Text: John 19:1-16

* Sound quality for the singing in this recording is not great. Listeners may want to skip through the singing and follow the links in the text below to listen to the songs that were taught during the sermon.

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There are parts of scripture that should come with content warning. Or with an opportunity to gird up, get ready before taking them on. Stories of violence. Not just violence but torture, assault, humiliation. This is one of them.

It’s a story I need preparation for. So we’re going to prepare together. There are lots of songs in the “Singing Resistance Songbook” but this is one that speaks to both the need for resilience and the need for community. Gather Your Courage.

Gather your courage into your heart.

When we’re together, we can start. (x2)

 

Everybody show up.

Everybody rise up.

Everybody shake it up.

Everybody here.

Okay. We can start. Together we can hold this story of suffering.

We are together here with each other, but in the story, Jesus is alone. He is alone and the violence against him is completely senseless. No charges have been leveled. The Jewish authorities’ story is shifting to appeal to the Roman occupier. The occupier is ready to let Jesus go but still has no qualms about beating him. The soldiers mock and taunt and abuse him. 

Jesus is alone and he is almost silent. There is no chorus to bolster his courage.

This is a story that I would rather avoid. There are so many stories about Jesus that I love so much. Stories about Jesus’ actions to emulate, his words that inspire and teach and invite. There are so many stories that show his compassion, patience and empathy for his followers and friends, or his anger at injustice, his cleverness with those who disagree and challenge.

If I can’t avoid this text I’d rather read it quickly, barely glancing at the details, getting through the gore to get to the glory. Consuming it quickly so I don’t have to taste it. I was always a kid who would gobble up stuff I didn’t like so that I could enjoy the good stuff. But there is no good stuff here. There is no glory. 

This afternoon, when I head over to the Singing Resistance meeting, one of the things that we’ll do is talk about authoritarianism. This Friday I wrote the definition in big letters on a flipchart:

A system in which there is a concentration of power in the hands of a small group of people who act in ways that are not constitutionally accountable and who maintain that power through repression and threats or acts of violence

I don’t think the Romans would have had a constitution, but otherwise, it feels like this fits the bill. This whole situation is a show of authoritarian power. 

The soldiers have no reason to act as they do. No stated reason, anyway. They are not ordered to slap and mock and play dress up with Jesus. It is about power! It reminds me of those stories of soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, now decades ago, taking pictures with prisoners in humiliating poses or after torturing them. Or, more recently, the videos of Kristi Noem striding in front of half-naked prisoners in ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ 

It’s on the same spectrum as the unkind mockery of children. They are seeking belonging and connection and power by establishing who belongs and who does not. Like life, the Bible includes this spectrum. The Bible is full of human beings and humans can be cruel. Can de-humanize, because de-humanizing means not having to have empathy.

Jesus too is human. A human who, if you do have empathy it is hard to ignore. 

Jesus may be God’s son. Indeed it is one of the accusations against him by the Jewish leaders, but here he is, a broken and belittled human man. Alone and suffering.

It is because of his very humanness that we must not turn away. He is human so he understands the suffering of humanity. Of individual people. Of the people in his own time and of people throughout time. Of people now. We are called, in our own humanity to attend to Jesus’ suffering and all people who suffer.

There is so much suffering now. But most of us wouldn’t need to pay any attention to it if we didn’t want to. We could easily turn off the news, click un-follow on the accounts that feed us world and local events. Even living as I do, in a neighborhood where my neighbors are experiencing racism and violence and deportation, my family and I are not directly impacted. I could choose not to talk about it or think about it. I could look away.

Certainly my impulse with the suffering in the news or on my social media feed is the same that makes me want to avoid or skim past this story in the Bible. It’s hard and it hurts and I don’t want to feel those things. 

But Jesus is mine and I am his. And if I am going to be a disciple, I need to stand and feel with him. He did not suffer and die so that I would not have to experience or face suffering but in deep solidarity with the suffering and injustice of all people. I believe that if I don’t look at and stand alongside Jesus I am standing with the soldiers, with the leaders yelling for crucifixion, with Pilate.

Last week I talked about being kin with Jesus. About belonging in a family. About being God’s children. Sometimes in families, someone we love is hurt, gets sick, is wronged, dies. While it’s definitely true that we can have a hard time facing the suffering of a loved one, we usually do it because we love them. They are kin and their suffering is our own. We simply can’t escape it. 

Jesus is every beloved human who is experiencing pain. As kin to Jesus, they are kin to me and I need to feel with them. They are mine and I am theirs. James Baldwin wrote, “Every bombed village is my hometown.” Inspired by those words, Nikita Gill wrote a poem.

“Every bombed village is my hometown.”

And every dead child is my child
Every grieving mother is my mother.
Every crying father is my father.
Every home turned to rubble
is the home I grew up in.
Every brother carrying the remains
of his brother across borders
is my brother.
Every sister waiting for a sister
who will never come home
is my sister.

Every one of these people are ours,
Just like we are theirs.
We belong to them
and they belong to us.

Inspired by that poem, Annie Schlaefer wrote a song. And that’s how we’ll end today. We’ll sing her song together.

Every one, oh every one, oh every one of these people are ours,

Just like we are theirs.

We belong to them and they belong to us.

And all of us are God’s. May we gather our courage into our hearts and look into the face of Jesus, however painful, together. 

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