Why Did Jesus Die?

Matthew 21:1-11

 

The sign on our noticeboard asks the question, “Why did Jesus die?” and answers it with “Because of his politics.”  This may seem to be a 21^st century response to a deep question that is often answered very differently.

 

For many people the answer to why Jesus died has to do with the crash known as original sin resulting in broken relationships and a paradise abandoned, the story of two people who made a decision resulting in the suffering of generations following. This story turns the death of the man Jesus into one of sacrifice and scapegoating as a response to the frailty of humanity, seemingly out of proportion to the supposed sin and out of character for a God who was, we told, the one who created us in the first place.

 

The story John provides us with today, the wandering rabble entering Jerusalem, is  a story of confrontation with tradition, power and the political system. Jesus has known for some time that his pronouncements about his relationship with God whom he intimately describes as father, his identification with key theological themes via the I Am statements in John's Gospel and his general denouncement of both Rome and the Temple elite is not going to end well.

 

His entry into Jerusalem is an acclamation mark on his political protest. David Ewart reminds us that "Jerusalem is not a large city. And what the authors of the Bible take for granted and fail to mention is that while Jesus is parading in on a donkey through one of the back gates, on the other side of the city Pilate is parading in on a war horse accompanied by a squadron or two of battle-hardened Roman soldiers.” He adds, “ Do you think anyone at Pilate's parade heard about Jesus' parade? Heard what the crowd had shouted? Let's see what unfolds in the week ahead."

 

Now its important to understand that while Jesus death is because of a response to his politics, his politics is not the politics the people of his day, or we of our day are used to. It is not a politic of power and control, of power and control for power and control's sake alone. Much of what passes for politics can be reduced to self-interest, the self-interest of maintaining control over others for your own benefit. Policies are made and implemented that are designed to maintain those in power to remain in power.  Policies, no matter how necessary they may be that would threaten a party’s control on government are quickly jettisoned for those which will ensure power remains in the hands of those who have it now.

 

The politics of Jesus is the politics of the kingdom of God. The ramble into Jerusalem is symbolic of the politic of non-violence, community, wholeness and inclusion that is the kingdom of God and runs contrary to the politics of power, exclusion, individualism and oppression. Jesus is joined in this final confrontation with those on the margins of society; women, rural folk, those who have been healed physically and redeemed from impossible lives due to the rules enforced by those in religious and political power.

 

Jesus uses a young donkey, people hail him as King and he enters in defiance of a show of power occurring simultaneously. Jesus is holding up a mirror to society and challenging it to choose the way it wishes to go. Does it continue to live by violence (the Romans), wish to regain independence by violence (the religious leaders) or to offer something new – a vision of the world in which relationships, justice and hope are freely shared with all? Is it ready for a completely new way of doing life ?

 

Sarah Breuer suggests "Jesus didn't come to take over Pilate's system; he came to replace it. When we confess that Jesus is Lord and Christ, the God’s anointed, we are leaving no room for the Pilates of this world." John makes this very clear when he writes “⁴This took place to fulfil what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, ⁵“Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

Interestingly this wasn’t what the crowds watching on saw. “¹¹The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”” This is the danger in every protest, march or alignment with the kingdom of God, those involved will be seen as prophets or protesters, do-gooders who are interesting, perhaps have something to say, but they and what they have to say are quickly marginalised and sidelined as an oddity. Jesus was abandoned by many who followed him or stood by the road in a very short time because the politics of the kingdom of God not only challenged those in power but also those under their power.

The difficulty we find with Jesus and his politics of the kingdom is it is not remote, it is not about them, it is not out there – it is personal, intimate and revealing, it is about how we live and act in the everyday. We are implicated in the violence of the prevailing politically system every time we pay our taxes, cast our vote or support one or other of the possible contenders. Somewhere in the week after Palm Sunday people may have begun to understand the implications of following Jesus and realised the cost and decided it was more than they could pay. They had families, businesses and responsibilities and while this kingdom of God looks good on paper it is risky and it was a risk they did not wish to take.

After the procession Jesus makes a full frontal attack on the money lenders and the traders in the temple, a blatant protest against the way the politics of both church and state exploited the anawin or little ones, the ones with out power. While this was an annoyance to those in power it was frightening to those who feared the fallout, the very people Jesus kingdom stood for. And over a period of a week the politicians regained the upper-hand and crucified Jesus. Self interest seems always to triumph even if it is the self interest of better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

If we just look at this story as a story about Jesus the man  who died on the cross we miss the power of Jesus the Christ, the Alpha and the Omega, the one who was there at the very beginning of creation and the one we leads us forward as the Omega – our destination as a creation in him somewhere in the future. We miss the truth that this is not about personal frailty, personal sin or even the sinful nature of humanity (original sin) but about the communitarian journey into wholeness – the journey of all of creation to a place where we enter the Garden for the very first time.

The politics of the kingdom are the politics of whole –ing – of making whole, of breaking down all that separates existence into parts. It is a process that began at the beginning of creation and will continue beyond the foreseeable future. It will indeed replace all Pilates, political or religious and take us into places beyond our imagination.

As we walk the dusty road with Jesus do we have what it takes to live out the politics of the kingdom or do we value our own self interest beyond our commitment to the Source of that kingdom? Tough question to answer.

Fourth Day Living - The Day Beyond Hope

John 11:1-45 

 

"LOST: male dog, has one eye, mangled left ear, missing left hind leg and most of his teeth, crooked tail. Answers to the name, ‘Lucky'.

 

In our modern day world I suspect many of us feel a little like Lucky. We are bombarded by bad news – bad news on a world scale, bad news on a local scale and bad news on a personal level. It never seems to stop. You turn on the tv to watch a little news and relax, and all you get is one bad story after another, even the shows which are supposed to entertain are full of anger, bully and violence. Watch an episode or two of Married at First Sight, My Kitchen Rules or The Block to see what I mean.

 

Talk a stroll through the local bookshop or record store (are there any of these any more?) and take a look at the covers, the story briefs or the lyrics and you will be surprised by the  words used, the storylines or violence and horror which seems to permeate almost everything out there.

 

Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst, wrote in 1956; “We have a literacy above 90 per cent of the population. We have radio, television, movies, a newspaper a day for everybody. But instead of giving us the best of past and present literature and music, these media of communication, supplemented by advertising, fill the minds of men with the cheapest trash, lacking in any sense of reality, with sadistic phantasies which a halfway cultured person would be embarrassed to entertain even once in a while. But while the mind of everybody, young and old, is thus poisoned, we go on blissfully to see to it that no “immorality” occurs on the screen."

 

Little seems to have changed in the 60 years since he wrote that. There seems to be no end to bad news and we may find ourselves overwhelmed and feeling we are living in the worst of times not the best of times. Despite the capacity for human beings to grow and develop knowledge, skills and quality of life we seem not to have mastered the art of living well together.

 

No wonder we feel a little like Lucky the dog, broken down, dragged out and not all there. We may indeed feel as if we are living in the hopeless days. And it is when we are living in the hopeless days that we are the closest to the sense of another long Gospel reading from John. This is the story of loss and grief, of facing up to the inevitable death that faces us all in some way every day. We receive bad news about our own health, about the health or death of a friend, about the health of our beloved pet, we lose a job, we face divorce, we face financial ruin, we risk everything for a better life only to be told no and more.  For whatever reason we find ourselves living in the hopeless day.

 

Martha, Mary and Jesus find themselves in this very place. Their brother, his friend has died. He gets the news on the day it happens. He is sad but does not rush back but waits 2 days before travelling to their home. Perhaps he was worried about the reception he would get. The disciples were because they intimated it was beyond risky for Jesus to show his face there. Perhaps he was so overcome with the thought of going back and facing it immediately, it was just too much. So it wasn’t until the third day that he began the trip and he arrived on the fourth day, a day when it was going to be too late for heroics such as a healing, the body had already started to decompose.

 

Martha and Mary were both upset at his tardiness intimating he had known about Lazarus’s health prior to his death and hadn’t come back. They were well aware of his ability to heal and couldn’t come to grips with his failure to heal the one he loved. Their confrontation with him may have been a little more forceful than John relates and his defence that this was all for God’s glory probably was not an appropriate answer. And it isn’t ever.

 

Yet here they were in what was to them a hopeless situation.

 

Peter Woods writes that "Jesus knows that Lazarus is dead. He tells his disciples this brutal truth. Only then does he decide to go to nearby Bethany. He arrives on the fourth day. The day that is beyond all hope. All through Scripture the third day is the day that God acts. Jesus arrives on the hopeless day, the fourth." 

 

This is worth keeping in mind as it is the only time it is recorded. The day that is beyond hope is a place where people live and where God is not absent. Yes God acts on the third day, timely and appropriately, before everything decomposes and falls apart and we live and have been taught to live with the expectation that this will happen. But God is not absent from the hopeless day, the day beyond hope. What actually happens in this story we do not know but we do know something happens and Lazarus is somewhat restored, at least in the story if not in real life. God in someway restores equilibrium and balance in so dramatically that in a few verses on from this reading, Jesus future is doomed by those in power who will see to it he dies.

 

We always want God to act within the 3 days, within a timely framework that works for us. We also want God to restore it to the way it was. But it has changed no it is different and uncomfortable. We find the day that is beyond all hope too painful, to dislodging, to traumatic, and it often leaves us with scars we can never erase. Yet if we look closely to that day or days we find God is not absent, stuff is happening to us and others, the ground is shifting and life continues, different, changed but it is still life.

 

Fourth day living is where the church has been since the promised or expected immediate return of Jesus has yet to occur. Fourth day living is the ordinary experience of each of us and has produced wonderful spiritual practitioners, writers and saints. Fourth day living is the norm for the majority of people throughout the world, not the exception in places where God does not appear on the third day to prevent children dying of starvation, people being bombed out of their homes or others feeling the wrath of racism and oppression.

 

It is in fourth day living that we begin to experience the necessity of faith, hope and love; the value of community and belonging; and the expansiveness of God’s presence, even when God seems to have gone missing. Fourth day living pushes our boundaries, reshapes our values and expectations and beckons us forward into an ever-expanding universe open to surprise, beauty and possibility.

 

The truth for Jesus friends is that they have not avoided the inevitable encounter with fourth day living, only postponed it; but they may have lived the days after Jesus’ visit, the day after they experienced for the first time the day beyond all hope, very differently, intentionally, focused and with an awareness they didn’t have before.

 

Like Lucky, they panted for more.