Unitarian Universalist
Meeting of
“The Passion”
Rev. Kathy Duhon
Each Easter I follow the ancient tradition of beginning this sermon with a joke – for today is a day of joy. I owe this one to Billy Crystal.
“A man is on his deathbed, and his family is gathered around. His son says, ‘Papa, is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?’
‘I want to taste mom’s chopped liver, just once more before I die, please, some chopped liver.’
‘OK Pop, I’ll get it.’ He comes back a moment later.
‘Do you have the liver?’
‘No, mom said it’s for after!’”
Death and life – so intertwined in our experience. But we Unitarian Universalists don’t believe the good stuff is only for “after”.
We are not all Christians – some of us are – but we learn from all religions, and Christians believe that the resurrection is now, the Passion is a participatory event, and this is the greatest story ever told. Now you don’t have to believe that, but I’d be holding back on you if I didn’t share this great story with you. Maybe it will bring some comfort, hope, even transformation, and wondrous joy.
There are plenty of good religious stories. Certainly, the Exodus, the story of Passover, which was celebrated here last week, is one of the best. It’s the story of a people on a journey to new life, with all the suffering and hope, perseverance and backsliding, gratitude and falseness, faith, freedom, and finally peace, which makes an epic to remember and live with as a vital story of our lives. I was thinking this week of the stories I know about Muhammad and the Buddha, and they are less ordinary, more fabulous and amazing, and therefore a bit rarified for us as a story to help us live our lives.
The story of Jesus, especially his final few days, is a great story, with so many elements of human life that we can identify with, as in the Exodus story, and yet they happen to the exalted one. He suffers, and certainly in a physically painful way, but that is not the part that speaks to us the most. He feels abandoned by his followers, betrayed by his friends, wearied by false and officious questioning, derided and taunted by the crowds, thirsty for life, forgiving of his torturers, compassionate to his fellow sufferers, forsaken by God, and by his own deepest faith, and yet, he seems to have ended life with these words of peace, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit”. Jesus asks that this cup of suffering be removed, but he also accepts it. He dies as a common criminal, convicted of no real crime, by a powerful empire – nothing really unusual in such an ending, or in his feelings as he approached the end. How does the Passion get to be such a tremendous story?
The Passion and Resurrection are the center of Christianity for a very simple reason of faith, one that many have found to be the most difficult thing to understand, let alone accept or find meaningful, and others have found actually destructive, while still many more have found it to be the very breath of life. Some folks, Christian and non-Christian alike, think that the central faith event of Christianity, the story at its very crux, is that Jesus is God, proved by the Resurrection, but that is not the real center, not from a Christian point of view. The most basic center is the simple faith that “Jesus is Savior” or “Jesus is Redeemer”, and for many Christians, he’s not the exclusive savior/redeemer. Jesus saves or redeems; in other words, our lives are made whole, good, holy, healthy, worthy, transformed, by Jesus having lived, died, and been resurrected, and by his continuing to walk with us in some real way. The longer version of the center of Christianity is that God gave his Son Jesus to die for our sins, and that is what saves us, redeems us. And that is not just some dry theological tenet, but a lived experience for many. Plenty of folks out there experience spiritual healing through the Passion story, believing that a great sacrifice has been made on their behalf. They feel an overwhelming Love come through this great story that touches them personally. That may seem like a mystery to most of us, so I want to explore how this might be understood in a more universal way.
First, though, before
I get to the great possibilities of this central story, I have to acknowledge
the ways in which this story can be and has been used and interpreted to be the
worst story in the world. One is when Jewish
culpability is emphasized, which comes through in the gospels, and which is not
accurate historically, as far as we know.
Jesus, a Jew, was killed by the
The other, more hidden problem of the Passion story was exposed by my esteemed colleague, the Rev. Rebecca Ann Parker, and her co-author, Rita Brock, in their recent book, Proverbs of Ashes. At the center of the Christian myth, two persons of God, Father and Son, are acting upon each other, and the theology suggests paternal abuse. This is one of the reasons Unitarians protested the traditional understanding of the Trinity – it begins to sound like multiple gods are interacting with each other up in heaven, affecting the fates of us below, emphasizing too much the Greek legacy within Christianity, instead of its Hebrew monotheistic strength. The father seems to sacrifice the son in a violent way in this story, and the son accepts it, and that’s not what the theologians mean, but it is what gets understood by the many. This seemingly intentional violence at the center of the story has perhaps unintentional results in justifying violence and teaching submission – if Jesus could endure what his father required of him, some think, then they must have to endure the family violence that comes upon them. This is another horrible use and interpretation of the Passion story, which has caused great suffering to this day.
Despite these two
huge interpretation problems that have led to untold violence and suffering
over the years, there is still a saving message at the center of this story
that we may yet find worthy. Something
amazing happens to folks through this story, from the first apostles all the way through to ordinary Christians today, and I believe it
happens first because people identify with the story, find it similar enough to
their own experiences. Who doesn’t know
betrayal, taunting, suffering, thirst, forgiveness, compassion, forsakenness,
peace? Haven’t we all been the betrayer
and the betrayed, culpable and victim, wounded and compassionate, doubt-filled
and faithful? Christians know this story
well and can draw upon it when they reach their own gardens of
Do folks really believe that Jesus bore their sins, saving them? Some do, though for many, including me, that isn’t the crux of the matter – for many, it’s more that Jesus represents both the human and the divine, the human suffering that is so like ours, and the divine presence through it all that sustains and comforts us in our suffering. I met the mother whose three children were killed in a car crash on Route 7 in Lee about 10 years ago, shortly after the accident, and she said to me, “I’m clinging to the cross of Christ”. It saved her to have that image, that Passion story that let her know that her precious friend and beloved Lord understood suffering first hand, and was with her in her darkest time.
In spiritual experiences reported from many religions, the revelation that sweetens life, that brings peace, is this: despite our fully recognized limitations, smallness, sinfulness, culpability, suffering, we are yet one, beloved, belonging, at one with the universe. Whether we experience this bliss as “God’s love” or as the unifying spirit of life, or as Nirvana, or however, these experiences are joyful transformations. What Easter does for Christians is to give a vehicle for this kind of experience of joy and rebirth into oneness. Through the story, the central story of the Passion and Resurrection, Christians know that they are sinful, but redeemed and redeemable, and that they are truly loved and belong to the story, and live its ending in rising up again and again, with hope and joy.
My final reflections are about why this particular man, and this particular story, caught on to be such a central, saving story, and I’ll begin without any dive assumptions about Jesus. There have been other good men, prophets, world teachers, avatars, some of whom have died unfair and torturous deaths as well, but this story looms so large. People are honored after they died when they have lived a good life, as Jesus is said to have done, and they are remembered, but usually the memories fade. It’s not just that Jesus had devoted followers who did a good job of keeping his memory alive.
When a person risks, sacrifices, and dies for love, as Jesus did, they live on even stronger in the memories of people, and their story spreads beyond those whom they loved directly. But Jesus did not die because of love and sacrifice for a particular person or group.
The people who are most remembered and honored are those who die for Truth or Justice or some other ineffable principle – a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Mohandas Gandhi, or even a hero from some conflict, and this person’s story can live on for generations. Jesus can be said to have died for Truth or other principles, but not in as direct a way as others. He was not standing up for a certain cause so much, nor willingly risking death for that cause.
Jesus did not die
for any person or cause – he was mostly unwilling in his final recorded prayers
– but he did surrender to a higher purpose, to God, to the greatest good
possible in the situation. And after he
died, his presence was sensed, he appeared, something of him rose up in spirit,
and some believe in body, to many folks – first to those close to him, and
later to those who had never met him. This
gave early believers and those ever since a great reassurance about the ongoing
nature of life, of the triumph of the spirit over death. That’s transforming. Not to fear death and not to die spiritually
to your own unworthiness, is powerful. You are beloved and you will rise again and
again – that is an alleluia truth, and a great joy. Happy, joyous Easter to you all!