Our Peace
Proper 11B
21 July 2018; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Homily Delivered by
the Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.,
at Trinity Episcopal
Parish
Ashland, Oregon
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of
flesh. Amen.
Good guys vs. bad guys. Cops and robbers. White hats vs. black. Citizens and aliens. Jews and gentiles. Believers and pagans. It is easy to see the world in Manichean
terms, a struggle between light and darkness.
“Remember that at one time you
Gentiles by birth, … [were] aliens … and strangers to the covenants of
promise…. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought
near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace… he has broken down the dividing
wall, … [Y]ou are no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens with the saints
and also members of the household of God….”
Today’s reading in Ephesians thus characterizes
the effect of Christ’s victory over death on the cross on his world. The idea is that by suffering and overcoming
the worst that the wickedness of the world could throw at him, Christ wrought
peace to people far and near, and broke down the wall dividing groups. Paul expressed the idea a little more
expansively in Galatians: “There is no
longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male
and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).
The idea is profound—in Christ, all
divisions and distinctions are healed, all distinctions blurred, polarities
centered, dualities united.
In the Harry Potter books, there is
a clear struggle between good and evil, between Voldemort and Harry Potter, the
Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix, Griffindor and Slitherin: good guys and bad guys. Yet at one point, Sirius Black tells his
godson that one must not think that one group or person is purely good and
another purely evil: “We've all got both
light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's
who we really are.”
In the Gulag Archipelago, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn describes his own suffering at the hands of an evil system as a
prisoner in Stalin’s labor camp system. Tortured on a near daily basis, he
becomes more and more dehumanized. But then,
in a chapter called ‘Resurrection,’ he regains his Christian faith and begins
the long road to true freedom, even in prison. He realized that no matter how
tightly his interrogators constrained him, he always had a choice—they always
eventually could force him to say what they wanted, but he could do so
willingly or unwillingly, cheaply or expensively in terms of suffering.
He saw that his interrogators were under constraint: if they did not torture, they themselves
would become prisoners. But they could
do it with pleasure or regret: they too had a choice in how they did what they
were forced to do. In a system where all were victims in one degree of
another, Solzhenitsyn realized this great truth: the line between good and evil
is not found between one group of people and another, between country and
another country, between one economic class and another, between one political
party and another, between one religion or another, or one race and
another. The line between good and evil, he says, is fine but very
definite, and runs down the middle of each and every human heart. It is
found in that space of the heart where we exert our choices, no matter how
constrained our choices may be. He asks, with good an evil in each of our
hearts, who is willing to kill a part of his own heart? It is easier to deny
it, label it in others, and fight against them.
Solzhenitsyn realized that he needed
to pray for his interrogator, and for all of God’s creatures, even Stalin.
It is so easy to divide the world
into us and them. Group identity is a
cheap way of finding ourselves, and seeing only the good in us, at the expense
of those not in our group. It is a
seductive way of making us forget our own failings by focusing on the failings
of others. Thinking that such divisions
matter masks the truth that all of us are flawed, and that ultimately, we are
all in this together.
Think of the following divisions we
make in our world:
Rich and poor.
Black and white.
Strong and weak.
Saints and sinners.
East and West.
North and South.
Male and female.
Catholic and Protestant.
Young and old.
Native-born and alien.
Legal and illegal immigrant.
Supervisor and subordinate.
Able-bodied and disabled.
Straight and Gay.
Republican and Democrat.
Conservative and Liberal.
Socialist and Capitalist.
Native and foreigner.
Religious and secular.
Healthy and sick.
Clean and unclean.
“Christ is our peace; in him, we are
one.”
Ephesians is not saying that good
and evil do not exist, or that we need not worry about struggling against evil. But it is saying that such divisions no
longer matter in light of the cross.
There is a deep logic to this. Community defines itself not just by who it
includes, but also by who in excludes.
For this, Philosopher René Girard says that community is “unanimity
minus one,” that is, a group united in accusing and expelling at least one of
its own. Community is not just joined hands and linked arms of embrace. It in its structure is also the pointing
finger of accusation, of exclusion. Community regulates itself by scapegoating.
Anthropologists note that most
primitive cultures have myths that express this. Generally a dissident, abnormal, or impure
member of the community is singled out, driven out, and often killed in the
myth. Thereby the community is made
whole. Impurity and wrong are thus
purged.
Girard notes that Christians have
their own version of this myth, based on the death of our Lord: the crowd points their fingers at Jesus and
calls for his death, he is brutalized, taken outside the city walls, and
killed.
But the difference is this: in the Christian telling, Jesus is
innocent. It is he who is right, and the
community that is wrong. The cross
embodies the dark side of community: accusation,
the driving outside the city wall, scapegoating. But Easter morning turns everything on its
head.
Thus Ephesians: Christ on the cross
preaches peace to those who are far off and those who are near. The resurrection condemns accusation itself. The cross, that cruel tool the Roman Empire
used to enforce community, that instrument of public terror supporting
conformity as an act of policy, is itself undone by the resurrection of our
Lord.
Christ, once driven outside the
wall, becomes our peace, and breaks down all dividing walls. He brings those far off, those driven outside
the walls themselves, back, and draws them near.
That’s what all the shepherd imagery
in today’s other readings is about:
where the kings of Israel, called the shepherds of the people, here the
bad shepherds, failed them, in large part by striving too hard to maintain
their community, their advantage over other nations, Jesus sustains them and
brings them all together—regardless of their background—into a single
fold. He tends them not because they are
his sheep and others are not, but because, like in today’s Gospel, they need a
shepherd. And so he feeds them and
serves them, regardless of their origins.
The cross undoes not just the mutual
accusation between groups. The division
within ourselves that each of us experiences, the sense of not being worthy, of
not being a “good person,” is also undone. Paul says Jesus “erased the record
against us from all legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the
cross” (Col. 2:24). He thus destroys the alienation within each
of us because of the accusation built into our individual lives. Anthropologists and critical theorists who
work in the area of liminality, the puzzling places where we are at the margins
or caught between group identities, value systems, or ritual status, note that
being on the margins causes great stress and doubt, often experienced as
self-alienation.
What alienates us from
ourselves? What makes us accuse
ourselves?
It usually is difference, the
difference between:
What we desire versus what we
actually have.
What we ought to do versus what we
actually do.
What our community expects of us
versus who we are in reality.
How we’d like to be, individually or
in community, versus how we actually are.
Even in this, “Christ is our peace;
in him we are one.” The cross and
resurrection tell us that we ought not accuse ourselves or others. They tell us that we are one, that we are
beloved.
Loved ones, alienation is real,
whether between groups or within our hearts. We are all strangers and
foreigners. We try to make ourselves
feel better about it by clinging to our group, our family, our tribe, defined
in part by making strangers and foreigners of others. We accuse scapegoats or blame enemies; we
also accuse ourselves as forlorn, desolate losers. Those political and religious leaders who
milk such alienation to gain power and wealth are guilty of great sin. For Jesus took this all with him outside the
wall, and it died with him. In the light
of Easter morning, we can see that it is all a sham.
In Christ, we are one. In Christ, we are no longer strangers and
foreigners. He has broken down the
dividing wall, and has nailed the accuser’s power itself to the cross. He is our peace.
Thanks be to God.
