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On Retribution, Reconciliation and Redemption
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 16, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 3:1-13 Matthew 18:21-35 Romans 8:31-39
“What are we to say to these things?” asked Paul in the face of tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril and sword. Recent headlines no doubt have put another spin on our asking. What are we to say to these things: to these pictures of sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, next-door neighbors and casual acquaintances grinning over piles of naked prisoners with thumbs upturned? Of course the temptation that has been ours since the garden is to point to the behavior of the other in order to justify our own. David Remnick acknowledges as much in this week’s New Yorker. “There are order of magnitude distinctions to be made,” he writes in Talk of the Town. “Major General Antonio M. Taguba’s confidential report on the brutality, humiliation and sadism at Abu Ghraib can hardly compare to descriptions of the horrors there under Saddam…[Here we must also add the beheading of Nicolas Berg]…It is nonetheless shocking, and indefensible, and has made a mockery of [our] pretenses to moral leadership in the Middle East.” So it was that the Risen Christ said to Peter, as he attempted to sidestep Christ’s command of him to “follow” by asking after the destiny of the Beloved Disciple. “What is that to you?” Jesus snaps. “You follow me.” He commands no less of us this day! Listening, then, in Scripture for a word not my own, I also reached for the writings of two masters of ethical reflection in a Christian context: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr. Bonhoeffer’s Ethics was a book left unfinished, completed only by his life…or rather in the witness borne to generations by his death at the hand of the Nazis. Niebuhr, writing at the remove of an ocean, nevertheless understood the pervasive power of evil and so the necessity of realism in the face of its banality in human history. His lectures on Christian ethics, delivered in the spring of 1934, are prescient in their anticipation of the storm gathering in Germany, but are also astonishingly to the point for the living of these days. So with the help of these two minds in conversation with Scripture this morning, I want simply to ask two questions, questions originally raised in the garden of our fall and now pressed anew by events whose meaning we ignore at the peril of our nation’s soul. The first question is spoken by the serpent and asked of the woman: “Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat from any tree in the garden?” The woman answers, “We may eat the fruit of any tree in the garden except for the tree in the middle of the garden.” In the middle of the garden is a tree whose fruit, when consumed, makes the man and the woman think they know good and evil. What the tempter has asked, in effect, is whether God has set any limits on our moral discernment. Like the woman and the man who did eat when offered a bite, we have consumed and so been consumed—acutely so since September 11, 2001--by our own moral certitude, by the lie we tell ourselves: that we may unambiguously identify evil in the other, the enemy, while identifying ourselves, our ideals, our cause, our country with the good…and with God. The relevance for the week is this: that such presumptive knowledge subtly alters the way we view the humanity of the other whom we have judged to be evil in light of our own embodiment of the good. “The first task of Christian ethics,” says Bonhoeffer, “is to invalidate this knowledge.” Human beings were made, he writes, to know only one thing: to know God. Our knowledge of good and evil—our claim to that knowledge…our identification of that knowledge with our knowledge of God—reveals nothing other than our separation from God. We have transgressed the limit God has set, from the beginning, such that our claim to know good and evil reveals simply that we do not know God. We, of course, think it reveals just the opposite: shows the world how well we know God and God’s will! We have become like God and so against God, says Bonhoeffer, the good and the evil being a good and evil of our own choosing, proof-texts notwithstanding. Taken individually, such a way of knowing produces Pharisees. “The Pharisee is not a…historical phenomenon of a particular time,” notes Bonhoeffer. “He is the man to whom only the knowledge of good and evil has come to be of importance in his entire life….For the Pharisee every moment of life becomes a situation of conflict in which he has to choose between good and evil.” Not insignificantly in scripture, every attempt to draw Jesus into this choice, every instance in which a pharisaic way of knowing tries to press Jesus to take a side [What would Jesus do?], Jesus refuses to respond, refuses to be held by humanly chosen alternatives. In other words, in Jesus we know not a finer definition of good and evil, but know God and the freedom of God’s love let loose against our every logical alternative! It is, of course, why the Pharisees wanted him gone! Now when this pharisaic way of knowing is writ large upon nations, what comes to speech is the rhetoric of moral idealism which “makes nations more secure in their self-respect and more ruthless against their foes….The consequence,” Niebuhr writes in 1934, “is that modern men fight for their causes with a fury of which only those are capable who are secure in their sense of their righteousness. Thus all modern social conflicts are fought for ‘Kultur,’ for democracy, for justice, and for every conceivable universal value…[revealing] the pathos of modern spirituality….There is no deeper pathos in the spiritual life of man,” he concludes, “than the cruelty of righteous people.” That is why we must ask ourselves anew the first question asked of the woman: has God set a limit on our knowing good and evil in this nation? If this is in any sense the right question to ask, then what we must say to these things, to the pictures leaked from Abu Ghraib, is that in their release the limit to our pretension to know good and evil as unambiguously as we have claimed has been revealed. As The Economist observed yesterday, “The moral clarity that seemed so important to American foreign policy is beginning to go fuzzy at the edges….The grisly pictures from Abu Ghraid are raising doubts, even in the heartland, about whether American power is an unalloyed force for good in the world.” Our moral clarity has sanctioned a cruelty possible only when another’s humanity has been denied. Hence the relevant nakedness in those pictures is our own. Hence we stumble, in the same garden, upon the second question asked of this pair who have chosen to know good and not God, a question leading to the truth rather than the lie. Hearing the sound of God’s footsteps upon the land, the man and woman hide, for they are ashamed. “Where are you?” the Lord God asks, seeking not so much their location as their lost and fallen humanity. For you see, knowing good and evil, they have quit the limits of being human to masquerade as gods. Naked before the God who is God, they hide the selves they had become and confess as much when asked. God responds to their confession with our second question: “Who told you that you were naked?” Thus “there arises shame,” says Bonhoeffer. “Man is ashamed because he has lost something which is essential to his original character, to himself as a whole; he is ashamed of his nakedness.” “I am a big believer,’ writes Tom Friedman in today’s New York Times, “that what a culture or a society deems to be shameful is the most important restraint on how its people behave.” Shame is, by God’s strange grace, where in this last week many more than before in this nation now dwell. Bonhoeffer goes on to say that shame seeks a covering, yet “the covering implies confirmation [of the loss of self] and it cannot therefore make good the damage.” As we now know, the first instinct of those whose moral certainty, whose clear knowledge of good and evil led us to take up arms, the response was to cover-up. We all recognize that instinct, I daresay, and if we deny we know it, chances are our righteousness is simply on a banana peel that has yet to slip! Slipping, of course, we must also start spinning. That Abu Ghraib’s inmates were moved within the prison grounds to new temporary quarters which have been named “Camp Redemption” frankly turns my own shame to disgust. Allowing the use of the word which points to God’s saving purposes for pitiable political ends ought to bring any in direct conversation with their heavenly Father to beg for God’s mercy. To wit: shame, Bonhoeffer concludes, “is overcome only in the shaming through the forgiveness of sin, that is to say, through the restoration of fellowship with God and [humanity].” That is why the “crown of Christian ethics,” according to Niebuhr, “is the doctrine of forgiveness….Love as forgiveness is the most difficult and impossible of moral achievements. Yet it is a possibility if the impossibility of love is recognized and the sin in the self is acknowledged. Therefore an ethic culminating in an impossible possibility produces its choicest fruit in…the doctrine of forgiveness, the demand that the evil in the other shall be borne without vindictiveness because the evil in the self is known.” The ironic gift these snapshots of our lost selves are to us is the revelation that we are naked too; that we live in need of a redeemer who, by his humiliation at the hands of his captors, revealed not the good and the evil we claim to know, but the God in whose mercy and love the impossible possibility was made flesh and we are forgiven. And if forgiven, then what we say to these things is simply this: “Have mercy upon us who deserve no mercy.” Forgiving love, says Niebuhr becomes “a possibility only for those who know that they are not good, who feel themselves in need of divine mercy, who live in a dimension deeper and higher than that of moral idealism, feel themselves as well as [the other] convicted of sin by a holy God and know that the difference between the good and the bad are insignificant in his sight.” What are we finally to say to these things? “The year was 1972. In the cell block, in separate cells, were another two dozen or so prisoners…a relatively timid group, made up mainly of ministers and priests—“religious leaders”—and the night was passing with anguished slowness. Murmurs occasionally broke the silence, and doors clanged on a distant corridor. The barked orders of guards jolted the air now and then. Otherwise, an eerie stillness filled the dark. “Even now, you have no idea what prompted him to do so, but at some point in that night, the man in the next cell began to sing, softly at first. His resolute baritone gradually filled the air as he moved easily into the lyric of what you soon recognized as Handel’s Messiah: ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.’ …[he] sang as if he were alone on the earth, and the old words rose through the dark as if Isaiah himself had returned to speak for you to God—to speak for God to you. Others in the cell block soon joined their voices…‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light’—but his voice, in effect carried the others. He knew the words…the music.” What are we to say to these things? We know the words…the music. In the prisons of our enemies, let us sing of the God who redeems us all by the impossible possibility that in his love undeserved, we are all forgiven. Thanks be to God. Amen. |