Lent V

The Fifth Sunday of Lent

2021 – Cycle B, Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51; Hebrews 5:7-9; John 12:20-33

In the movie, The Matrix, a beautiful stranger leads a computer hacker named Neo into a forbidding underworld where he discovers a shocking truth – the life he knows is the elaborate deception of an evil cyber-intelligence. Neo’s life is an illusion, a computer-generated world.

This is exactly the shocking truth that is revealed by the Cross of Jesus Christ. The life we know is an elaborate deception under girded by a spirit whose ways are domination, violence and death.

Jesus says, “Now is the time of judgement on this world [on this spirit of domination, violence and death]; now the ruler of this world will be driven out”. In the Preface of the Passion we pray and praise God with similar words, “by the wondrous power of the Cross your judgment on the world [this spirit of domination and violence] and the authority of Christ crucified are now revealed”.

John’s use of the word “world” is not in reference to God’s creation which Genesis teaches us is “very good” but rather to the forces in our world that are in opposition to God’s purposes and that we often participate in knowingly and unknowingly.

This includes everything from war to white supremacy to the willful destruction of the earth. Detention camps in our country that today hold migrant children once held Japanese Americans and before that indigenous people; our criminal justice system controls more black people today then were enslaved in the year 1850; the military–industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in the 1950s has run on a war against terror for so long that distant wars are a normal feature of American life.*

The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth judges this world of domination by placing before us an image of the reality and pervasiveness of this violence. Consider the cry of utter fear, abject loneliness and desertion of Jesus from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”  The Cross is the mirror raised up for us to look into and see our world as it really is and not the illusion we have constructed.

Consider how much of our world deals with threats from enemies, real or perceived, by violently eliminating them. Elimination is what is about to happen to Jesus. The execution of Jesus is “our world of illusion” eliminating a threat to itself. Jesus taught us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Jesus gives us the example as he prays while the soldiers are nailing him to the Cross; “Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing”. Why don’t we know what we are doing? Because we live in an illusion. We believe that power over others protects and saves us. That teaching about loving enemies and that prayer of forgiveness threaten much of our world.

So our world eliminated Archbishop Oscar Romero pleading for justice for the poor; Martin Luther King, Jr. dreaming of people of various coloured skin living in harmony, and Mohandas Gandhi seeking a path to unity between Hindus and Muslims. This spirit of domination causes people to be eliminated through internet cyber bullying that has led teens to commit suicide and destroyed people’s reputations. It is a world, our world, in which children are beheaded in Mozambique, families are allowed to starve in Yemen, where governmental corruption and drug lords cause parents to send their children alone across vast and dangerous landscapes as refugees so they will not be murdered. It is the spirit that allows the world to remain silent in the face of the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya people in Myanmar and Uighurs in China, the rising violence against Asian–Americans, the rise in worldwide Anti–Semitism and the engagement in endless minor wars throughout our world.

The principle by which our world lives is to win by any means. The bumper stickers say it all: The one who dies with the most toys wins or Winners focus on winning – Losers focus on winners. The Cross of Jesus Christ reflects this world vision back to us. Jesus is a loser.

So much of the violence of our world is rooted in our institutions. How many of our societal structures and institutions, including the Christian Church, are shaped to create a world of winners and losers? That’s one reason why I enjoy European soccer. A game can end in a tied score. No overtime to decide a winner; both teams are winners!

Not only does the Cross and the authority of Christ crucified judge us. The Cross challenges us to re-imagine our Church, societal structures and institutions.

Beginning with Constantine in the 4^th century the Christian Church was an imperial Church. We were the invincible Holy Roman Catholic Church. We used violence against indigenous peoples to spread the Gospel as well as against other Christian believers who disagreed with us. The imperial Church continues to suppress the gifts of women and now is insulting the generous love of LGBTQ people as sinful.

Pope Francis is re-imagining the Catholic Church. His re-imaging is not imperial but Church as a field hospital. A field hospital is mobile in structure, tent–like. I am reminded of the ancient Hebrew Tent of Presence in which God dwelt moving with Israel from place to place in the desert. A field hospital refers to a medical unit for the wounded and sick. Does this image not much more describe what the institution of the Church should be rather than imperial? A Church moving with people, healing and binding up wounds?

But if we Christians want a world and a Church where everyone shares in the goodness of creation and the sacramental grace of Christ, the Christian is called not just to resist this spirit of domination and violence but more importantly to re-imagine our world and Church in the terms that Jesus taught us and that led to his crucifixion.

The crucifixion, this spilling of blood, this death, was not needed for God to forgive humanity. So why the crucifixion? This tortuous death was caused by Jesus’ fidelity to the vision of God for humanity. The consequences of this spirit of domination, violence and death chosen by humanity to live out is offered back to us. The image of a crucified God.

In these days as Lent draws to a close, look deeply into this mirror of the Cross. Contemplate what you see. And then re-imagine. Re-imagine a church as a field hospital. Re-imagine a world where there is enough of the basics for everyone, because there is. Re-imagine your life lived out not with eliminating people or participating in systems that do eliminate people, but a world that embraces people who are different from us because they complete us.

That re-imagining begins with the Cross of Jesus Christ. Without the vision before us, nothing changes, including ourselves.

*from See No Stranger by Valerie Kaur, chapter 6.

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PLEASE NOTE: Homilies presented here are also being videotaped and put up on the Saint Mary, Oneonta website: http://www.SMCCOneonta.org.