Two Ways To Get Crucified
Sermon
Rejoicing In Life's 'Melissa Moments'
The Joys Of Faith And The Challenges Of Life
A generation ago liberals learned that while segregationists might be wrong, they are not dumb. In 1954 the Supreme Court declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. A few states tried to find a way around this ruling. Some individuals said they would not conform to this new interpretation of things. Liberals in the South urged everyone to obey the law. A little bit later Martin Luther King, Jr., began to engage in civil disobedience. It was proper, he said, to disobey an unjust law in obedience to a higher authority. The liberals who had previously urged obedience to the law as determined by the Supreme Court found themselves in a dilemma. Some did an about-face. They began to follow King in saying that only those laws that are just have to be obeyed. Segregationists pounced on this apparent inconsistency and began to ask in taunting fashion, "Are we supposed to obey the law or not? Make up your minds." And if Martin Luther King can decide on the basis of his conscience whether to obey laws he doesn't like, why can't segregationists appeal to that principle too?
Seeing the television version of The Final Days reminded me how complicated this gets. Some of those involved in the Watergate scandal suggested a parallel between their breaking the law and the civil rights demonstrators and anti-war activists who engaged in acts of civil disobedience. President Richard Nixon himself hinted that the atmosphere in which the Watergate incidents occurred was in part created by the protest movements of the '60s. He noted that civil disobedience had frequently been blessed from American pulpits.
We could argue for a long time about whether the Watergate burglars and the draft card burners are alike or different in trying to justify their acts. And we could get into long discussions about whether the segregationists and the civil rights demonstrators were on equal moral grounds when they resorted to civil disobedience. Here I would only propose that the law can be broken from above, and it can be broken from below. Laws can be violated by acts morally inferior to the standards required by law. They can also be disobeyed in obedience to imperatives that are ethically superior to the legal code. Very low morality and very high morality can get you in jail. It is very important to know the difference between breaking the law from below and breaking it from above.
Perhaps we can get a better perspective on these differences if we look for a moment at an event far removed from our own time. Outside the gates of Jerusalem stood three crosses. On either side was a common criminal. In the center was Jesus of Nazareth. From this cross we can learn a great deal. Paul vowed to know nothing and to preach nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified. He urged that God has chosen to save those who believe through the folly of the cross.
I want to call attention to another dimension of truth that is symbolized by all three crosses together. When we ponder this scene, we become aware that there are two ways to incur the wrath of society. One way is to be very bad. The two thieves are witness to this. They had endangered the order and security of society by resorting to brute force, to threats of death and violence. When they were apprehended and brought to trial, all decent people agreed that they must pay for their crimes. Religious leaders and officers of the state approved of the sentence. No one doubted that justice was done when these two were put upon the cross. If everyone lived as these two men did, chaos would result. The honorable institutions of society and decent ways of making a living would be undermined. The preservation of the social order required that these very bad men be condemned.
The situation is different when we turn to the other cross, the one in the middle. There were some, indeed, who thought that Jesus was also a very bad man. Was he not a blasphemer who pretended to have the authority to forgive sins? Had he not claimed to be the Messiah? Some accused him of being a revolutionary who sought to overthrow the Roman government and make himself a ruler over his own kingdom. Certainly he was an agitator who stirred up the people and caused trouble. Nobody ought really to be crucified, but, after all, he was a disturber of the peace. So the argument might go. When the situation is analyzed closely, we see that Jesus was not put to death because he was very bad. He was crucified because he was very good.
Yet while he hung there on the cross, people passing by wagged their heads, derided him, and made fun of him. And you know what? The thieves reviled Jesus as well. What irony! The criminals said awful things to Jesus. How is it that the very worst people can make fun of the very best people and try to make them look bad? How mixed up things get in this crazy world of ours. Truth is indeed sometimes stranger than fiction.
Let us proceed with the story. We should notice in this connection that it was the very same social forces that led to the execution of Jesus and to the condemnation of the thieves. The religious and political authorities approved in each instance. In both cases the same social wisdom was at work to preserve the status quo, to maintain in existence the prevailing order of society against disruptive change. Jesus, in his own way, was a threat to established ways of thinking and acting. He threatened the religious order because he broke the law in the name of love. He uncovered the weaknesses of the received traditions and claimed an immediate authority from God. He gained the support of many of the common people who had been discriminated against. He associated with the riffraff of society and brought down upon his head the scorn of the class conscious. So the Scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees took steps to put him down lest he upset the religious establishment.
Jesus was also a threat to the state. It is true that he did not seek to throw off the Roman yoke by military means. The kingdom of which he spoke was of a different sort. Nevertheless, he did have a power over the masses. He was even under suspicion by the Jewish rulers. Wouldn't it be better for the sake of law and order, for peace and security of the land, if he were put down? Pilate apparently thought so. Hence, the evil coalition between religion and politics resulted in the mockery of a trial, a final humiliation, and at last in execution.
In a very profound sense, then, Jesus threatened the established social order just as the thieves did. The difference is that the thieves threatened it because they were worse than most people. Jesus was a threat because he was better than most people. You can get yourself in trouble either way. When Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated George Bernard Shaw remarked, "It just goes to show you how dangerous it is to be good."
These words came to me with a new impact when the word was flashed over the television set that a sniper's bullet had taken the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The two moral leaders King admired most were Jesus and Gandhi. Like his teachers, he was put to death because he sought to do good. An agitator who stirred up people? Yes! A troublemaker who appealed to the poor and oppressed of the land to seek a new order? Yes! A law breaker who was often in jail? Yes! A revolutionary who threatened the prevailing social order? Yes! But all of this in obedience to the demands of love and the requirements of justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was a graduate of Crozer Theological Seminary, where I was later privileged to teach. He was president of the senior class and finished his academic work with a higher grade average than any of his classmates. The Seminary always requests a statement from prospective students regarding their motivation for entering the ministry. When asked why he wanted to become a minister, he wrote, "I felt an inescapable urge to serve society." The urge that led him to wear his body out in behalf of his people was in a real sense the cause of his death. He was carrying out that aim to serve humankind when he was killed. It was symbolic of his life that during his last week on earth he was at work in behalf of the garbage collectors of Memphis. He had a dream, an American dream and a Christian dream, of a land where everybody was free and equal. In pursuit of that idea, he was put in jail. He loved the poor, the outcasts, and the oppressed. Many wanted to kill him. One man did.
When the news was put on the television networks that he was dead, a black woman sat in a bar filled mainly with white men. When they heard the news, they drank a toast and celebrated with cheers. Even the governor of a state could regret his death by violence but then add that he was a troublemaker who caused a lot of turmoil in the land.
During the trouble in Birmingham, King said on one occasion to his black audience something like this, "It may be that a lot more blood will have to be shed on the streets of Birmingham before this thing is over, but let it be our blood and not the blood of our white brothers." And his congregation cheered him and said, "Amen, that's right." For preaching and practicing non-violence, he was hated and despised. For taking Jesus seriously and urging his followers to love their enemies and bless those who cursed them he was called an agitator and a disturber of the peace.
Clarence Jordan was a white man who left his home in Georgia to study theology. He came back from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary with a doctorate in New Testament. That was commendable, everyone thought. But he caused a lot of turmoil when he established an interracial community in Americus, Georgia, several decades ago. He was not very popular with a lot of people for that reason and others. The Koinonia Community farmed on a communal basis. Except for very personal items, they shared the fruits of their labor in common. Eventually, Clarence and some others were ousted from the local Baptist church. To be pacifist, interracial, and to share goods equally seemed strange and even dangerous to those who lived by conventional standards. Yet Clarence and the others were only trying to follow the teachings of the New Testament as they understood them.
One day Clarence and a black man from the community were traveling in a car. They came to a filling station that had only one bathroom, obviously intended for white people. Clarence went to the manager and said, "Would you mind if my brother used your bathroom?" The proprietor seemed a bit puzzled but said, "Why, no, of course not!" When the black man started to the bathroom, he was seen by the manager, who protested, "I thought you said he was your brother." Clarence replied, "He is; he is my brother in Christ." That is one of the reasons the FBI eventually had to intervene to protect the Koinonia Community from violent attacks.
It is just amazing how people who try to love everybody upset the good, decent, law-abiding citizens and church members of this land of ours. I have been reading about a group of social radicals in the South who were active from the time of the Great Depression of the '30s until after Word War II. Most of them were Christians inspired by the example of Jesus and the teachings of the New Testament. Many of them were trained by a social gospel theologian at Vanderbilt University whose name was Alva Taylor. There was H. L. Mitchell of Arkansas who organized the desperately poor tenant farmers. There was Buck Kester of Virginia who was everywhere investigating lynchings, supporting the tenant farmers and sharecroppers, overcoming racial barriers, and all the time defending the poorest people of the land. There was Don West of Georgia who was active in the labor unions in behalf of mill workers and coal miners. All three of these white men, two of them ministers of the gospel, were threatened, run out of town, chased all over the place, and persecuted and hounded by the good, decent people of the country. What was their crime? Loving everybody, defending the poor, organizing desperate and oppressed farmers and laborers, that's all. What was their sin? They tried to get poor white people and poor black people together to fight against the system that kept them down, that's all. That's all they did. And they were persecuted by the good people, the nice, wonderful people who loved their children, read the Bible, went to church, and sometimes drank a little whiskey, and mostly fed their dogs well.
George Bernard Shaw was right. It is dangerous to be good. Socrates illustrates this. Jesus is an example. Gandhi showed that it still holds in modern times. Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarence Jordan, and the radical prophets of the South remind us that it is true in America.
Let us look once more at the three crosses outside Jerusalem. On either side is a thief. In the middle is Jesus. There are two ways to break the law and the conventions of society. You can be worse than most people and break the law from below. Or you can be better than most people and break the law from above. There are two ways to get crucified. One way is to be cruel and violent and hence to be such a menace to society that law-abiding, decent folks take measures to punish you. The other way is to love everybody and seek peace and justice and hence be such a menace to society that law-abiding, decent people take measures to punish you.
If we now return to the Supreme Court decision on segregation and the Watergate era, let us keep these three crosses before us. When people today break the law, they sometimes claim they are acting in pursuit of a great cause that justifies their actions. How shall we respond to this? Violating the law is a serious matter. For individuals to take it upon themselves to decide whether to conform to the demands of society is a dangerous thing. Complex issues arise. Much would need to be said to analyze all that is involved. One thing can be said here. When laws are broken, we have to ask whether the lawbreakers are following in the footsteps of the thieves or following the example of Jesus.
Seeing the television version of The Final Days reminded me how complicated this gets. Some of those involved in the Watergate scandal suggested a parallel between their breaking the law and the civil rights demonstrators and anti-war activists who engaged in acts of civil disobedience. President Richard Nixon himself hinted that the atmosphere in which the Watergate incidents occurred was in part created by the protest movements of the '60s. He noted that civil disobedience had frequently been blessed from American pulpits.
We could argue for a long time about whether the Watergate burglars and the draft card burners are alike or different in trying to justify their acts. And we could get into long discussions about whether the segregationists and the civil rights demonstrators were on equal moral grounds when they resorted to civil disobedience. Here I would only propose that the law can be broken from above, and it can be broken from below. Laws can be violated by acts morally inferior to the standards required by law. They can also be disobeyed in obedience to imperatives that are ethically superior to the legal code. Very low morality and very high morality can get you in jail. It is very important to know the difference between breaking the law from below and breaking it from above.
Perhaps we can get a better perspective on these differences if we look for a moment at an event far removed from our own time. Outside the gates of Jerusalem stood three crosses. On either side was a common criminal. In the center was Jesus of Nazareth. From this cross we can learn a great deal. Paul vowed to know nothing and to preach nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified. He urged that God has chosen to save those who believe through the folly of the cross.
I want to call attention to another dimension of truth that is symbolized by all three crosses together. When we ponder this scene, we become aware that there are two ways to incur the wrath of society. One way is to be very bad. The two thieves are witness to this. They had endangered the order and security of society by resorting to brute force, to threats of death and violence. When they were apprehended and brought to trial, all decent people agreed that they must pay for their crimes. Religious leaders and officers of the state approved of the sentence. No one doubted that justice was done when these two were put upon the cross. If everyone lived as these two men did, chaos would result. The honorable institutions of society and decent ways of making a living would be undermined. The preservation of the social order required that these very bad men be condemned.
The situation is different when we turn to the other cross, the one in the middle. There were some, indeed, who thought that Jesus was also a very bad man. Was he not a blasphemer who pretended to have the authority to forgive sins? Had he not claimed to be the Messiah? Some accused him of being a revolutionary who sought to overthrow the Roman government and make himself a ruler over his own kingdom. Certainly he was an agitator who stirred up the people and caused trouble. Nobody ought really to be crucified, but, after all, he was a disturber of the peace. So the argument might go. When the situation is analyzed closely, we see that Jesus was not put to death because he was very bad. He was crucified because he was very good.
Yet while he hung there on the cross, people passing by wagged their heads, derided him, and made fun of him. And you know what? The thieves reviled Jesus as well. What irony! The criminals said awful things to Jesus. How is it that the very worst people can make fun of the very best people and try to make them look bad? How mixed up things get in this crazy world of ours. Truth is indeed sometimes stranger than fiction.
Let us proceed with the story. We should notice in this connection that it was the very same social forces that led to the execution of Jesus and to the condemnation of the thieves. The religious and political authorities approved in each instance. In both cases the same social wisdom was at work to preserve the status quo, to maintain in existence the prevailing order of society against disruptive change. Jesus, in his own way, was a threat to established ways of thinking and acting. He threatened the religious order because he broke the law in the name of love. He uncovered the weaknesses of the received traditions and claimed an immediate authority from God. He gained the support of many of the common people who had been discriminated against. He associated with the riffraff of society and brought down upon his head the scorn of the class conscious. So the Scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees took steps to put him down lest he upset the religious establishment.
Jesus was also a threat to the state. It is true that he did not seek to throw off the Roman yoke by military means. The kingdom of which he spoke was of a different sort. Nevertheless, he did have a power over the masses. He was even under suspicion by the Jewish rulers. Wouldn't it be better for the sake of law and order, for peace and security of the land, if he were put down? Pilate apparently thought so. Hence, the evil coalition between religion and politics resulted in the mockery of a trial, a final humiliation, and at last in execution.
In a very profound sense, then, Jesus threatened the established social order just as the thieves did. The difference is that the thieves threatened it because they were worse than most people. Jesus was a threat because he was better than most people. You can get yourself in trouble either way. When Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated George Bernard Shaw remarked, "It just goes to show you how dangerous it is to be good."
These words came to me with a new impact when the word was flashed over the television set that a sniper's bullet had taken the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The two moral leaders King admired most were Jesus and Gandhi. Like his teachers, he was put to death because he sought to do good. An agitator who stirred up people? Yes! A troublemaker who appealed to the poor and oppressed of the land to seek a new order? Yes! A law breaker who was often in jail? Yes! A revolutionary who threatened the prevailing social order? Yes! But all of this in obedience to the demands of love and the requirements of justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was a graduate of Crozer Theological Seminary, where I was later privileged to teach. He was president of the senior class and finished his academic work with a higher grade average than any of his classmates. The Seminary always requests a statement from prospective students regarding their motivation for entering the ministry. When asked why he wanted to become a minister, he wrote, "I felt an inescapable urge to serve society." The urge that led him to wear his body out in behalf of his people was in a real sense the cause of his death. He was carrying out that aim to serve humankind when he was killed. It was symbolic of his life that during his last week on earth he was at work in behalf of the garbage collectors of Memphis. He had a dream, an American dream and a Christian dream, of a land where everybody was free and equal. In pursuit of that idea, he was put in jail. He loved the poor, the outcasts, and the oppressed. Many wanted to kill him. One man did.
When the news was put on the television networks that he was dead, a black woman sat in a bar filled mainly with white men. When they heard the news, they drank a toast and celebrated with cheers. Even the governor of a state could regret his death by violence but then add that he was a troublemaker who caused a lot of turmoil in the land.
During the trouble in Birmingham, King said on one occasion to his black audience something like this, "It may be that a lot more blood will have to be shed on the streets of Birmingham before this thing is over, but let it be our blood and not the blood of our white brothers." And his congregation cheered him and said, "Amen, that's right." For preaching and practicing non-violence, he was hated and despised. For taking Jesus seriously and urging his followers to love their enemies and bless those who cursed them he was called an agitator and a disturber of the peace.
Clarence Jordan was a white man who left his home in Georgia to study theology. He came back from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary with a doctorate in New Testament. That was commendable, everyone thought. But he caused a lot of turmoil when he established an interracial community in Americus, Georgia, several decades ago. He was not very popular with a lot of people for that reason and others. The Koinonia Community farmed on a communal basis. Except for very personal items, they shared the fruits of their labor in common. Eventually, Clarence and some others were ousted from the local Baptist church. To be pacifist, interracial, and to share goods equally seemed strange and even dangerous to those who lived by conventional standards. Yet Clarence and the others were only trying to follow the teachings of the New Testament as they understood them.
One day Clarence and a black man from the community were traveling in a car. They came to a filling station that had only one bathroom, obviously intended for white people. Clarence went to the manager and said, "Would you mind if my brother used your bathroom?" The proprietor seemed a bit puzzled but said, "Why, no, of course not!" When the black man started to the bathroom, he was seen by the manager, who protested, "I thought you said he was your brother." Clarence replied, "He is; he is my brother in Christ." That is one of the reasons the FBI eventually had to intervene to protect the Koinonia Community from violent attacks.
It is just amazing how people who try to love everybody upset the good, decent, law-abiding citizens and church members of this land of ours. I have been reading about a group of social radicals in the South who were active from the time of the Great Depression of the '30s until after Word War II. Most of them were Christians inspired by the example of Jesus and the teachings of the New Testament. Many of them were trained by a social gospel theologian at Vanderbilt University whose name was Alva Taylor. There was H. L. Mitchell of Arkansas who organized the desperately poor tenant farmers. There was Buck Kester of Virginia who was everywhere investigating lynchings, supporting the tenant farmers and sharecroppers, overcoming racial barriers, and all the time defending the poorest people of the land. There was Don West of Georgia who was active in the labor unions in behalf of mill workers and coal miners. All three of these white men, two of them ministers of the gospel, were threatened, run out of town, chased all over the place, and persecuted and hounded by the good, decent people of the country. What was their crime? Loving everybody, defending the poor, organizing desperate and oppressed farmers and laborers, that's all. What was their sin? They tried to get poor white people and poor black people together to fight against the system that kept them down, that's all. That's all they did. And they were persecuted by the good people, the nice, wonderful people who loved their children, read the Bible, went to church, and sometimes drank a little whiskey, and mostly fed their dogs well.
George Bernard Shaw was right. It is dangerous to be good. Socrates illustrates this. Jesus is an example. Gandhi showed that it still holds in modern times. Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarence Jordan, and the radical prophets of the South remind us that it is true in America.
Let us look once more at the three crosses outside Jerusalem. On either side is a thief. In the middle is Jesus. There are two ways to break the law and the conventions of society. You can be worse than most people and break the law from below. Or you can be better than most people and break the law from above. There are two ways to get crucified. One way is to be cruel and violent and hence to be such a menace to society that law-abiding, decent folks take measures to punish you. The other way is to love everybody and seek peace and justice and hence be such a menace to society that law-abiding, decent people take measures to punish you.
If we now return to the Supreme Court decision on segregation and the Watergate era, let us keep these three crosses before us. When people today break the law, they sometimes claim they are acting in pursuit of a great cause that justifies their actions. How shall we respond to this? Violating the law is a serious matter. For individuals to take it upon themselves to decide whether to conform to the demands of society is a dangerous thing. Complex issues arise. Much would need to be said to analyze all that is involved. One thing can be said here. When laws are broken, we have to ask whether the lawbreakers are following in the footsteps of the thieves or following the example of Jesus.
