B Easter 5 OL UCB
2018 (Resurrection)
Matthew 23:37-39;
Philippians 2:1-11
April 29, 2018
You may
have heard about the new museum the Equal Justice Initiative opened up in
Alabama to commemorate victims of lynching across the South. A museum chronicling African-American history
will also be constructed nearby. I read
some of the quotes of white folk in nearby towns and you would have thought
that African-American folk were forming a militia in town. Many white folk in nearby towns think the
museum is just stirring up trouble, raising up the dead best left buried. Memory is a powerful and a dangerous
thing.
In the
2012 movie, Django Unchained, set two
years before the beginning of the Civil War, Django, a freed slave, walks
directly into the maw of slavery, to free his wife from a Mississippi
plantation owner. The movie is termed a
“revenge fantasy”, asking the viewer to consider what might happen if slaves
had taken revenge for the violence, cruelty, and death of slavery. The director, Quentin Tarantino, in his own
violent way, reveals one of the nightmares of white America, “What if
African-American people rise up using the same violence, cruelty, and death
imposed that has been upon them in slavery. Lynching, and mass incarceration?” With the movie’s release in 2012, right
around the time of Easter, one of the actors from the movie, Christopher Waltz,
appeared as the guest host on Saturday Night Live. In a movie short, Waltz did a spoof of Django Unchained titled, “Djesus
Uncrossed.” Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ emerges from the tomb, rolling the
stone away, saying, “Guess who’s back?”, https://vimeo.com/59975315, (play
the movie to 1:07).
This short
seems to ask, “What if the Resurrection meant that Jesus returned in revenge to
deal out the violence, crucifixion, and death to the Romans that Rome had done
to the Jewish people regularly and systematically every day of the week? What if the Resurrection is just about who
has the political power to deal out their own brand of violent justice?” Unfortunately, many Christians have
interpreted the Resurrection or even the Second Coming of Christ to mean
exactly that. It is a about a struggle
for power. We were the victims but now
we’ve won. You would do best to follow
along so that we don’t have to kill your people, burn your women as witches,
and crush your culture. Christ is
risen! We win. Wait till you get yours! And doesn’t that mean we get to dictate the
terms of surrender?
In the
hands of the dominant culture, without critical engagement, that can indeed seem
to be the interpretation of the Resurrection.
But what if the interpretation of Resurrection was intended to be in the
hands of some other people?
Resurrection
had several different meanings or interpretations within the New Testament,
each meaning targeted for a particular context and community. As related in the introduction to Karen’s
reading in the apostle Paul’s letter to the communities in Philippi, we have
before us today one of the earliest forms of Christian worship, sharing some of
the earliest reflection of what the resurrection means.
In this hymn or “praise speech,” Paul compares
Jesus’s behavior to that of the ever-present Roman military and emperor, who
try to attain or reach God-like status.
So though the Roman military and emperor may have reached for the status
of a god, and may have used that status to their own advantage, God
super-elevates Jesus over them. Paul
uses a verse from Hebrew Scripture, in Isaiah 45, where God counters the
loyalty expected to Babylonian kings and idols to say now that the faithful
will only find saving justice from one source—the Living God: to whom every knee shall bow and every tongue
confess. Jesus is placed in that long
Jewish tradition to say that knees shall not bow nor tongues confess unjust and
foreign rulers who oppress the Jewish people.
Rather, God in Christ, who is humble in healing, kind to the poor, and
just shall be treated like a king or emperor.
To that counter-cultural Christ shall knees bow in homage and tongues
confess in praise. And not just the exalted
status of a king, Paul writes, but a super-exalted or highly exalted status above
king and emperor.
The
language and symbols in Paul’s letter to the Philippians would have been
familiar to the people. In the First
Century, two temples, dedicated to the Emperor’s family, would have dominated
the landscape in Philippi. Another king
cult, celebrating a historical King Philip, had an imposing structure in the
city.
Also, in
Scripture passages before the one Karen read for us today, Paul used military
language in the form of a soldier’s pledge of allegiance to the general and the
emperor, language to denote excellence in combat, the image of soldiers
standing side by side in formation, and imagery of the battlefield. Paul used the loyalty and fidelity of Roman
soldiers to ask for the loyalty and fidelity of Philippians who found
themselves in times of hardship and struggle.[1] Veterans of the Roman military settled in
Philippi making it thoroughly Roman.[2] Philippi was a Roman Colony, ruled by two
military officers appointed by Rome. People who lived in the colony would have
looked all around them and seen “forms” of the emperor as a god on coins and
statues.[3] Remember that this is how the “praise speech”
from Paul begins: “Being in the form of a god.”
The
Philippian hymn is not some transcendent ode or code explaining the goings on
of a far-away divinity. Rather, the
Philippian hymn is a reflection of the everyday reality the average Philippian
would have seen and known throughout their city.
Philippi’s
wealth was found in mining. Gold and silver mines could be found in the
Orbelos mountain range nearby.[4] And slave labor—a filthy, dangerous, and
degrading job in the First Century--would have been used to mine the gold and
silver from those mountains.
When the
Philippians would have read or heard Paul’s letter, picking up on all the
language and symbols of the military occupation around them, they would have
recognized his references. Paul writes,
Being
in the form of a god;
Did
not consider it a thing to be taken advantage of,
That
being equal with a god, But he emptied himself;
Taking
the form of a slave;
Becoming
in the likeness of humans.
Jesus is
then more highly or super-exalted than any other emperor or king, a verb used
in the Greek version of Hebrew Scripture or the Old Testament to talk about the
“Most High God.”[5]
Paul
writes a letter to the Philippians that helps them to identify with Jesus over
and against the imperial powers who seek to seize god-like status in the layout
of architecture of Philippi.
This understanding
and interpretation assume that Jesus’s message brings with it a certain
conflict that cannot be avoided. There
are competing claims in the world, and those claims seem to recognize that his
death did not happen by accident. Christ
and his ministry seem to forever run headlong into Powers and people of power
who do not like truth-tellers. These
Powers and people of power are the .1% who justify their status by making
Divine claims for their wealth and violence.
Christians, then, make sense of their moral universe by saying that
Christ and his ministry are affirmed by a God who is not found in the Roman
Emperor, the most powerful man in the world, or the Roman military, the most
powerful force in the world but in Christ taking his form as a slave.
More than
just super-elevating Christ above emperor or military, Paul was trying to do
something else here. Paul identified
Jesus Christ with those Philippian slave miners. Or . . . Paul identified those Philippian
slave miners with Jesus Christ. You can
imagine what a revelation such an identification must have been at that
time. Even in our day, miners, have a
shorter life expectancy in what can be a dangerous job. They emerge from a mine covered in the
substance of earth. In my mind’s eye, I
always have a picture of coal miners, faces covered in black coal dust. I
cannot even imagine what slave miners of the First Century must have looked
like, how expendable they were considered as slaves in a mine. I doubt that canaries were even kept in the
mine for their protection, one slave just as expendable as another.
Slave
miners in Philippi must have looked like and been treated like what naked
fisher folk from Galilee must have smelled like and been treated like. And miners and fisher folk, both at the
bottom of the economic scale, were both probably treated like prostitutes and
tax collectors, Jewish people who had to resort to marginal professions because
of their economic circumstance.
Paul
identifies Jesus with slave miners. That
is in keeping with Jesus, himself, who kept community with fisher folk,
prostitutes, and tax collectors. What
the Philippians heard was a Jesus who identified with them, found solidarity
with those who would have been considered the very dregs of Roman society in
what would have been a popular but dangerous statement by Paul.[6] Remembering Jesus is to say that God does not
divinely ordain oppression and injustice.
No! God identifies with Jesus to super exalt him above any military
commander, any king, any emperor.
I suppose
it is human nature that in every age there are jobs or peoples we blame for
their economic circumstance. That was
certainly true in Rome. Slaves, fisher
folk, prostitutes, and tax collectors were thought to be morally inept and unclean—even
by their own people. Not unlike Rome, somehow,
in this day and age, we seem to have forgotten how the Bible makes sense of the
universe and regularly blame the poor or economically struggling for their
situation. “Look!” we scream, “they pay
no income tax.” As if we should ask them
to pay for a system and infrastructure that already bleeds them dry, for which
they are not able to take advantage.
Perhaps we blame the economically poor because we are all trying to reach that
god-like status, grasp the golden ring, exploit it for our own gain, to which
Paul refers to so that we too might be able to use the system and
infrastructure for our own advantage.
Though many of us are neither poor nor rich, we look forward to the day
when we might get ahead and bend the rules to us. Identifying with the poor makes little moral
sense in the world. Think of those
people in our time, in our culture, who are readily judged as morally
contemptible for being who they are: the
deplorables, the economically poor, redneck tea partiers, the chronically
inebriated, undocumented immigrants, imprisoned African American men, changing,
but still, unwed, welfare mothers.
And yet,
here are these Biblical passages, challenging us to think why Jesus was
super-exalted by God. Paul identified
him with the economically poor. Jesus
made community with the economically poor. And God super-exalted him for not
seeking to become like one of those Roman gods but remembering a faith that
began with God identifying with, making community with, and becoming the
Deliverer of Hebrew slaves.
Is this
the God we really want to shout out about, bend knee to when we make sense of
our moral universe?
The gospel
of our wider world is competition, grasping and exploiting for gain. Demonstrating our power and divinity to the
wider world is the form of Caesars and Roman legions. We are invited to that competition, grasping,
exploiting, and turning it over for profit all the time.
But Resurrection
does not mean Christ now somehow triumphs over Rome and gets his revenge. Resurrection is solidarity . . . with Philippian
slave miners. Resurrection calls us to
such solidarity. The good news before us
is that our God identifies with those economically poor who are considered
morally inferior. And all of a sudden
our moral sense of the universe is turned upside down, and God super-exalts a
crucified criminal. Paul conveys that
resurrection has a particular content. Resurrection
is solidarity. And memory is a powerful
and a dangerous thing. Thanks be to
God. Amen.
[1] Philippians 1:27-30
[2] Joseph A. Marchal,
“Military Images in Philippians 1-2: A
Feminist Analysis of the Rhetorics of Scholarship, Philippians, and Current
Contexts,” January 2004.
[3] Scott,
“The Trouble,” pp. 70-71.
[4] Gordon Franz, “God, Gold,
and the Glory of Philippi,” March 5, 2003, http://www.ldolphin.org/pphilippi.html.
[6] Scott, “The Trouble,” p.
72ff.
No comments:
Post a Comment