An empty 'maranatha' waiting for Godot

It's Sunday evening. My family is gathered around the dinner table as we have every Easter for the past fourteen years. There, in the center of the table, a wine glass stands on a saucer next to a bottle of wine.

“How much joy have we had this year?” I ask, and fill the wine a quarter of the way. “This much?”

My girls know the drill. “More than that!” they answer, and I fill it halfway to the top. “This much?” I ask.

“More than that!” I pour again. Three-quarters. “This much?”

“More than that!” Wine flows, and a moment later wine fills the cup past the rim and splashes joyously to the saucer below. We have friends. We have a home. We have one another. Middle Daughter has found a passion for the stage that will carry her well into adulthood. Oldest Daughter is in the home stretch of her junior year and thinking about college. For Youngest Daughter, every day is a new adventure, every moment a treasure to unpack. Life overflows with joy, and with love.

After we have measured our joy but before we eat the meal, comes what I am finding is the hardest part of Easter. My own wine glass in hand, I turn to Youngest.

“Before Jesus ascended into heaven, he told us he would return one day,” I tell her. “Open the door and invite him in.” I quickly add: “Don't let the dog out.”

Youngest knows the routine by now. She opens to the kitchen door and peers out into the back yard. “Maranatha,” she calls. “Come, Lord Jesus.”

There is a pause. Jesus doesn't come. “Maybe next year,” I say. Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won't come this evening, but surely tomorrow. 

It's been about two thousand years. How long are these Last Days supposed to last, anyway?

I had my religious awakening in 1988, about six weeks after high school graduation. While I was away at college I soon found myself drawn to an Assemblies of God church off campus. Services there were lively and boisterous, a marked departure from the staid Presbyterianism I had grown up in. There was an immediacy about worship there that I had never felt before, a sense that we were in the very presence of God and not just admiring him from a distance.

With that immediacy also came an urgency. Christ could return any day. The modern nation of Israel had formed in 1948, an event that to many evangelicals fulfilled key biblical prophecy in heralding the Second Coming. Adding to that urgency were the dramatic shifts in the popular zeitgeist and in geopolitical power over the course of that one decade.

For much of the 1980s the entire nation had lived under the cloud of nuclear war. Made-for-TV movies like “The Day After” in 1983 and “Countdown to Looking Glass” in 1984 carried the fear right into our living rooms. Conflicts like the military downing of a Korean Air Lines flight in September 1983 set the nation's teeth on edge. Even the pop culture reflected this fear, with songs like "99 Red Balloons" and "It's a Mistake" imagining nuclear war breaking out over a simple misunderstanding. (As it nearly did.)

Then in the late 1980s, reforms like glasnost and perestroika led to the breakup the Soviet Union. One by one the Baltic republics declared their independence and established democratic governments. The Berlin wall came down, and suddenly there were talks of reunifying the two Germanys for the first time since World War II.

With that much change afoot, it couldn't help but feel that Judgment Day was coming. And when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, armchair interest in biblical prophecy shot up in a way it hadn't since Hal Lindsey had published “The Late Great Planet Earth” in 1970 and Christian moviemakers started producing B-movies like “A Thief in the Night.” Jesus was coming! No one knows the day or the hour, but still it had to be soon. It had to be.

Except Jesus didn't return. In fact it's been 68 years since the founding of Israel, so significant that Edgar Whisenant once wrote a popular book, “88 Reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1988,” prompted by that event. (Spoiler: It didn't happen.) Whisenant later predicted the return of Christ in 1989, 1993 and 1994 as well. Jesus didn't return then either.

'And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come.' — Matthew 24:14

This has been going on for a while. The church fathers were so convinced that the Parousia was coming within their lifetimes that the Bible contains apostolic letters reassuring people not to panic that they were dying of old age before Christ's return. He's coming, Peter says. Just be patient. It's been about 1,980 years. How patient do we have to be?

I don't have a good answer for that. I'd love it if I could find a neat and tidy conclusion that makes the interminable wait seem worthwhile. The gospels tell us that Jesus is going to return, and it's the creeds that we recite; but year after year keeps going by. We keep waiting, and he keeps not returning.

Why do we do this? Is it because the Second Coming is supposed to be such a major event? At the Parousia, that wondrous appearing of Jesus, we're told that all will be made right. Fish will team in rivers and streams whose waters will be restored, and herds of buffalo will stampede across the plains again. The wicked will no longer feed off the anger in the land and turn us against one another, and the arrogant will no longer sit in places of power.

When Christ comes, we'll recognize the dignity of one another without pause or exception. We'll recognize the wrongs we've done one another over the centuries, and we'll ask forgiveness for not setting it right sooner. We'll apologize for separate drinking fountains and for glass ceilings, for stolen land and for stolen labor. We'll dismantle empire and repair the damage it has caused, and as we get to know our neighbors, we'll wonder why we ever avoided them before.

Is that why we wait, to remind ourselves what the Kingdom of God is supposed to look like? Do we have the promise of a Second Coming so that we can take seriously what he said the first time he came, and start working on that in the meantime?

“Maranatha,” my daughter dutifully says. There is a pause. Jesus doesn't appear, just like he didn't appear last year, or the year before that.

“Maybe next year,” I say, and I think: “I doubt it.”

The doubt is all I have, Lord. I give it to you, and pray that it's enough.


Copyright 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Life of Cesar Chavez celebrated on Easter, people freak out

My faith is in shambles today, because Google honored Cesar Chavez today instead of celebrating Easter. Or at least so the Christian Right would have it.

Google has a custom of altering the logo on its main page to mark major holidays, significant events and anniversaries, and just because it can. A lot of these doodles are fun, like the time it replaced the Google logo with a functioning Pac-Man game. (My daughter still plays that.) Others are educational, like the time Google honored M.C. Escher. Other times, they're just odd, like the logo honoring the 150th birthday of L.L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. (For what it's worth, I speak the language, and just shrugged at that one.)

But heck, it's their logo, they can do whatever they want with it. Right?

Apparently not. On Easter Sunday this year, Google honored Cesar Chavez, a labor activist born on March 31, 1927, and not the Resurrection, and that, apparently, was too much. Glenn Beck got all snarky at the imagined disrespect; other Twitterfolk suggested that Google was elevating Chavez over Christ, or even found it a tremendous insult to their religion.

Come on, really?

I fully understand that Christians on Easter may greet one another with cries of "He is risen!" and "He is risen indeed!" But it's silly, it's pointless, it's completely un-Christlike, to demand that everyone else celebrate the Resurrection with us, and to take offense when a corporation like Google, with users who are Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, agnostic, atheist, Jainist, Shinto, Sikh and Wiccan as well as Christian, does not take the time to affirm our particular set of religious beliefs, or even to celebrate our holiday with us.

The empty tomb on the first Easter is foundational to my faith. It is the basis for my belief that Jesus is the Son of God, the foundation of my hope that one day I too will rise from the dead, and for my conviction that God's dream is for us one day to live in a world free of pain, disease, death and infirmity, for us to walk with him as his people and for him to walk with us as our God.

I don't need a Google Doodle to affirm my faith today, and even if Google actually savaged Christians today with a doodle that declared "He's dead, you nitwits," my faith would be unrattled. (Though at least in that case I could understand being upset.)

But, in fact, Google's choice of doodles today is one that affirms my faith, and if you're a Christian you also should find it encouraging.

Cesar Chavez, after all, was a tireless advocate for the rights of poor workers. Himself an American farm worker, Chavez was a leader in the labor movement in the 1960s and also worked for civil rights, encouraging Mexican Americans to become registered voters involved with the political process.

With Dolores Huerta, he co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, a labor union that worked to ensure laborers were paid well and treated with dignity. One of the hallmarks of his activism was his strict commitment to nonviolence.

Chavez, it should be noted, was a devote Christian, He drew his inspiration for all these stands and for his actions from the person, the teachings and the life of Jesus Christ.

And isn't a transformed life the best way to honor the man we believe rose from the dead?


Copyright © 2013 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Resurrection lies at the heart of faith

You know, it's the Resurrection more than anything else that keeps me from walking away.

It's not apologetics. A lot of apologetics involves either violence to the text, such as the rather involved, complicated, and beside-the-point efforts to justify scientifically the Deluge and a six-day creation, instead of just letting the stories be what they are; or they involve trying to convince ourselves that square pegs are round.

It's not experience, because experience can go be interpreted at least two ways. Do we sense God's presence during worship, or does something about music stimulate a part of our brains that we mistake for God's presence? Those who have gone to both have remarked that attending a Grateful Dead concert is like attending a Pentecostal worship service.

Those who attend churches with loud worship, heavy on guitars and drums, feel excited in the presence of God -- just as they would at a secular rock concert, because the volume triggers an adrenaline rush and makes those who listen feel excited.

And those who attend somber, serious-minded services with organ worship probably feel the same sort of sober response as concert-goers listening to Bach or Mendelsohn.

It's not the transformation, because I don't see much evidence of that. I've known absolutely saintly people of just about every religion, and even with no religion, and I've known some real jerks who claim to have been born again. Frederick Douglass in his autobiography noted that the cruelest slave owners were also the most devout.

Keep in mind that many Christians see nothing wrong with imposing Christian morality or views as the law of the land if we can build a large enough lobby for it. If that doesn't seem so bad, just ask a gay friend how much compassion they get from the church crowd for happening to be gay.

Think about the way Christians so lovingly rip to shreds spouses who file for divorce.

Consider the paranoid thinking that often comes from our evangelical leaders about the various agendas supposedly at work to destroy all that is decent in America, and the cavalier arrogance that marks the ways we discount as foolish those whom we disagree with.

Recall the ways we so carelessly classify one another as "real Christians," "cultural Christians," "counterfeit Christians" and "Christians who don't get it as well as I do" based on petty stuff like baptism, eschatology, doctrines of Scriptural inspiration, ethics and sexual morals, abortion, capital punishment, and so on.

And that doesn't even touch the Christians who  shoot abortionists, bomb clinics, or tacitly support those who do.

When you get down to it, I see very little difference between Christians and the rest of the world as far as spiritual renewal goes. As someone once observed, I'd find it easier to believe in the Savior if I knew more people who had been saved by him.

But the person of Christ is someone I can't let go of, and the Resurrection is something I just can't shake.

A family Easter celebration: 2005

We had what was, all things considered, a decent Easter weekend.

Around noon Saturday, we took the girls to an Easter egg hunt at the university. (Speaking of Easter eggs, I've found seven so far on Disk 2 of "The Incredibles," including a sock puppet version of the movie.) There was some confusion about how we were supposed to sign in, and the girls missed -- just -- the hunt intended for the little kids.

After that, they took part in the hunt that was meant for all the kids and that, sadly, was a rout.

Evangeline managed to get six eggs, and Rachel got three. How're a 5- and 2-year-old supposed to compete with 40 other kids, some of whom are practically teens? It was crushing to see as their father, particularly when the hunt was over and hordes of kids are counting "20! 21! 22!" as they rack up their gains.

Evangeline was in tears, because she really wanted to gather more.

There were some frustrating things, like the adult who took the egg I was trying to point out to Evangeline, but there were some bright spots too. Another parent saw Evangeline walking to an egg up in a tree and handed it to her, and when Evangeline was feeling inconsolable after the hunt, I could see a boy her age struggling with whether he should share some of his prizes. (He decided not to, but it was nice to see him feeling badly for her.)

Luckily, the organizers had planned for such a contingency, and had packages of consolation eggs stashed away for children who had gathered fewer than 10 eggs, so Evangeline ended up cheering up considerably. Fortunately, it was after I had managed to convince her that the important thing was that she had had fun looking for them.

Afterward, we dyed eggs and Evangeline was in heaven.

And in what must surely count as some form of sacrilege, Natasha and I took some deviled Easter eggs to a potluck dinner that night.

Easter, though, was a blast.

A few years ago I started to lament that the whole of our family traditions concerning Easter involved food: We eat ham, mashed potatoes, green beans mixed with cream of mushroom soup and topped with french onions, and biscuits. And that's just pregnant with meaning, isn't it? Well, I started the ball rolling and we've been adding some meaningful traditions.

First, there's the eggs. We take a runny egg and hard boil it. What does this signify? The transformation of our lives when we commit ourselves to following Christ. Next we put the egg in the dye and change its color. So it is when we immerse ourselves in Christ -- gradually we change and take on his likeness.

Then there's the Easter basket. It's hidden, and we look for it. It's a parable about the kingdom of God and our search for Christ. We search high and low, and we find him, it's a cause for celebration.

Natasha and I took the Easter meal and added some stuff at the beginning that we borrowed from the Passover seder Jews celebrate each year. That is, we're using some of the same elements, but we're reinterpreting them. The horseradish becomes the bitterness of our sins; the apple is the comfort that God provides for us in taking away the full measure of the cost our sin carries. We dip the parsley into salt water to symbolize the tears of this life and the new life that we have been promised.

We would have had wine, to symbolize joy and the Holy Spirit, but alas! I forgot the wine until Sunday, when all the liquor stores were closed. (But we're getting better. This year we had more of the elements than we did last year.) Dinner includes some Scripture readings about Good Friday and Easter Sunday and if we had had the wine, we would have celebrated Communion.

I even had planned to have an extra glass of wine on the table, although, since we believe Elijah already came to prepare the way for the Messiah, I had Evangeline open the door to invite Christ into our home, not just in the immediate sense, but also for the Second Coming. Next year, of course, who wouldn't want to celebrate Easter Sunday in the Kingdom of God?

So I was feeling pretty good about it. Things were a little disorganized and we had to reheat the mashed potatoes, but we used two longstanding Easter traditions (the basket and the eggs) to relate spiritual truths to our children, and we turned our Easter dinner from simply another large meal into what hopefully will be a long-lasting family tradition that will teach our children the foundation of our faith.

And today, Easter Monday, the girls watched "Jesus Christ Superstar," which is to date my preferred Passion play.

easter and pesach

A friend of mine and I today were talking about his visit home for Passover yesterday, and it hit me what a good thing the Jews have set up in the way they celebrate the seder.

The seder, as probably everyone knows, is a meal that is filled with structure, layered with meaning, and replete with teaching. The elements of seder, laid out in the book of Exodus and developed further in the Talmud and Midrash, remind children and adults every year about their Jewish heritage. Through the ritual, they remember the suffering of their ancestors in Egypt and the deliverance God brought them through Moses in exquisite detail. Each element of the meal from the horseradish down to the matzoh refers back to some element of the Exodus story. It's a fantastic way not only to educate children about the religion, but to keep the Jewish identity intact despite all the pressures to conform to a non-Jewish society.

By contrast, when we celebrate Easter this year, most of us are going to go to church like we do every other Sunday, although some of us might dress up a little more, and then we'll go home and eat an Easter ham with spend time with family.

That's nice, but I can't help but think what we're missing out on. When Jesus ate that final seder with his disciples on Maundy Thursday,1 he added new layers of meaning as reinterpreted each element of the meal to refer to himself, from the lamb to the glass of wine to the matzoh. I doubt the average Christian household would even know where to begin that process with our own Easter meals. Passover can tell the story of the Exodus and the Passion; my Easter dinner is mostly just a nice family time.

It doesn't have to be that way, though. When missionaries brought the gospel to our pagan ancestors, they used elements of the pagans' belief systems to explain the gospel. The renewal and new beginnings that the Anglo-Saxons looked forward to with the arrival of Easter met its fulfillment in Christ, and so the trappings of Easter celebration -- like eggs and rabbits, symbols of beginning and fertility -- were reinterpreted along those lines.

Last year, I turned the question of Easter eggs over and over in my mind and sought a way to use them to teach my children. I finally hit upon the egg as a type -- when we boil the egg, it changes from being runny to being hard. In the same way, Christ uses the trials of this life to change our inner being. And, just as dipping the egg into the dye changes its color, so we can be changed to look like Christ when we immerse ourselves in him.

The Easter basket I turned into a living parable. We search for Truth and when we find it we're glad and we treasure it, just as we search for the basket and are happy for what it gives us.

I'd like to do more with the Easter dinner, though. Some of the family traditions we have are nice. Eowyn likes to eat holiday meals by candlelight, just like I do; and there's the foods we "must" have or it's not Easter, like the ham and the mashed potatoes and what have you.

But I really want to see if we can do what the Jews do with Passover, and turn the day into more than just a family get-together and meal to feel good over. Easter is a different day for us too. It marks the day we were set free from slavery to sin and really experienced the joys of God's love and forgiveness. If Passover can be a meal to pass the faith down through the generations, so can Easter.

But I'm stuck for how to do it. Any suggestions?

1 I did point out to Josh, and he agreed, that Christians have much neater names for the individual days of Holy Week than Jews have for the days of Passover. Although we have the lame and predictable "Palm Sunday," we also have Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday.

Of course, as I also mentioned, Jewish holidays have much nicer-sounding names than Christian ones. Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and Advent just can't hold a candle namewise to Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana, Hanukkah, Sukkoth and Pesach.

Plus, if Constantine had converted to Judaism, we'd get three weeks of vacation every year, since Passover, Hanukkah and the High Holy Days each run about that long. We really shot ourselves in the foot by making sure that Easter always lands on a weekend. What management stooge thought of that?

easter baskets redux

I was talking today with a co-worker about the golem legend and how it appears in other forms throughout literature such as Frosty the Snowman and Pinocchio, and somehow discussion trailed as it is wont to do onto other subjects.

The issue of how we celebrate our religious holidays with the extra trappings came up, and I mentioned the dilemma we faced over the Easter eggs. I shared with him how we resolved it at our house, which he found fascinating: As Evangeline and I boiled the eggs and dyed them, I explained to her that just as we change the eggs' nature and appearance every Easter, putting our faith in Christ changes our nature and our appearance to the Father so that when he looks on us he sees his Son. In other words, I made the Easter message a central part of the Easter eggs so that they're not a distraction from the meaning of the day.

It was great -- not only did I get to use Easter eggs to teach my daughter something, I was able to use them to share my faith with a co-worker in a completely nonoffensive and nonintrusive way.

We didn't do an Easter basket this year because it didn't occur to me in time how to do it, but next year we're going to use the Easter basket as a metaphor for searching for Truth and then discovering him in the person of Christ. If I get really fancy, we could leave the Easter basket somewhere on Saturday night, and then on Sunday when Evangeline goes to look for it, she'll discover it's not there and have to go looking for it, just as Christ's friends found his body had disappeared unexpectedly.

judas' motivation redux

I was listening to my "Jesus Christ Superstar" soundtrack on the way home from work tonight (this morning?) and was hit by something I hadn't really fully noticed before. Judas' motivation in the musical is stated completely in the opening song: He was scared of what was going to happen, and wanted everyone to survive.

I've usually interpreted Superstar's Judas as acting from a sense of national preservation; i.e., he was trying to keep Israel from being destroyed by the Romans. But it was simpler than that, actually: He wanted to keep Jesus from being destroyed by the Romans too. When he approaches the Sanhedrin at the end of the first act, he's pleading for help; i.e., show me what I can do to save his life. When he betrays Jesus to the Sanhedrin, he's expecting the Sanhedrin is simply going to lock him up -- and he's utterly floored, flabbergasted and appalled when he sees what they do to him: "You beat him so bad I had to turn my head / You hit him so hard that he was bent and lame / and I know who everybody's going to blame."

He's shocked at the barbarity of what happened, but he's also horrified that everyone's going to think this is what he wanted to have happen.

Perhaps I should be embarrassed it took me so long to make such an obvious reading of the book, but it still struck me about how personal it makes it. It has Judas acting out of love and "for Jesus' own good."

Makes you wonder about the things we do for one another, doesn't it?

the apostle: a monologue

This is a monologue I wrote two years ago for the Good Friday service at my church. It may not be reprinted, reposted, forwarded or performed without my express permission.

"The Apostle"

Don’t look at me like that.

The first time I met the Lord, he couldn’t have been more than 10 years old. I really don’t remember too much about it. I remember my family and I were in Jerusalem for the Passover feast, and we happened to bump into this family from Nazareth with a boy about the same age as me.

He was a little different even then, you could tell. He had a certain
mischievous look in his eyes — the kind that doesn’t do anything that’s actually wrong and that you can’t punish him for but it still makes you nervous anyway. We hit it right off, if for no other reason than we were the same age and both awed by the sites of the Holy City.

We saw each other a few more times as the years went by, and even though we got older, we still looked for each other around the Passover when we were in the city. By the time we were adults, Jesus had adopted a kind of intense air. Not brooding so much, but when you looked into his eyes, it was like looking at the sea and knowing there were such deep mysteries hidden within.

His eyes ... Don’t look me like that.

We were thirty when it all came together. I met him after he had been out in the desert with John the Baptist. I didn’t realize at the time that they were cousins, but I found it out later. It wasn’t long after that that he asked me to be one of his disciples. You can imagine how I felt. It was like — well, it was like I’d just been named one of the Twelve Apostles.

And let me tell you, it was a ride I will never forget as long as I live. When he spoke, everyone listened. Crowds. Demons. The waves. Even the priests and teachers of the law.

Then there were miracles. Everywhere we went, people came to him with
diseases, with afflicted children, and he healed them. Did you know that one time when were in Bethany he actually raised an old friend of his from the dead? There was no doubting who he was. He was the messiah, the very son of God himself, and I was left speechless that he actually would associate with me.

Please don’t look at me that way. It’s bad enough already.

You see, I was there with him from the very beginning. The others all knew him and loved him, but I could tell they couldn’t see what I saw happening. Things were getting out of control. When we started out, there was no doubt that Jesus was in control of things. People came to him for a miracle, and he gave them that miracle, and then they told others, and more people came, and Jesus gave them their miracles too, and they kept coming and taking, and Jesus kept right on giving, no matter how exhausted he was.

It all started to come clear to me a little over a week ago. Jesus had been hinting that there was trouble ahead. He was still talking about the kingdom of God, but something had changed. He started talking about being executed, and Peter — God bless him — Peter got upset with him. Jesus rebuked him, and I think that’s when I realized where we were headed.

It was absolutely clear to me just after we entered Jerusalem, and I knew it was clear to Jesus too. He kept looking at me with those eyes of his — eyes that were warm, but somehow sad — and I knew what he was thinking. It had gone too far. In all their hosannas and shouts of "Son of David, save us!" the crowd had changed. He had stopped leading them, and they hard started to drive him.

We had come too far, too fast, and things were spiraling out of control. I remember the last time that nearly happened, when hundreds of people left him at a time because of something he had said. His eyes had been filled with pain and confusion, and I knew we were headed toward that again, only worse.

Do you know what it’s like to love someone and see them get eaten away, piece by piece? It’s horrible. You see them in pain, you hear them crying out for release, and in the end, there’s nothing left of their glory or majesty. They’re empty shells, and that’s all that people remember of them.

I had to do what I did. I love him too much to let people remember him as anything but what he was this past week. A king, triumphantly riding his way into town. A prophet, angrily facing down the hypocrite shepherds who fatten themselves on their flock. A priest — the only real priest I’ve ever known — who cares for people and brings them closer to God.

Stop looking at me that way. I don’t want your pity, and I don’t need your horror. I did it because I love him. He knew it at the seder last night, and when I came to him early this morning, I saw it in his eyes that he was ready … his eyes ...

(choked laugh)

Oh God ... I've betrayed divinity....

[music]
[hanging]

Copyright © 2001 David Learn

easter baskets

An odd question here: What sort of treatment do you give to extrabiblical holidays and extrabiblical customs? Natasha and I are trying to decide how we want to handle Easter this year and whether we want to go the route of an Easter basket for Evangeline.

I'm inclined to, on the grounds it's not an offensive addition to the holiday; Natasha is discinlined, on the grounds that it's an occasion for overindulgence on chocolate and other junk, and feeds into the American consumer mentality. We have similar concerns about Christmas, obviously.

My best thought of course is to reinterpret the custom in some way, not to give it a Christian gloss, but to give it a new spin that somehow is Christ-centered. What the missionaries did with Easter made sense at the time -- turning a pagan holiday about renewal into a Christian celebration of new life and forgiveness -- but I'm kind of stumped about what to do with an Easter basket and chocolate. The best I can see is something with the basket being hidden and then found somehow paralleling the risen Christ emerging from the tomb, but that's kind of a stretch.

What does everyone do?

judas' motivation

Why did Judas betray Christ?

• Evil needs no motive
• He hoped to force Jesus to lead a revolt against Rome
• He hoped to spare Judea a futile revolt against Rome
• He didn't realize the Sanhedrin's intent to have Jesus executed
• There was no choice involved; it was the role God had chosen for him
• Because he loved Jesus and wanted him to be remembered at his height
• He needed the money
• The Pharisees or others had been threatening him and the others
• He had decided that Jesus was a false messiah
• He chose to betray Christ in order to see the prophecies fulfilled

Vote

It's actually a serious question. Judas has fascinated me for years, mostly because we know so little about him. Dante puts him in the lowest level of hell, calling him the worst of all sinners, and Christians often depict him as someone who doesn't really fit in with the other Twelve Apostles, someone who doesn't quite belong with Jesus, who is on the outskirts of the group rather than an insider.

That doesn't sit well with me. For one thing, he was eating at the same table as Christ during the final Passover seder, which isn't exactly a seat of dishonor. For a second, one of the messianic psalms bemoans the betrayal, saying, "If it had been an enemy who had done this, or even a stranger, I could have dealt with it. But it was you, a friend of mine." For a third, he was someone who had seen the miracles right from the beginning: the resurrection of Lazarus, the healings, the demons being cast out, the feeding of the five thousand -- heck, he even performed healings and other miracles when Jesus sent the disciples out.

And yet he betrayed Christ anyway. That makes him a compelling figure to me because it means he probably was doing what he thought was the Right Thing, or at least a Good Thing. I see more applications there for me as a believer, when I've duped myself into believing that I was doing was good and right when it was obvious to everyone else that it wasn't. And after all, "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me."

Of course Judas could be forgiven, and so could Hitler, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and even me, but whether any of the others are forgiven of their sins is none of my affair to decide. My own sins, black and horrid as they are, I accept on faith that they are no more in the eyes of God, even though their memory haunts me some times.

From the textual descriptions we have of Judas and the betrayal, it doesn't seem that he reached the point of understanding what Jesus offered. His suicide seems to me an act of supreme despair, where he thought himself too horrible and too hardened in his heart to turn and seek forgiveness.

It's an interesting question, and one we'll never know the answer to until a lot of other things are made clear too, but I don't think it's likely the answer is yes. John the Evangelist writes that Satan entered into Judas and led him to betray Christ, which would indicate his heart wasn't right with God.

Another intriguing character from the Passion, of course, is Pilate. I posted an interesting essay about Pilate at CHRefugee last year, and (not surprisingly) there are old traditions about his salvation as well. In the Ethiopian church, there is even a St. Pilate's Day and an accompanying feast.

And as long as we're talking about the supporting cast, I have a drama I started working on but never finished, about an old priest who is remembering a time when he was younger that he met the messiah, still a child at the time, in the Temple courts. The priest at the time walked away, his pride hurt, and when he returned the next day, realizing who the boy was, found he had gone. That part is based on a song by Mike Card, but the part that's completely mine is what comes next -- the priest is Caiaphas and he's about to go out and make sure the Sanhedrin sentences Christ to death.

It's one of my projects. I really want to finish that.

Choosing Barabbas over Christ

I first came across this essay way back in my college days, in 1990 or so. It's a nice piece to trot out as Easter approaches, to stop and reflect on what happened on Good Friday.


"Not this man, but Barabbas!"

It is often said that Christianity is at its roots anti-Jewish, that it encourages hatred for Jews by teaching that they are responsible for the death of Jesus. Moreover, it is said, this is not just a distortion of the Christian faith by a few misguided fanatics -- it is the teaching of the New Testament itself. In this essay, I should like to examine in what sense, if any, this is so.

Before examining the question of how the Christian scriptures interpret the events, where they lay the blame for the events connected with the death of Jesus, let us consider how they report the events themselves, their account of what happened, and the role of the Jews in it.

It seems to me that some aspects of the trial of Jesus are often misunderstood, and that it is important to clear up the misunderstandings, both because they cause ill will between Jews and Christians, and because they keep us as Christians from understanding clearly what the Scriptures have to teach us.

In the gospels, we read that Pilate was willing to release Jesus, but that the crowd shouted, "Crucify him!" and that Pilate gave in rather than risk a riot. From this, many readers infer that the overwhelming majority of Jews hated Jesus because he rebuked them for their sins, and were determined to see him dead.

Occasionally, the moral is drawn that the crowd was not so much consistently malicious as hopelessly fickle, so that the same tongues that shouted, "Hosannah, Son of David! Welcome in the name of the Lord!" on Palm Sunday were ready to shout "Crucify him!" only five days later.

Now the first thing to be noted is that the gospels plainly declare that Caiaphas and his associates were determined to kill Jesus, not because he was unpopular, but precisely because he was popular. They were afraid that the people would hail him as the messiah, and start an uprising against Rome, which the Romans would crush without mercy, as they had similar uprisings in the past (John 11:47-50).

And so they decided to have him arrested, but not when there were people about, because of the danger of a riot in his favor (Matthew 26:5); hence the usefulness of Judas, who could lead them to him at a time and place where he was alone and could be seized quietly.

It is highly probable that they made arrangements with Pilate ahead of time, explaining the situation to him and receiving his assurance that when they brought him the prisoner at the crack of dawn, he would ratify the judgment of the Jewish tribunal immediately and automatically, without re-examining the case, so that the prisoner could be sentenced at daybreak and nailed up within the hour, before the people knew what was happening. The following points favor this theory:

1. If Pilate had received an advance visit, he might well have told his wife what it was about, and so it would have been natural for her to dream of Jesus and her husband on Thursday night, and to wake in the morning knowing that he had gone to sign an execution order.
2. The accusers could not enter the courtroom, lest they become ceremonially unclean and unable to celebrate the Passover. This required Pilate to be continually going outside to hear what they had to say, and back in again to confront the prisoner. This is a ridiculous way to conduct court, and presumably court would not ordinarily have met that day at all. That Pilate consented to hear the case under the circumstances suggests prearrangement.
3. Pilate, having got a note from his wife, changed his mind and decided to re-examine the case after all, instead of simply glancing at the warrant and signing it. When he says to the chief priests, "What is the charge against this man?" They answer, "If he were not a criminal, we would not have brought him here." In other words, "Never mind the details, just sign."

This is an incredible piece of insolence, explicable only if they were relying on an explicit promise that this case would go through without a snag. Caiaphas presumably had explained that Jesus was a dangerous man, and unless he were dealt with swiftly and without giving his followers a chance to react, there was danger of a major uprising.

So here they were, delivering the prisoner at the crack of dawn as arranged, to be sentenced and nailed up before most of the city was stirring. And now Pilate was, for no apparent reason, having second thoughts. No wonder that his accusers feel double-crossed, and that their response betrays their indignation.

Pilate delays, sending the prisoner to Herod in the hope of not having to make a decision himself. And by the time that Herod sends him back, there is a crowd. They have come to demand the release of the Passover prisoner.

Now few if any have come to demand the release of Jesus. Except for the disciples, who have fled in disarray, and the arresting party, almost no one in Jerusalem knows that Jesus has been arrested. Nor is someone likely to show up who has no particular prisoner in mind that he wants released, but who plans to vote for someone or other when he gets there. In fact, most of the crowd consists of partisans of Barabbas, and have come for the express purpose of getting him released.

Years ago I heard a sermon in which the preacher spoke of how the crowd chose Barabbas over Jesus, and reminded us that Barabbas was a murderer, and that it was as if the crowd had a choice between Jesus and George Sidney Sitts (a then-famous multiple murderer -- today he would have said Ted Bundy).

But surely this misses the point. Barabbas was condemned for murder and insurrection. In the eyes of those who favored armed resistance to Rome, he was a freedom fighter -- less a Ted Bundy than a Nelson Mandela, or, if you like, a Joe Hill.

The English writer Dorothy L. Sayers, in her radio play The Man Born to be King, suggests an Irish parallel. Suppose that in the days before Irish home rule, during "the troubles," you are an Irishman in Dublin, and it is St. Patrick's Day. Suppose for the sake of illustration that it is the custom that every year on that day, the English governor general must release a prisoner selected by the Dublin crowd.

This year, good old Paddy Murphy is in jail, sentenced to be hanged because he blew up a bridge that a British troop train was crossing. So we are all going down to Government House this morning to shout, "Free Paddy Murphy! Free Paddy Murphy!"

Here we are now, at the back of the crowd, almost a block away from the balcony on which the governor general (may his bones rot!) has just made his appearance. A great roar has gone up from the crowd. "Free Paddy Murphy!" On the balcony, the governor general (may his bones rot!) is waving his arms and trying to get the crowd to quiet down so that he can speak. People are quieting down a little, expecting him to announce the freeing of Paddy Murphy. But no, he is saying something to the effect that he has another prisoner in mind that he would rather free instead.

Now the crowd is really roaring, and we are shouting along with everyone else. The nerve of the fellow! The rule is that he has to free the man that we pick, and does he think that he can take the choice away from us and set someone else free instead? If he can get away with that, we might as well not have the St. Patrick's Day Amnesty at all. But in fact he is not going to get away with it. If he tries, we'll see to it that he has a riot on his hands. Altogether now, boys. "Free Paddy Murphy! Free Paddy Murphy!"

Fine. The governor general has backed down. I knew he would. He doesn't want a riot on his record. So Paddy Murphy is free and the other fellow is to be hanged. Who was the other fellow? I didn't quite catch his name, and it really doesn't matter. I suppose it is a shame that he's got to hang, but it was him or Paddy, and what counts is that Paddy got off, and that we showed the governor general (may his bones rot!) that we know our rights and that he can't bluff us out of them.

All this, of course, takes Pilate completely off-balance. He has managed the whole thing badly. When the case first came to him, he could have ordered the prisoner released on the spot. Instead, he has the brain-wave about passing the buck to Herod. When Herod simply sends the prisoner back, the crowd has assembled by this time. Knowing (if he was in Jerusalem the previous Sunday he could not help knowing) that Jesus was extremely popular with the people, he assumes that he can talk the crowd into choosing Jesus for the Passover Amnesty.

When this blows up in his face, he has effectively tied his own hands. By offering the crowd a choice between Jesus and Barabbas, he has said, "We have here two prisoners, both condemned to death." Having said that, he cannot turn around and say, "I was just kidding about Jesus of Nazareth. Of course he is innocent and I never intended to sentence him to anything."

To do that would be to acknowledge to the crowd that he had tried to cheat them, had tried to get them to waste their vote on a man who did not need it. Pilate has already convicted the prisoner and passed sentence without noticing it, and there is no way out.

***

What is the practical application of these considerations? What do they do for our practice, as opposed to our historical curiosity?

First, they guide us in making statements about the Crucifixion and the role of the Jews therein that meet the tests of truthfulness, fairness, and goodwill. Christian statements on the subject have not always done so, and it is important that they should.

Second, they guide us in our own thinking about the Passion of Our Lord. It is easy to think of history and conflict in terms of good guys and bad guys. Why did Nero persecute the Christians? Because he was one of the bad guys. Period. Why did Caiaphas want Jesus dead? Because Caiaphas was a wicked man. And of course this means that we would never behave like Nero, or Caiaphas, or Pilate, or Herod (either Herod Antipas or his father Herod the Great at Bethlehem a generation earlier). We may cut a few corners every now and then, but sheer wickedness for its own sake is not our style.

In fact it is not as simple as that. Let us look at the record:

So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said, "What are we to do? For his man performs many signs. If we let him go on thus, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation." But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing at all; you do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation should not perish." (John 11:47-50)

There you have Caiaphas' motives plainly set forth, and they are defensible and in some respects praiseworthy. Many times in Caiaphas' lifetime men had risen up and incited the Jewish people to strike a blow for national independence. Some of them had claimed to be the messiah. Some had performed, or were believed by many to have performed, miracles. All had ended in disaster, with severe repressions from the Romans.

Caiaphas had every reason to fear that with the next uprising all traces of Jewish liberty would be stamped out. Certainly he had grounds for arguing that it was better to kill one potential leader of a rebellion than let him survive to lead thousands to their deaths. A general who will not sacrifice one man to save a battalion has no business in uniform.

Do we ever reason like this, concentrating so on the big picture that we neglect the immediate issues of right and wrong that are before us? Perhaps not. Most of us are not in a position to be faced with policy decisions on a large scale.

Very well then, let us look at the crowd. If they had assembled that morning out of sheer malice and wickedness, because they had heard that a completely innocent man was on trial and they wanted to make sure that he was convicted, then their actions would have no lesson for us. But in fact they were there for the perfectly legitimate purpose of getting a freedom fighter out of the clutches of the occupation troops.

Intent on their purpose, they did not stop to think when Pilate put forward an alternative. They simply thrust it aside and demanded what they had come to demand, seeing in Pilate's suggestion only a distraction from the business at hand.

Are we ever like that? Do we ever pursue a goal with a single-mindedness that keeps us from stopping to consider who might get hurt in the process? If so, then let us remember Our Lord's words: "What you have done to the least of these, you have done to me."

***

We have seen how the Holy Scriptures narrate the events leading up to the Crucifixion. Now, what do they say about blame for the events?

On two occasions, Peter, addressing Jewish audiences, speaks of them as involved in the killing of Jesus:

"Men of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works which God did through him in your midst, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men." (Acts 2:22-23)

"Men of Israel, the God of our fathers glorified his child Jesus, whom you delivered up and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release him."

(Acts 3:12-13)

However, when Paul is addressing a synagogue audience in Pisidian Antioch, he says:

"Brethren, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you that fear God, to us has been sent the message of this salvation. For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him or understand the utterances of the prophets which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled these by condemning him. Though they could charge him with nothing deserving death, yet they asked Pilate to have him killed." (Acts 13:26-28)

The distinction is clear. Peter is addressing crowds in Jerusalem, the first address less than two months after the Crucifixion, and the second shortly thereafter. It is probable that both audiences included persons who had been present when Jesus was condemned. But Paul, addressing Jews outside Jerusalem, says, not "You killed him," but "They of Jerusalem killed him."

There is no suggestion in the New Testament that "the Jews" as a body were responsible for the Crucifixion. The most that can be argued is that the writers think that "they of Jerusalem" were responsible.

Now Christians have been accustomed to view the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the second temple in A.D. 70 as a punishment for the Crucifixion. And in support of this, we have Christ's own words as he wept over the city (Luke 19:41-44 and Matthew 23:37-39). What are we to make of this?

I reply that a historian who refused to put any religious interpretation at all on his data nevertheless would have good grounds for connecting the crowd's choice of Barabbas over Jesus with the fall of the city a generation later.

The people were offered a choice between two leaders, one offering spiritual renewal and the other political and military action aiming at national independence. They chose the latter. Given the strength of Rome, and Rome's willingness to use that strength, the choice was suicidal. A purely secular historian might have listened to the crowd that day and said, "Now I know that the sack of this city by the Romans is inevitable."

A Jewish friend to whom I made this point asked, "But why do you blame the Jews of that day for aspiring to political freedom and national independence? In what other people would such a goal be considered anything but admirable?"

I said: "One answer would be that the Jews had a calling not to be like the other nations, and that therefore what is allowed to other peoples might not be allowed to them" (1 Samuel 8:7,19-20).

It is not that political aspirations are wrong in themselves, but that they cannot take first place with those called to serve God. But in fact, I remind you that our hypothetical historian is carefully steering clear of religious and moral judgments. He is not saying that it is wrong for the Jews to fight Rome for their independence. He is only saying that if they do, they are bound to lose -- which they did.

***

So, when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but that a riot was about to begin, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, "I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves." And all the people answered, "His blood be on us and on our children." (Matthew 27:24-25)

Here we have the people solemnly cursing themselves. But one thing is missing -- a voice thundering from heaven, "So be it!" It is written: "How can I curse whom God has not cursed?" (Numbers 23:8). A curse, even on oneself, is powerless if God does not ratify it. Jesus, as He was being crucified, said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Does anyone suppose that his words carried less weight with the Father than theirs did?

I regret to say that I have heard one person argue that this prayer was spoken only on behalf of the Roman soldiers, not on behalf of the Jewish rulers, since they knew what they were doing. This contradicts the words of Peter: "Brethren, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers" (Acts 3:17).

On the other hand, the fact remains that Matthew has preserved for us the words of the crowd. Since he clearly did not preserve every word spoken that day, it appears that he thought these words significant. What then is their meaning?

There are no grounds for applying them to the Jewish people as such. The application must be narrower, to the then inhabitants of Jerusalem and their immediate offspring, the next generation; or broader, to all the peoples of the earth.

As we have already noted, they are applicable to the sack of Jerusalem, and it is largely the crowd front of Pilate's hall, and their children, who would bear the brunt of that sack when it came a generation later.

On the other hand, they are applicable to the whole human race. In the Law of Moses, we find that blood is taken as a symbol of guilt. To say that A's blood is on B is to say that B bears the responsibility and the guilt for the death of A. But blood is also taken as a sign of purification. When a leper is declared to be well again, and clean of his former disease, he is smeared and sprinkled with blood (Leviticus 14:6,7,17). When the covenant is ratified at Sinai between God and the people of Israel, they are sprinkled with blood (Exodus 24:8). When a priest is consecrated to the service of the Lord, he is smeared and sprinkled with blood (Exodus 29:20; Leviticus 8:23,30) In like manner the blood of Christ is on every member of the human race, either for guilt and condemnation, or for cleansing, incorporation into the covenant, and consecration.

May God grant it to each of us to receive it for the latter.

surviving easter

If I have to eat another ham sandwich, I'm going to throw a fit.

This past Easter Sunday was the first Easter my wife and I celebrated as a married couple. Last year, when we were only engaged, I think we observed the holiday by eating out at a restaurant, hanging out for a while, and finally heading back to our respective apartments, where we passed the rest of the day doing our individual things.

Not this year. This year, by gum, we're a family and I was determined to make sure we celebrated Easter properly. So on Holy Saturday, I paid a visit to the local supermarket to buy the proper ingredients for a Learn family Easter dinner.

It was about the time I pushed the shopping cart through the front door that I realized I had no idea what a proper Learn family Easter dinner involved. I don't know why that should be the case; I've been a member of the Learn family for 28 Easters, and all but five of them had been with my parents.

"Mashed potatoes," Natasha had told me before I left. "You have to have mashed potatoes."

I'm not sure why she thinks she's an expert on these matters; she's been a Learn for only 10 months. Still, in only 10 months I've learned that when Natasha uses that tone of voice, I have to listen. Natasha is only 4-foot-11, but she can make every inch count when she has to.

I picked up the potatoes in one aisle, bought some pork stuffing from another aisle, and found the perfect Easter ham in the back. ("I can't wait to hear how you plan to stuff a ham," one friend told me Sunday morning at church. Before I could tell her that that wasn't the point, Natasha cut in with, "He just likes to eat stuffing," and proceeded to embarrass me by recounting the time a box of stuffing was all I ate for dinner one night when I was a bachelor.)

Now I should mention that due to various circumstances, I have become the de facto househusband. I take our dirty clothes to the Laundromat every week, I wash the dishes after most meals, and more and more lately, I have been preparing the meals. I'm a liberated man of the 90s, and this is not a problem for my self-image.

The only problem is I don't know how to cook.

So it was that late Sunday afternoon, Natasha was talking to my parents about their Easter celebration. I walked into the study where she was and asked, "Honey, how do I glaze a ham?"

She told me, and when I still didn't get it, she made a mixture of mustard and brown sugar and glazed it for me. I popped the ham into the oven, peeled the potatoes and went back into the study where she was now talking with my brother Brian, who had just called.

"Honey, how do I make mashed potatoes?"

"Boil them!"

"How long?"

"Until they're done!"

(My brother later commented that it sounded like Natasha and I had been at any moment ready to file divorce papers over the mashed potatoes.)

Next it was, "Honey, how do I cook broccoli?"

"Steam it, or it'll lose its nutritional value," she said. (She really does talk like that, mind you. She's the only woman I've ever known to complain that she has a large surface area-to-volume ratio and that her glomerular filtration rate is higher than convenient.)

Of course, we have no bamboo steamer, despite the many TV ads I saw for them when I was a boy. I finally improvised a steamer by placing a colander of broccoli on top of a pot of boiling water.

By 8 p.m. - thank goodness for daylight-saving time - dinner was finished. We had a nicely done (if I do say so myself) box of stuffing; mashed potatoes with undercooked, unmashed pieces of potato mixed in for variety; mostly cooked broccoli and the ham.

All 10 pounds of it. For the two of us.

Did I mention that I'm sick of leftovers?