Hilton Head Island, SC – March 6, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 7:36-50; Mark 14:3-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text –“She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burying.” – Mark 14:8 (RSV)
The Unavoidable Cross
It is impossible for anyone to be able to authenticate the historicity of the four Gospels. No one shall ever know beyond doubt that every episode about Jesus that is reported or that the sequence of those events is historically accurate. Scholars of the New Testament spend their lifetime poring over every word of every sentence in the four Gospels, and they frequently disagree strongly with one another about whether Jesus ever actually said or did what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John say he said or did. So how can we, who do not have doctoral degrees in New Testament Studies and do not spend decades studying these matters, be expected to speak authoritatively about what actually happened in the life of Jesus of Nazareth?
However, most of us probably assume that most of what the Gospel writers said is generally correct in how it portrays the life of Jesus. Unless we take that position, we have little or no basis for believing in Jesus as the Messiah, the Savior, the Son of God, or God Incarnate. Christianity would be intellectually and theologically unsupportable without a tacit affirmation that Jesus lived and that the events portrayed in the Gospels represent an accurate depiction of who Jesus was - - - and is.
Nevertheless, there is one event in the life of Jesus which initially seems so unpredictable and enigmatic as to be either inexplicable or incomprehensible --- or both. And that event is the one which ended Jesus’ life, which is, of course, the crucifixion. Today I shall not be addressing the theological implications of the cross, but rather the historical factors which seemed to render it inevitable, even though to anyone other than Jesus the crucifixion was utterly unimaginable.
Tradition says that the public ministry of Jesus lasted for only three years. That figure is based on calculations the Gospel scholars make, further based on what all four Gospel writers, but especially John, tell us about the chronology of Jesus’ ministry. The question is this: How could Jesus have evoked so much opposition in so short a time that people in power should want to see him not only publicly silenced but executed? Jesus preached love for everyone, and inclusion for everyone, and consideration and respect for everyone. Those ideas don’t get people killed – do they? Instead they engender admiration and devotion – don’t they?
Such notions are what make most of us want to be Christians. And indeed they are the glue which bind Christians one to another, despite our differences with each other. However, in the culture in which Jesus lived, not everyone believed they should love everyone, nor did they believe God required that of them. This was a time when sinners were stoned to death, and wayward children or young adults were systematically shunned by family members, being driven out to fend for themselves. People who believed what were considered to be the wrong doctrines were forced out of the synagogues and the temple in Jerusalem. Both the Jewish religion and culture deliberately excluded certain kinds of people, as do virtually all forms of religion. It was widely assumed that to include such people was to violate the will of God. Many people believed that the wrong kind of people did not deserve consideration or respect. To many of his contemporaries, Jesus was a provocateur, undermining the very foundations of Israel.
Jesus represented a complete break from the prevailing thought of his time. He reached out to the people whom the religious and cultural establishment despised and shunned. In today’s terms, it would be as though Jesus were hanging around with people who are afflicted with sexually transmitted diseases or who smoke marijuana or crack cocaine or who have tattoos on their arms and torsos and necks and maybe faces or who are hapless or helpless or homeless. Most of his followers weren’t like that, probably, but some were, and Jesus didn’t try to shoo them away, nor would he allow his more socially acceptable followers to scare them away.
Thus it is not surprising that Jesus realized from the beginning of his ministry that not only was he likely to get into trouble but that he was already in trouble. Jesus was perceived by the religious and political establishment to be a deliberate troublemaker. Historically, there is no way to avoid that conclusion. From the time Jesus first began to preach, teach, and heal in the earliest chapters of each Gospel to the Last Supper in Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, and John 13, for ten or fifteen or twenty-plus chapters, depending on the Gospel, Jesus unintentionally but also unmistakably created very serious political and religious enemies. The occupying Roman government opposed him because they thought he potentially represented an armed insurrection against them, and many Jewish religious leaders opposed Jesus because he was a major threat to what they stood for and believed.
The writer of the Fourth Gospel says it was “the Jews” who engineered the crucifixion of Jesus. It wasn’t “the Jews” at all. It was “some Jews,” particular kinds of Jews, the Jews who controlled the Jewish religious establishment and who called the shots in the temple and who were members of the Sanhedrin, the highest council of 1st-century Judaism.
The great majority of any religious group ordinarily do not become as zealous or filled with inflexible certitude as do the leaders of the group. The common folks just go with the flow and try to live low-key lives as best they can, without being swept into radical behavior of any sort. However, the leaders may inspire some of their followers to take bold or even violent actions against those whom the leaders identify as enemies of the one true faith.
It was not a widely recognized Hindu holy man or a frightened British official who assassinated Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, the Great Soul. It was a radical Hindu loner with whom almost no one was familiar who shot the man who welcomed the Untouchables into his presence and who led the essentially peaceful revolution which led to the independence of India from the British Empire. It was not Elijah Muhammad or the highest leaders of the Nation of Islam, the so-called Black Muslims, who riddled the body of Malcolm X with bullets in 1965 after he had broken away from the Nation of Islam to express more moderate views, including working with non-Muslims to improve society. It was a small cadre of Islamist militants who killed Malcolm X. It was not Bull Connor or George Wallace or Lester Maddox who fired the rifle that murdered Martin Luther King, Jr. It was James Earl Ray, a very small cog in a very large wheel of institutional racism which pervaded the USA, and especially the Old South, in April of 1968. Big shots never pull triggers. It is the small shots who take the big shots.
“The Jews” did not stand in the crowd gathered in the Roman Praetorium in the spring of 29 CE or thereabouts. It was the followers and disciples of the members of the Sanhedrin and the leaders of the scribes and priests and Sadducees who cried out, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
For the better part of three years Jesus knew what was coming. He knew he couldn’t say what he said and do what he did without provoking serious and potentially even violent opposition. He intimated that was what happened to some of the prophets before him.
But there was more to it than just that. Perhaps two years before Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, so the Gospels declare, he began to speak about his “cross.” Early in his ministry, at least according to Matthew (10:38) and Luke (14:27), Jesus said, “He who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” Did he already sense what lay ahead? Apparently so. Later, perhaps only a few months or weeks before Good Friday, Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me” (Mt. 16:24, Mark 8:34 and 10:21, Luke 9:23).
Unless they are completely insensitive, people who rub people the wrong way, either unintentionally or deliberately, know what is happening. How could they not? They can see the fury in the faces. They can observe it in the body language, in the fitful fidgeting and the refusal to look them directly in the eye.
There was only one legal way to execute anyone in 1st-century Judea, and that was to get a Roman order to do it. Jewish authorities, whether religious or secular, did not have the political or legal power to execute anyone. So if Jesus were to be crucified, which was the most common means of execution, he knew someone would have to convince the Roman governor or another Roman official lower down in the chain of command to do it. And the longer his ministry continued, the more Jesus became certain that is what would happen.
But again, why? Why would anyone be so incensed by what Jesus did that they would plot to have him killed?
It isn’t really hard to understand why. Jesus was so in-your-face provocative, so blatantly out-front with what he said and did. Subtle he wasn’t. Straightforward he was.
Earlier we heard two scripture passages which illustrate this. There are major similarities and differences between the two stories, and they have echoes from other stories in other Gospels, or other places in the same Gospels.
In the first story, Jesus was presumably somewhere in the Galilee, the northern province of Judea where he spent almost all of his ministry except for the last week, the week we call “Holy Week,” the week that begins two weeks from today. This episode is found only in Luke, chapter 7. It says that a Pharisee named Simon invited Jesus to come to his home for dinner. While Jesus was there, we are told that “a woman of the city, who was a sinner,” heard that Jesus was in Simon’s house. So she came into the central courtyard where everyone was eating.
The woman was crying, presumably because she felt so guilty for her sins. She took a flask of ointment and began to pour the oil over Jesus’ feet. As she copiously wept, her tears fell on Jesus’ feet. She removed her hijab, the long scarf which covered her hair, and unbound her hair, and began to wipe Jesus’ feet with her hair. That in itself was a scandalous action.
To us this incident seems very odd. To everyone who saw it, however, it was skin-crawling awful. In the first place, this woman is identified as “a woman of the city, who was a sinner.” That means she was a low-class woman, and women were second class citizens anyway. But when it says she was “a sinner,” it genteelly implies, without actually saying it, that she was a low-class prostitute. Everyone, including Jesus, but especially Simon the Pharisee, knew that.
Jesus saw the moral revulsion etched into the face of his host. So Jesus told a short three-line parable about someone who had two debtors, one of whom owed him ten times as much money as the other. The lender forgave both debtors their debts. Jesus asked Simon which debtor would be more grateful to have the debt forgiven. Simon said it presumably would be the one who was forgiven the far greater amount. “You have judged rightly,” Jesus answered Simon.
Then, with a sudden fury that shocks modern people, if we understand it, and it certainly shocked the others who were there in the courtyard who did understand it, Jesus exclaimed, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house, and you gave me no water to wash my feet, but this woman has washed them with her tears, and wiped them with her hair! You gave me no kiss on the cheek, as cultural propriety demands, but she has kissed my feet! You didn’t anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with soothing ointment!”
It would be like any of us inviting a candidate for a presidential nomination into our home, any candidate, but perhaps one in particular. And before everyone there, you would take out a giant economy sized can of pork and beans and serve them, cold, to the candidate and the other guests. By so doing, you would deliberately intend to insult the candidate by your improper choice of cuisine for your supposedly honored guest. This is what Simon did to Jesus.
Then came the theological zinger. Perhaps putting his hand gently on the prostitute’s shoulder, Jesus said to Simon, “Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little” .”(“Like you, Simon,” Jesus seemed to suggest.) Then to the woman Jesus said, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
Jesus put down the Pharisee. He humiliated him. It would be okay to humiliate a prostitute, but not a Pharisee. From the get-go, Jesus rubbed his theological enemies the wrong way, and eventually they were able to enlist his political enemies to see to it that Jesus was crucified.
The second episode is strikingly like the first in a few details. This time it is either Holy Wednesday or Holy Thursday, just one or two days before Good Friday, and Jesus is in the village of Bethany, east of Jerusalem. He is in the home not of Simon the Pharisee, but Simon the leper. And a woman comes in while everyone is eating, and she pours some very expensive nard over Jesus’ head. Some of the guests grumbled among themselves, saying that she should have taken the money she spent for the ointment and given it to the poor. Jesus, hearing their complaints, said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burying.”
Jesus knew he was about to be killed! He knew that very soon he was going to die! There was a cumulative effect in what Jesus had been doing. Animosity was growing, opposition was mounting, and Jesus realized he would never survive it. He couldn’t melt into the Passover crowds and flee Jerusalem; they would find him and it would be over anyway. He was finished. He knew he had come to the end of his life’s vocation.
What does the cross mean? Much of the Christian Gospel is founded on a particular theological proclamation regarding the cross. But historically, in the whole series of words and actions leading up to Good Friday, the life of Jesus rendered the cross unavoidable. Because Jesus lived the way he did, he died the way he did. What a travesty! And what majesty!