Tuesday in Holy Week
Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
April 3, 2007
Of all the things there are to talk about in today’s passage from John’s gospel, the one which seizes my attention is Jesus’s use of the word troubled to describe his inner state. "Now my soul is troubled.” Though John’s Jesus does not experience an agony in the garden, there is this moment where he asks to be let out of the consequences that seem to be coming toward him. "Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say-- `Father, save me from this hour'?” There has been a lot of talk up to now to the effect that Jesus’s hour has not yet come. Now his hour has come, and his first response is to be troubled.
The
word we render trouble in English is the Greek verb tarasso which
carries with it a number of senses. Outwardly, it means “to
agitate or trouble a thing by movement of its parts to and fro.” It
can also mean “to stir up or make restless.” So one
sense of troubling is its external meaning: we speak of troubling the
waters or troubling other people. To trouble is
to agitate: and it’s no accident that both political activists
and the central post of your washing machine are called agitators.
The Greek
word tarasso also has an inward set of meanings: “to cause one
inward commotion, take away his calmness of mind, disturb his equanimity;” “to
render anxious or distressed;” “to strike one’s spirit with
fear and dread;” “to perplex the mind by suggesting scruples or
doubts.” One can be agitated or stirred up or troubled inwardly
and outwardly. Internally, I can be troubled into inward commotion. Outwardly
I can be troubled into taking action.
"Now
my soul is troubled. And what should I say-- `Father, save me from this hour'?
No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your
name."—John 12.27-28a
So one set of things going on in today’s propers concerns that moment in Jesus’s life when his hour finally came: his first response is to be troubled: disquieted, doubtful, anxious, questioning. This moment is important because Jesus makes his way through this trouble into something else: instead of asking to be saved from this hour, he declares, “Father, glorify your name.” It is not that Jesus ceases to be internally troubled; it is rather that he decides to move through that anxiety into action.
And that
leads to the other set of things going on in today’s propers: the beginning
of this week’s focused attention on the cross. As the collect puts
it, “ O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument
of shameful death to be for us the means of life.” If part of our
attention today goes to Jesus’s internal state of mind, another part
of it goes to the cause of that internal state of mind, and that is the cross
which looms at the climax of this week’s dreadful events. Jesus
is troubled because the logic of his life and ministry is leading him inexorably
toward the cross. No one in this room doubts that he or she would cry, “Save
me from this hour!” in similar circumstances.
As a cultural
symbol, the cross has lost much of its meaning. A priest friend of mine
told me the story of being in a jewelry store and hearing a woman ask to buy
one of those cute crosses with the little man on them. Lenny Bruce once
said, “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children
would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.” Not
only do people not know what the cross stands for–a method of capital
punishment–the church has taken that image and transformed it into a
symbol of institutional power. Somehow in all of this we have forgotten
that the cross is, like the electric chair (or gas chamber or guillotine or
gallows or hypodermic needle) “an instrument of shameful death.” Now
I may be talking about your favorite hymn here, but one reason that I no longer
will sing the hymn “Lift High the Cross” is precisely because of
its triumphalistic spirit. Instead of seeing the cross as the mark of
our solidarity with those who experience shame, humiliation, and death this
hymn has turned the cross into the standard behind which the conquering ranks
of Jesus gloriously march. But that’s another sermon.
On this
Tuesday in Holy Week, Jesus is troubled, and we should be too. Our own
nation continues to use “instruments of shameful death” as means
of nominally legal executions. We have a national policy debate about the use
of torture, something the writer Slavoj Zizek [“Knight of the Living
Dead”, The New York Times, March 24, 2007] reminds us we have
not discussed publicly since the late Middle Ages. “In a way,” says
Zizek, “those who refuse to advocate torture outright but still accept
it as a legitimate topic of debate are more dangerous than those who explicitly
endorse it.” As Zizek observes, none of us would accept a public
discourse about the advisability of rape as a national policy, and yet we calmly
debate the pros and cons of torture as if we were discussing interest rates
or energy policy. As Jesus heads to the cross, to the “instrument
of shameful death,” he will become a victim of torture. That we
inhabit a culture which practices execution and torture is an offense to the
One whose journey we share this week. Jesus goes to the cross not only
on his own behalf but on behalf of all who are brutalized by life. You
and I who claim solidarity with him and those he stands with should be troubled
by the persistence and perfection of officially sanctioned cruel and inhuman
methods of torture and death. That these things are done in our name,
and often in the name of the one whose soul is troubled, should cause each
of us unbearable rage and sorrow.
Today, Jesus
is troubled, and you and I should be troubled too. More than that,
we should be troublers as well. It was not enough for Jesus to be internally
agitated: he took up his cross and went forward. Troubled as you and
I may be, we are called to move out of ourselves into action and witness. May
our walk with Jesus toward the cross this week transform us into people who
can stir up, who can agitate, who can trouble a world which still puts its
victims and prophets to shame and torture and death. Amen.