And since the fix was in before the questioning even began… isn’t it far better to let your actions and your convictions speak for themselves?
Here’s what meaning I take: Let’s not respond out of the heat of anger or a desperate ego. There is peace in knowing that one is acting out of their real passion, that one is living from the core of their desire for justice, not swaying from their rejection to being a part of an exploitive system. He knew what was a stake, it seemed. He’d be killed for those convictions.
So even though we’re all tempted, like that one in the group who got a bit sword happy, to deal with our anger in less-than-positive ways, there are ways to use our anger, not destructively, but in the service of peace and positive change.
So many similar experiences are shared by those who’ve done amazing things both large and small. By her own account, Rosa Parks was thinking about Emmett Till — a 14-year old African American who was brutally murdered by two white men in Mississippi in August 1955 — when she refused to move to the back of the bus in December of that year and sparked the Montgomery bus boycott which, in turn, triggered the civil rights movement.
We have all been angry at certain circumstances that present themselves to us.
Over the past two years, I have been angry at the treatment of a minister colleague in the United Church, being declared unfit due to her theological views – which are no different in substance from my own. They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but results aren’t seen, I’ve been tempted to let anger fly more freely.
Some of us, when confronted with what was felt as systemic racism in our justice system in dealing with Indigenous individuals experienced anger.
What have you come face to face with that has caused anger to flash?
The point is this. Like that night long ago when a ruling class and elite of civic and religious leaders wanted a quick condemnation to rid themselves of a troublesome protestor, movement leader and change initiation, we will always need to condemn pulling out our swords and turning to violence.
This is the difference between what community organizer Ernie Cortes calls hot anger and cold anger. With hot anger we act irrationally and misdirect it toward the wrong people. With cold anger we focus on what we can do to change oppression, exploitation and injustice (Cold Anger by Mary Beth Rogers).
If we act on our hot anger, it’s destructive, it’s often violent, it’s dangerous. If we hold our hot anger too long, it only begins to burn us, cooking up resentment, hatred, and destroying our inner well-being. But the opposite of that hot anger isn’t to become pushovers and doormats for the world’s bullies and power mongers. When we cool our anger down, turn it toward our focus on alternatives on paths toward change, on productive ideas, on community responses, this becomes the path to peace.
Peace is not a straight road. Let’s get angry. Let’s the get the right kind of angry. Not the kind that’s destructive and violent to others and ourselves, but the kind where the conviction of our ideas will help us find our way out of tonight and into a new day. Let’s get the right kind of angry. Not in some magical empty tomb or rising from the dead, but in the thoughtful, organized and beautiful action. That’s where we’ll find our way on this curvy path of peace to the hope of Easter, and every new possibility.
-Chris New
Comments are closed