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For Us To Evil Powers Betrayed
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 20, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Matthew 26:1-16
Properly translated, the last petition given us by Jesus for our prayers should rather read, “but deliver us from the evil one” or even more exactly, “snatch us from the jaws of the evil one.” I take it to be no coincidence on this Palm Sunday, when the story in Matthew turns on a dime from the exultant crowds to Christ’s passion and impending death, that our series on the Lord’s Prayer necessarily turns our sophisticated lives toward a character we thought we had abandoned in the Enlightenment: the evil one, the tempter, the devil, Satan. Evil as a generalized concept, of course, is very much in vogue these days. Four years ago this coming September, in fact, evil claimed its place at the center of our national discourse. It’s encroachment on our shores was put forth as the cause for a nation’s call to arms and now, patriotically, has come to be located in swarthy-skinned citizens regularly pulled out of lines or detained without counsel. Jesus likely would not be allowed on a plane bound for these shores today, let alone received graciously if ever once he made it through immigration! Moreover, two years ago yesterday a campaign of “shock and awe” ushered us into a war against one of three countries which, according to the commander-in-chief, comprise an axis of evil. This war, he said, was critical to the crusade wherein evil would be defeated and a beachhead of freedom established in its place. What with Iraqi elections behind us, Syrian troops retreating to their own borders, and Arafat moldering in his grave, we live presently in expectation: the hopes and fears of all the years finally met in the land of Christ’s birth and crucifixion? Perhaps. Yet we deceive ourselves (and success will only deepen the deceit) if we inhabit this well-honed national narrative thoughtlessly, praying to be delivered from the evil of the other; if we miss the detail wherein the same brush with which we have painted the world in morally self-assured strokes of good and evil draws us simply as characters unmindful of the evil one who crouches, in our best deeds, in our best deeds mind you, close at hand. The story is told of a painter who was commissioned by a prominent club in town to paint a portrait of the devil for the smoking room. When the day came for its unveiling, a respectable crowd assembled only to be horrified that the portrait was of a man decked out in Brooks Brothers’ best, a mirror image of themselves. We deceive ourselves, especially in Christ’s church, if we fail to understand that our praying for deliverance from evil must be a praying for deliverance as much from the devil crouching at our own door, as it is praying to be delivered from the distant, demonized other. Permit me to underline the point: “I find it to be a law” wrote Paul to the Romans, “that when I want to do good, evil lies close at hand.” Not just in our worst deeds but with our best intentions, not only when our eye wanders but when we are working at our marriage, not when we cook the books but when we report every penny to the IRS, not when we squander our savings in loose living but when we live by the rules and stick close to home, is the devil crouching, ready to claim us as his own, ready to turn us from God to the good we think we know for sure, ready to laud our righteous achievements with no tip of the hat to grace, and ready to confuse our allegiance at the most critical turn in the plot, the turn that sends the one who was born to deliver us from evil into the jaws of death itself. Let us therefore, for a moment, inhabit another narrative, the biblical narrative, wherein the devil is everywhere evident in the details and we read of only One who is able, by reason of God’s purposes originally and finally, to claim victory, the same One who taught us together to pray “…deliver us from evil.” At first, of course, we bring the culture’s narrative unawares to the text such that our first instinct in the midst of Christ’s passion is to locate evil in one singularly dark character, in Judas. Relatively speaking, we thereby excuse the rest—the disciples, the crowds, the religious leaders, the Romans, the characters with whom we may more easily identify ourselves—excuse them as merely misguided or maybe just stupid or perhaps a little irresponsible or somewhat lacking in imagination. Or was it that they wanted to do good yet evil crouched at their door too? Our text begs the question of the morning: were they on that fateful week to pray the prayer Jesus taught us to pray, were they to ask for deliverance from evil, what would they ask? If we begin with the crowds at the triumphal entry, we might conclude that the evil from which they longed to be delivered was the evil of an occupying power. From Roman occupation this descendant of David now seated on a colt just may be the answer to their prayers, may deliver them: “Hosanna! This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth,” the crowds shouted, the one promised who will succeed David as king. But soon their allegiances will be confused and they will turn on him, declare he is the evil one from which only his death will deliver them. Half right, they cry, “Crucify!” So goes the revolution! If then we join the religious leaders plotting the demise of him who has come to usurp their power, we must read between the lines: evil resides in the One whom the crowds now hail as their deliverer. This blasphemer, this deviant from the norm, this pretender to the prophetic tradition, this despoiler of orthodoxy is evil incarnate, not love. Deliver us from evil, they pray, but how? He must be arrested by stealth and killed. If then we stop in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, the outcast, the rejected, we encounter a woman on whose lips this prayer surely presumed deliverance from her sins of the flesh which (according to Luke) were many. She held no illusions: evil crouched at the door of her own shameful life. With ill-gotten money she purchased expensive oil, an alabaster jar, tainted yet redeemed, she poured it extravagantly on Him who would die for her sins, who would deliver her from evil. So what of the man Judas? That he sought to betray the man he had followed and in whom he once placed his trust suggests that something had changed his mind, his loyalties, his perspective. That he is the one in John’s gospel to pit the needs of the poor against the extravagant love poured out on Jesus has led some to imagine Judas as a zealot who was let down by Jesus’ less than radical politics. Others have presumed the sin of greed. Matthew tells us only of his actions: he goes to the religious authorities and offers to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, the price of an injured slave. I think he is drawn as a character without a prayer. Then there are the disciples. In Matthew they are collectively the ones outraged at the woman’s extravagance. Next they are confused around the table, worried that their loyalty may not stand the test. In a moment they will be all denial and fear and fleeing into the darkness. We excuse them as misguided or maybe just stupid or perhaps a little irresponsible or somewhat lacking in imagination. Yet precisely these recognizable human foibles led Hannah Arendt to write her scathing report on the trial of Adolph Eichmann subtitled “A Report on the Banality of Evil,” that is to say a report on the boring ordinariness of the evil that lies close at hand. “Eichmann,” she wrote in the book’s postscript, “was not Iago and not MacBeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove the villain.’…He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted….In his final statement to the court he spoke of the ‘revaluation of values prescribed by the government.’ He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness,” said Arendt, “that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period….That such…thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was in fact the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.” Though I think there is more than a lesson to learn in the Jerusalem of Christ’s passion. Rather there is the truth revealed in the mirror image of ourselves, painted in Matthew’s portrait of the palm-waving crowds, of the plotting, power-hungry religious leaders, of the hapless bureaucrats, but most of all we see the disciples, who were not stupid but thoughtless or perhaps simply lacked the imagination that might have kept them awake one hour, quieted their fearful hearts, silenced their quick denials, stopped their feet from running, clarified their allegience. The banality of their evil, no less than Judas’ dark deed, delivered him up to death. Until finally we are left alone with Jesus, who first encountered the evil one in the wilderness and now prays the prayer he has taught us in the garden of Gethsemane alone. He has hallowed God’s name and in his life God’s kingdom has come near; our daily bread he just broke for us at table, and here alone in the garden he prays to be delivered from evil if it be God’s will. God’s will, apparently, is that he be delivered not from evil but to evil…for us…by us…who lack the imagination even to stay awake one hour, even one lousy hour of a Sunday morning: for us he goes to meet the devil in the details of our death. “Satan tempts that he may destroy, condemn, confound, cast down,” says Calvin of Jesus’ final petition, but God, that by proving his own children he may make trial of their sincerity, and establish their strength by exercising it; that he may mortify, purify and cauterize their flesh, which unless it were forced under this restraint would play the wanton and vaunt itself beyond measure. Besides,” Calvin concludes, “Satan attacks those who are unarmed and unprepared that he may crush them unaware. God, along with the temptation, makes a way of escape that his own may be able patiently to bear all that he imposed on them.” God makes a way, even unto death for us, in Jesus Christ. Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, the betrayer is at hand. Deliver us, we are still praying, from evil. Thanks be to God. |