Sermon by The Very Rev Chris Yaw, 4/2/2023, Palm Sunday
(Thanks to David Peters and his insightful book,
‘Post Traumatic Jesus’ from which this sermon borrows heavily!)
Did you picture in your mind ’Skull Hill?’
A macabre place if there ever was one…
In Aramaic it’s ‘Golgotha.’
In Greek it’s ‘Kranion’ - you know the word Cranium from biology class or the board game...
And the Romans would call it ‘Calvarie’ - meaning the dome of bone on the top of your head.
The Skull is found on the flag of marauding pirates...
It warns of poison on the containers of insecticides-
And it’s on the back label of those highly potent liquor bottles requested of late-night bartenders only by the daring, the depressed, and the death wishers.
The Skull means it’s over.
It is bone absent skin, body minus breath, it is all that remains when even the insects have given up.
And, so, Skull Hill is a fitting place for a crucifixion.
This was the Roman way of multi-channel communication, to hang up hundreds, even thousands of bodies alongside busy roadways was an advertisement of who was in control.
It was also to command a death that was so incredibly painful, long, drawn out, excruciating - the middle part of that word actually originating from the word crucify - that only a fool would hear those cries of agony, echoing throughout the surrounding valleys, and want to cross the Roman Empire.
We imagine Jesus upon a cross -
His eyelids are red and blue - swollen nearly shut from being beaten on the head, spiked crown shoved on his brow - his hair is wet with sweat, even blood.
Indeed, atop his yellowed, dusty skin, there are patches of a crust of dried blood - with new blood oozing with each heartbeat.
And then there are the flies, the flies! - hovering and landing, hovering and landing, tending to each festering wound - nothing at all to be done about that.
Then beneath the cross are the battle-weary and war-worn guards - passing back and forth a bottle of soldier wine. It’s a taste they know well - used to numb the pain for which they are paid to inflict and has most assuredly taken its own toll upon themselves.
The soldiers tell and re-tell stories of great skirmishes and bloody conquests in faraway places, as the buzz gets stronger with each swig and the familiar fog of euphoria rolls in - trying to make their job just a little bit easier.
The soldiers mock the victims and their friends - not hard - they are taught to regard enemies as vermin or worse. They roll bone dice for Jesus’ clothing - it’s all a grisly game.
And a very expensive game - that has removed from them any vestige of empathy or sympathy for what they do - and who they are - they are no longer able to feel, no longer able to understand - no longer... human.
Perhaps the only one in worse shape is the woman who bore him - who looks on, helplessly, from below. Mother Mary does not care that the crowd mocks her - or that the same ruthless soldiers who strung up her son are at her side, downwind from their obscene sneering and odiferous breath.
Mary is indescribably broken.
What must a parent feel to look upon their son in such a state?
Unspeakable horror, gut-wrenching pain - shuddering anguish.
"How could this happen?"
"What could I have done?"
"Please, can we switch places?"
Yet he is helpless.
She is helpless.
Both simmer in the suffering and agony of the cross.
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Such a painful and traumatic death in an age of horrific pain and trauma.
Historian Mary Beard tells us, that the Roman world was terrifyingly vicious and as such, is absolutely alien to you and me, "that means not just the slavery, the filth (there was hardly any such thing as trash collection much less municipal plumbing in ancient Rome), the human slaughter in the arena, the death from illnesses whose cures we now take for granted; but also the newborn babies thrown away on rubbish heaps, the child brides, and the flamboyant priests.”
We cannot underestimate how traumatizing this reality was for people living in the world of Jesus - writes author David Peters,
’The loss of their political autonomy and judicial recourse, the violent moods of occupying soldiers, and the inability to get ahead because of the tax burden - are just a few ways the Romans traumatized the people of Jesus’ world.
Who knows how much pain and trauma served as underpinnings for normal, day-to-day life, 2,000 years ago, when Jesus lived and died - his body, naked to the wooden beams of the Roman torture device.
The trauma of Jesus’ 6-hour torture and crucifixion is something we call ’The Passion.’
It is re-enacted, rehearsed, recited, and remembered by billions of Christians during Holy Week every year. It is something Christians never want to forget:
We tether its symbol from our church ceilings -
Hang smaller versions around our necks -
Tattoo it on our arms -
Trace it on our bodies -
Why?
Because the Cross speaks of our human condition better than any other symbol.
You and I still know trauma.
In Greek, the word ’trauma’ means wound.
We are all wounded.
Just in the last 5 years - oh the pain we have endured!
The COVID-19 pandemic - putting aside its physical damage of death and devastating suffering - but of all the things we missed, we mourned, we lamented, we lost.
Then there was the civil unrest after police killings of Black people that caused widespread protest, fear and conflict.
And then, the assault on Democracy and the January 6th attack on the U-S Capital.
This was punctuated by political division, seen ever so starkly in President Trump’s indictment this week, and the polarized, in some cases, apocalyptic, way it’s being interpreted.
And through it all, violent mass shootings, especially of innocent school children, the latest in Nashville.
None of this has passed without making a mark.
None of those marks have left any of us.
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And so, the trauma of Jesus is our trauma.
The woundedness of Jesus is our woundedness.
And like Jesus, we recite Psalm 22 - ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Only to hear silence, God’s first language, mocking us as we struggle to make sense of the traumatic events that turn our world upside down.
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Yet in that silence there is a statement. And this is the point of my sermon this morning:
Something is being said on Calvary as you and I contemplate this, the world’s greatest, most historic and consequential event:
You are not alone when you suffer.
You are not by yourself or forgotten.
You are not weird or wacko.
You are a member of a great and vast fellowship - that unites - even transcends humanity.
And the God we serve is not far off, far away, and unaware of the wounds we carry.
For God carries them too.
From the cross Jesus announces to a suffering world that there is consolation in God when we suffer. There is even meaning in our woundedness.
Safe to say, get close to your wounds and you get close to Jesus.
“See my hands, my feet, that it is I, myself.”
For we have a building not made of human hands - but by the perfection of God - which is found and founded in woundedness.
The message of this day is that no matter how battered and bruised you have been, you are, or you will be: There is someone who understands this - and someone who walks with us through this - even someone who will triumph over this.
From the Cross Jesus tells us:
You are loved for who you are, where you are, as you are.
The wounds you carry are no secret to him.
In fact, in some profound ways, they are carried by him - so that 'By his wounds, we are healed.’
So, friends, let us not despair in our woundedness - for it never goes away -
In fact, healing does not mean that the scars disappear -
It means we have new life.
It means we have new life.
Amen.