“Nothing strengthens authority as much as silence.” Leonardo da Vinci
Breaking the Silence
“I think he absolutely needs to tell all Americans to stand down and allow the judicial system to take its course,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), member of the House Freedom Caucus that continues to keep silent about the Big Lie. “We trust judges, we trust juries, we trust appellate courts. This isn’t over until it’s over…. I think that sending a very clear message, and also having a surrogate send a very clear message, that violence will not be tolerated, is appropriate.”
Rep. KEN BUCK (R -CO), SPEAKING WITH ANDREA MITCHELL
The Poetry of Politics
Poets often shine a different light into the darkness. Adrienne Rich is one of them. In her poem “Rape” she takes us inside the minds of a victim and a rapist.
You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you: … he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.
ADRIENNE RICH, “RAPE,” DIVING INTO THE WRECK: POEMS 1971–1972
The Politics of Rape
In America today a rapist who knows, or thinks he knows, what Americans secretly want, has been indicted on criminal charges four times. No one wants to be raped. Ever! Yet, there is something about American culture that leaves us vulnerable to charmers and thieves who pose as Robin Hood.
The indictments of Donald Trump allege that rape has been committed repeatedly. Members of Congress who fail to “stand down” prove themselves unfaithful to their oaths of office. In spoken words and scheming silence they become accomplices who know, or think they know, what the country secretly want. Some might call it the politics of silence. The politics of silence is the politics of sedition. The politics of sedition is the politics of rape.
Gordon C. Stewart, Public Theologian, social commentator, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, August 30, 2023.
Like weaker gorillas dominated by the latest chest-thumper, we keep doing it. Chest-pounding is part of gorilla culture. It’s just the way gorillas are. It’s a way they communicate to maintain order in a family. It’s in their DNA.
Looking at us in 2023, I wonder whether human beings are much different.
Chest-thiumping
According to the online Free Dictionary, we humans thump our chests for the following reasons and purposes:
To make an ostentatious display of one’s dominance, superiority, and pride. Typically said of men.
The manager likes to thump his chest and make a big show of his authority during our production meetings, but you’d be hard-pressed to see him doing any actual work around the office.
The politician always makes a point of thumping his chest during press briefings, never missing a chance to brag about his successes in office.
The Free dictionary
What’s “this”?
Hearing a U.S. Senator declare “We can’t allow this to stand!” following Special Counsel Jack Smith’s announcement of the DOJ indictment of the former U.S. president, one might think that the thing which “we can’t allow to stand” referred to the alleged criminal behavior for which Mr.Trump’s has been charged.
But that’s not the “this” (the thing we cannot allow to stand). It was, as Mr. Hawley saw it, the continuing investigations and indictments, the prosecutions that are persecuting the leader of his party.
Questions
The questions are farther reaching than how and why a U.S. Senator and Officer of the Court, sworn by oath to uphold the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution, would disparage the judicial system which is exercising its duty to the Constitution. The more vexing question is how and why so many American citizens concur with Mr. Hawley.
No Time to Waste
Psychologists, sociologists, and historians will offer a variety of insights for decades yet to come, but some of us can’t wait that long. I turn to historians, analytical philosophers, and theologians who have sought to understand the dynamics of illusion, anxiety, fear, and collective madness. Among them are Gabriel Marcel and Willem Zuurdeeg. Each sought for understanding during a chest-pounding momenet.
Gabriel (-Honoré) Marcel and Willam Zuurdeeg
Gabriel (-Honoré) Marcel (1889–1973), the French existentialist philosopher, playwright, and author of Homo Viator, Being and Having, and The Mystery of Being, proposes a dist between the self as ego and the self as person. The self as ego is a poseur, an actor, performing on stage, playing to the audience among whom the poseur himself is the central figure.
Gabriel (-Honoré) Marcel (1889–1973)Willem Frederik Zuurdeeg (1906-1963)
“I attract the attention of others so that they may praise me, maybe, or blame me, but at all events that they may notice me. In every case, I produce myself.”
Gabriel Marcel
Whereas, for the ego, other people exist as a mirror of one’s greatness, a person sees others of value in and of themselves. The ego sees others as objects to be manipulated; the person sees others as she has come to understand herself as responsible and accountable in a community.
Beyond the reach
Philosopher of Religion Willem Zuurdeeg reminds us of Marcel’s warning against identifying ego with evil and personhood with goodness. So long as the ego remains shut up in itself as the prisoner of its own feelings, desires, fears and anxiety, it is beyond the reach of evil as wall as good. It is not yet awake to reality. “There is no doubt that direct judgment cannot be applied to such beings,” says Zuurdeeg.
Like Sleepwalkers
Marcel goes on to say what none of us wants to hear. “Each of us, in a considerable part of his [one’s] life, is still unawakened, that is to say that he (sic) moves on the margin of reality like a sleepwalker.”
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian and social commentator, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, August 16, 2023.
Getting up at the break of day is not unusual. I get dressed and take the steps down from the loft to make the coffee. But this daybreak was different. Through the window of the A-frame cabin loft, I catch sight of the tops of two long white necks. I rush to the window to see a Trumpeter Swan pen and cob…and six cygnets parading across the yard. The next day they were nowhere to be found.
Below the Window
morning with the swans, GCS, May 24, 2023
slender snow-white necks
pass below the window of
the a-frame next to the
wetland pond where the
trumpeter swans build their
borning home each year
while the red-wing blackbirds
feast on cotton-candy puffs
the cat’n-nine-tails serve
for breakfast each spring
and the loons dive and
rise to feed their young by
the land we think we own.
no “no trespassing” signs
mark the land where the two-
leggeds come when the
Illusion of meta-verses
where wetlands never shrink
or die leave us yearning for
this wondrous place where a
trumpeter swan pen and cob
proudly march their young
across the dmz between reality
and madness craning their
necks to guard their cygnets
from the two-leggeds looking
through the lofty windows.
Puff
the day after, GCS, March 25, 2023
there was no parade today
below the windows — no cob
or pen, no line of six cygnet
trumpeter swans — on our
side of the dmz, not a feather
left behind. An early morning
mournful loon cry warbles
across the pond a psalmic
lament for the soul-mates who
return each year to build a nest
to hatch and train the next
newborn from primordial depths.
far from the wrecks of time where
drones with artificial intelligence
bulls-eyes drive the world insane —
perhaps somewhere in moscow
or miami a strong-man thirsts for
a place like this where cygnets,
cobs and pens play by the wetland
no one owns where instead of
drones with eyes that cannot not see --
no bully or bomb breaks the hush
when the red-wing blackbirds
swoop and sing an ode to joy.
“Truth Social,” Donald Trump’s social media platform, and Donald Trump’s use of it have two things in common. As a platform, Truth Social is neither truthful nor social. It’s a propaganda machine — untruthful and anti-social. Donald Trump’s self-serving posts are the same, untruthful and antisocial. They reflect the defense strategy Roy Cohn taught him years ago. “Never defend! Always attack! Attack, attack, attack!” Roy Cohn fried whatever and whomever stood in his way.
Two featured news headlines — “Trump reverts to scorched-earth political strategy as he runs for ’24” (NYT), and “In U.S., Phoenix tops them all; climate change threatens health” (Associated Press)— strike me this morning as two sides of the same coin. The US Constitution and Earth are being scorched by an indicted former president and his party. Denial may have worked before now, but it’s harder to ignore when Phoenix and Death Valley hit record-breaking temperatures while the forests are ablaze in the Pacific Northwest and in Canada; the Northeast U.S. is awash with flooding and the scenes are most everywhere around the globe.
It’s time to listen to Bill Nye, the Science Guy
“Do you believe climate change is real? Is human impact making the earth less inhabitable?” should be the FIRST questions a voter asks a candidate. “Yes or No?” If the answer is No, or the candidate does a tap dance, it’s time to turn our backs, and find a candidate who answers “Yes.”
Seven detestable things
This direct question to candidates goes hand in hand with the seven detestable things named in the Book of Proverbs:
• haughty eyes; • a lying tongue; • hands that shed innocent blood; • a heart that devises wicked schemes; • feet that are quick to rush into evil; • a false witness who pours out lies; and • a person who stirs up conflict in the community.
The Faith and Freedom Coalition
At the Gala dinner at the Washington Hilton that ended this year’s Faith and Freedom Coalition Annual Conference (23–24 June 2023), the featured speaker brought his haughty eyes, lying tongue, heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that quickly rush into evil, and mouth that pours out lies to arouse the adrenaline of a crowd that claims to know their Bibles.
“Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me,” he declares, “I consider it a great badge of courage. I am being indicted for you….” The faithful lift their Bibles and flags in rapturous worship and praise.
Deception, denial, scorched-earth, and scorched Earth
When a candidate blames his criminal indictments and climate change as hoaxes cooked up by “Democrats, Marxists, communists, and fascists,“ Roy Cohn would be proud. But a scorched-earth defense by offense is not only morally offensive; it is a pattern of deception that is scorching the Earth itself.
Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf & Stock),49 brief meditations on faith and life, Brooklyn Park, MN, July 19, 2023.
It’s stranger than strange, yet, perhaps, not strange at all, for a human being to describe himself as legitimate. “I don’t do things wrong. I do things right. I’m a legitimate person,” said former president DJT on June 27 in self-defense when his integrity had been called into question following release of a self-incriminating audio tape.
What is a legitimate person? What makes a person illegitimate? What might it mean to call oneself a legitimate person? The synonyms for “legitimate” are interesting, but they are less helpful than some of the antonyms: counterfeit, deceptive, dishonest, false, illegal, invalid, unfitting, unreal, unreliable, unsuitable, untrustworthy, unlawful.
Who will rescue me from myself?
There are neither legitimate nor illegitimate persons, according to my faith tradition. Even the best of us lives in the throes of tragic estrangement. No one is exempt. The Apostle Paul — Saul of Tarsus who’d been knocked off his horse and blinded on his way to Damascus to commit domestic terrorism — expressed in his Epistle to the Romans the horrifying truth he had come to see in himself.
Though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not: the good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not want — that is what I do…. In my inmost self I dearly love God’s law, but I see that acting on my body there is a different law which battles against the law in my mind. So I am brought to be a prisoner of that law of sin which lives inside my body.What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Epistle to the Romans 7:19-24 New Jerusalem Bible
Breaking the paradigm of reward and punishment
While studying Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Martin Luther saw that the genitive in Justitia Dei (“the justice of God”) was not passive but active, his heart and mind set aside the mistaken view of God as the Judge waiting to reward or punish us according to our own righteousness and embraced the Judge who is gracious toward the defendant who throws himself on the mercy of the court, and, as in the parable of the prodigal son, is met by the grieving parent who has waited patiently for the beloved child’s return and reunion.
“The trouble with our times is not the multiplication of sinners, it is the disappearance of sin.”
“Philosophy always buries its undertakers.”
Étienne Gilson (1884 – 1978).
“I’m a legitimate person” is not a declaration of innocence. It’s a cry for rescue from the horror within one’s own self — the terrifying sense of illegitimacy — the threat that leaves one weeping in a solitary confinement of his own making.
“Life moves against itself through aggression, hate, and despair.”
– Erich Fromm (1900 –1980)
Law and Grace
In my less frequent pastoral moments I hear in the former president’s declaration of legitimacy the stammering cry of a wounded child who put his hand in the cookie jar but was never called to account. When the protest — “I didn’t put my hand in the cookie jar!”— is declared, and the lie is believed, or the truth swept aside with a shrug, the child is split between the instinct of self-preservation and the instinct of self-destruction. There remains a life-long denial, oozing from the cracks between truth and falsehood, a protest of legitimacy —“I don’t do things wrong. I do things right. I’m a legitimate person.” The adult child has yet to learn that none of us is legitimate or illegitimate and that there is a floor of mercy and acceptance waiting to save us from ourselves.
A return to Paul Tillich
In this moment I return to the wisdom of Paul Tillich that broke through the darkness of a despondent college student who had all but concluded that the faith tradition in which I had been raised was a hoax. I
I pray now for a similar wave of light for other sinners like me.
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.
Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know.”
— Paul Tillich, “You Are Accepted,” The Shaking of the Foundations” (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948).
No one can claim to be legitimate. None of us can claim we don’t do things that are wrong. No one does only right. The division of life into right and wrong is an early stage of childhood development in which the judge either rewards good behavior or punishes when you’ve put your hand in the cookie jar.
Blessed are they who live long enough to get knocked off their horses, and trust that there is more mercy in God than there is sin in us.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness, Brooklyn Park, MN, July 15, 2023
On his way to the Theatre of Pompey, where he would be assassinated, a haughty Julius Caesar passes the seer who had warned him that harm would come to him on the Ides of March. “Well, the Ides of March are come,” says Caesar, mocking the seer. “Aye, they are come,” says the seer, “but they are not gone.”
By the end of the Ides of March in 44 BCE, Caesar’s power over the Roman Republic had come to a cruel end at the hands of the Roman Senate. Although the GOP would have us believe otherwise, Tuesday’s federal indictment of former president Donald Trump was not an assassination. It was a day of accountability under the rule of law. Caesar’s voice fell silent. Donald Trump’s has not.
Of characters without character
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all…to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Conversing with Milo
“Will you commit tonight to accepting the results of the 2024 election?” asked the CNN town hall moderator, Kaitlan Collins. “Yes, if I think it’s an honest election, absolutely, I would.” Moderator follow-up: “Will you commit to accepting the results of the election regardless of the outcome?” Answer: “Do you want me to answer it again? If I think it’s an honest election, I would be honored to. And, right now, we are so far ahead of both Democrat and Republican. And you know what? If I don’t win, this country is going to be in big trouble. It’s so sad to see what’s happening.”
“If I think…“
“If I think…” is not new. One expects to hear such “ifs” in the lock-down hospitals for the criminally insane, or in the fiction section of the library. Decades of serving churches and a public defense law office brought me face-to-face with the likes of Milo Minderbender. None of them had access to nuclear codes. These patients created their own worlds, but they lived within confined quarters in the real world. Aside from the nuclear codes, former daily national security briefings, command of the global spotlight, wealth, lawyers, multiple playmates, Donald Trump seems undistinguished from similar souls suffering from the worlds in their heads. He is its center. His wants, wishes, and desires —and his alone — define reality. He is, in fact, the weak man, the needy man, the sick man who puffs himself up to as a “man’s man,” the Strong Man with authority to separate truth and falsehood, good and evil. He is the star who can do whatever he wants — in a lingerie section of an upscale department store, on an airplane, or in a Moscow hotel suite— whose charm persuades masses of people that January 6 insurrectionists are patriots deserving of pardon.
“Hell rages round us” — Paul Tillich then and now
“Hell rages round us. It’s unimaginable!” wrote a young German Army chaplain in a letter to his father from the trenches of Verdun during World War I. “It’s unimaginable.” The young chaplain was Paul Tillich. During the Nazi party rise to power, Tillich served as Professor of Philosophy at University of Frankfort.
On April 13, 1933 — 10 weeks after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor —Tillich was among the first professors ousted from their teaching positions as “enemies of the Reich.”From that time forward, Tillich made his mark on American cultural history with teaching positions at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. His descriptions of sin as hubris and as estrangement led Time magazine to feature him on its cover in 1959. Paul Tillich left the world more than a memory or a legacy. His legacy has fresh legs. It walks the streets of the estranged nation America has become.
The cuckoo’s nest: 2023 and 1933
Hell again rages around us in ways once considered unimaginable. No two historical circumstances are identical, but some moments in time bear an uncanny resemblance. The social, cultural, political, economic, spiritual estrangement is as much the challenge now as it was when a deranged Strongman turned Germany into a cuckoo’s nest where morning becomes night, the yearning for the good is twisted into evil, where the fear of death turns life into stone, reality into delusion, faith into demagoguery, courage into cowardice, capacity into carnage.
Shakespeare and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
“When Shakespeare was writing,” said Ken Kesey of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “he wasn’t writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.” The Ides of March are come and gone. It’s June now. The Ides of June are come…but they are not gone.
Gordon C. Stewart, Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), 49 brief commentaries on faith and the news; Brooklyn Park, MN; June 15, 2023, the Ides of June.
My head is swirling. I can’t keep up. My relationship with the news is like my 17 year-old son’s description of an older married couple he’d just met: “She’s confused, and he’s confusing.” The world is confusing, I’m confused, and it’s about to get worse. Macular degeneration has not yet affected my reading, but, according to my ophthalmologist, it likely won’t be long before I’ll need new glasses.
To see more clearly
For just as eyes, when dimmed with age or weakness or by some other defect, unless aided by spectacles, discern nothing distinctly; so, such is our feebleness, unless Scripture guides us in seeking God, we are immediately confused. — 16th Century CE French reformer Jean Calvin.
The parable of the sheep, the shepherd, thieves and bandits provides a way of looking at what is happening now, as well as then. Jesus’ parables exceed the boundaries of time and place.
Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit (John 10:1).
Very truly, I tell you…
The introduction to the parable, “Very truly, I tell you,” commands my attention. Truth has fallen out of favor. Falsehood is in vogue. To tell the truth is suspect. If honesty prevailed in 2023, many leaders would begin, “Very falsely, I tell you,” before they set off to undermine truth with self-serving partisan speeches, rallies, alternative facts, and agendas.
The Shepherd, thieves, and insurrectionists
The circumstances in which these words are addressed are much like our own. Parables are like that. They exceed the boundaries of time and place. The sheep (people) are threatened by religious leaders (thieves) who have twisted their faith traditions, on the one hand, and bandits (armed nationalist insurrectionists), on the other. Both thieves and bandits are climbing over the stone wall into the sheepfold. The words κλεπτης (thief) and ληστης (robber, brigand, bandit) call for deeper understanding. English translations — “thief” and “robbers” — appear to be a needless repetition, but they are not the same. The κλεπτης is a thief; the ληστης is an insurrectionist.
The Thief
The thief is a burglar, a bad shepherd. Fourth Ezra, a non-canonical work of the second century CE, catches the sense of it. “Do not desert us [the sheep] as a shepherd does [who leaves] his flock in the power of harmful wolves.” The thief in Jesus parable robs the people’s sacred tradition in collusion with the occupying power, the wolf, the Roman empire. When Jesus drives the moneychangers from the Temple, his fury is with the deeper theft— the robbery of the people’s sacred tradition. “Get them out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a house of trade!” (John 2:16)
The bandit
The bandit is different from the thief. The ληστης is not a κλεπτης ! The thief (κλεπτης) is malleable. He adapts, as circumstances require. That bandit (ληστης) does not. The last thing a kleptomaniac wants is a ruckus! That bandit (ληστης) makes a ruckus. The ληστης is armed and dangerous, ready to do whatever it may take to get his country back.
The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.
Reckless assumptions
A shepherd’s voice is calm. Its assuring tone and cadence allay anxiety, fear, and panic. The sheep expect a thief or bandit to climb over the wall at night or in broad daylight. They will see it with their eyes and hear it with their own ears.
They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.
But what if the stranger impersonates the shepherd’s voice? What if the sheep do not hear the difference between the shepherd’s voice and the imitative voice? What if the shepherd has been away? What if anxiety dulls the flock’s hearing and clouds its vision, such that the desire for security weakens its defenses against impostors? What if they mistake the thief (κλεπτης) for the good shepherd who enters, and leads them out, through the gate?
The thief comes only to steal, slaughter, and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. (Jn. 10:10, NRSVA)
Penultimate thoughts
Although, with age, my eyesight is dimming, my knowledge antiquated, and my soul heavy with weakness and defect, an old pair of spectacles helps me see more clearly beneath and beyond the dazzling displays of wealth and power. I’m stunned that we can be so foolish, but I’m not shocked. The parable of the Good Shepherd zooms in on reality. It leaves me asking who I will follow before all goes dark.
Most disturbing to this old preacher are clergy colleagues who, laying aside their spectacles, on Palm Sundays, lead anxious, fearful flocks in the parade, waving palm branches for Barabbas (Bar [Son] of Abba [Father]), the alternative savior thief and insurrectionist who swears he’s been robbed.
No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. (Matthew 6:24, CEB)
Gordon C. Stewart, Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), 49 short essays on faith and the news; Brooklyn Park, MN, May 2, 2023.
The day Congressman Jim Jordan took his House Judiciary Committee on a field trip to NYC, Elijah’s kindergarten teacher took the five year-olds on a field trip to the Science Museum in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Mr. Jordan’s committee went to NYC to hold a “field hearing” to expose the failure of the “pro-crime, anti-victim” policies of Democrats like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Elijah’s kindergarten class rode a school bus without the federal law enforcement that protects congressional committee field hearings.
Different daily drills
The visit to the Science Museum meant time out from the daily safety drills that prepare the kindergartners for what to do when a shooter shows up at their school. Mr. Jordan and his committee didn’t take a break from practicing their daily rope-a-dope drill of how to evade responsibility for the guns that are sending kids on a one way trip to the morgue.
Message to Robb Elementary School parents of students several hours following the shooting.
Body language: pants on fire
Mr. Jordan’s conflicting answers to the repeated question whether and when he talked with the president on Jan. 6, 2021 are captured in this video. Watch the body language that accompanies his words.
CNN post showing Rep. Jim Jordan’s differing answers about the January 6, 2021 insurrection
Under ordinary circumstances, Jim Jordan fires words at the pace of an AR-15 magazine. The Jim Jordan we see in this video stammered, and his stammering was accompanied by something I found more telling — his body language. He was hitching his pants up.
Promoting a radical political agenda
New York City “has lost its way when it comes to fighting crime and upholding the law. Here in Manhattan, the scales of Justice are weighted down by politics. For the district attorney justice isn’t blind — it’s about advancing opportunities to promote a political agenda — a radical political agenda.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, Chair of US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee
Getting it right while getting it wrong
Mr. Jordan got it wrong. NYC’s crime rate is lower than most other American cities. It is also, however, the city whose district attorney, Alvin Bragg, had just indicted Donald Trump on 34 criminal counts for lying about not keeping his pants up.
But Mr. Jordan also got it right. His accusations of others describe himself and his party. He and the Judiciary Committee had travelled to NYC to promote their own political agenda — a radical political agenda — the conspiracy of power that lit the match of the January 6 insurrection and “the Big Lie” that never dies.
This post comes in two parts. The first was written Holy Saturday (the day between Good Friday and Easter); the second was written yesterday, the second Sunday of Easter.
The Silence of Holy Saturday
Everything falls into silence today. Jesus is crucified, dead, and buried behind the heavy rock of a borrowed tomb. Armed guards stand on either side of the stone that secures the tomb; the governor’s seal — the occupying empire’s official seal —warns against tampering with this tomb. The seal is unbroken; everything else is broken.
Holy Saturday is the day after the victory of death on the Hill of Skulls. There is no Easter. No reason to trust that the clouds will blow over, the sun shine through, the shivering stop. Life is frozen stiff. Only the loneliness within my frozen self remains.
To protect themselves against the fear of death, two bullies twist truth into lies, and station their guards to keep the rock in place and the seal unbroken. The piercing of his side; thorns cutting into his skull; the ridicule of vision; the soldiers’ taunts to come down to prove he is the king he never claimed to be; the cynic-sneer that takes the place of innocence; the barren blindness to what was once my sense of beauty; the indictment of hope and trust; the gnarling of beauty, truth, and goodness into tangled knots that are neither truthful nor social, hammer in my head from Moscow, Mar-a-Lago, and now from the state house of Tennessee.
My soul is not still today. The stone has not been moved. The seal stays put. Only Pilate’s questions and sneer remain:”So you’re a king!” “What is truth?”
Thomas and his Twin
I’m a lot like Thomas. Neither of us was there to verify what others told us. We were not in the room when the others reported that the crucified Jesus had come through their locked door. Thomas wasn’t into ghosts. Neither am I. Although my grandmother claimed the old house on Church Lane was haunted by a previous resident named ‘Gus’, and although I often heard the creaking steps outside my bedroom, I’ve always been like Thomas. I’ve never believed in Gus or the Jesus-ghost other apostles say they’d seen and heard.
My Holy Saturday experience this year was just my latest recurring argument with my grandmother and with the surviving apostles who made up fairytales to keep us from doing what Judas did when despair and guilt overwhelmed him.
I like fairytales. I love Wendy, Peter Pan, and Tinker Bell, but I don’t confuse them with the way things are. Neither Wendy’s wand or Jiminy Cricket could wish upon a star and make the Pied Piper drop by Gus’s house to rid the rats that scampered through the walls at night. This year reminded me of that; it’s the year of the rats, another year of the plague with no Pied Piper to lead the rats out of town. In 2023, there is no longer anywhere that is out of town.
Thomas is called ‘The Twin’ with no further explanation or elaboration. People of my ilk carry Thomas’ DNA! We’re Thomas’ identical twin. When Thomas arrives at the upper room to join the other surviving apostles, a week has passed. The difference between Thomas and Judas is that despair has not yet severed Thomas’ sense of connection. Loneliness, not belief, drives him back to what remains of his circle of friends. All hope is gone for Thomas. There is only the grieving: the sounds of nails being driven into Jesus’ hands, the horror of a soldier thrusting a spear into his side, the shouts of mockery and insult, his final declaration that it was over. His Lord is dead and buried, never to return. His friends have told him that things are not as they seem. The rock, they said, had been rolled back, the imperial seal broken, the guards lay on the ground like dead men, an encounter with Mary as a gardener, instruction to meet him in Galilee. All of it a fairytale!
The Incredulity of Thomas – Carravagio
“Put your finger here; reach out your hand”
What happens to Thomas and others like him is more tangible than magic wands and pixie dust. “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and throw it into my side” is not an ethereal invitation. To be a disciple of Jesus means not only to see and hear, but to touch his physical wounds. The new community is born of his wounds and their transformation, commanded to throw ourselves into the sufferings and open wounds from which blood and water still flow. Resurrection is not pixie dust.
In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair…the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.
Dorothy Sayers
Gordon C. Stewart, Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), 49 short meditations on faith and the news; Brooklyn Park, MN, Second Sunday of Easter, April 16, 2023
Over the years, every Palm Sunday has spoken in ways I did not expect. Today is no different. I no longer fixate on the question whether Palm Sunday happened or is the narrative artistry of Gospel writers. That question no longer interests me. Whether an historical event, or the Gospel writers’ way of looking back on who Jesus was and is, the entry into Jerusalem is filled with parody and paradox. While Caesar’s troops ride into Jerusalem on tall white stallions, Jesus rides in on a donkey as a crowd welcomes his coming with palm branches, the symbol of Jewish resistance to Roman occupation. They are looking for the long-awaited king, the Messiah, who would put an end to national humiliation by a foreign occupation. Jesus was the warrior-king whose purpose was to restore the nation’s glory.
Ecce homo – “Here is the man”
This year, Palm Sunday drew me to Jesus standing before Pilate. “Are you a king, then?” or “So, you are a king, then!” begs the question of Jesus’ understanding of himself. Jesus’ response is as paradoxical as his ride into Jerusalem: “You have said so.”
Mistaken identity?
“You, Pilate, and Caesar, and my compatriots — not I — have said so!” This refusal to claim royal authority is what captured my attention this year. I imagine Donald Trump responding to Judge Juan Merchan’s question tomorrow when the judge unseals the indictments.
“So, you are a King?” “Damn straight! I’m the king who will make America great again.” “But, Mr. President, we don’t have kings in this country.” “Take a look outside, Your Dishonor. Count the crowd! Count the flags, the AK-15s, the gas masks, the helmets, and battering rams; look at the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Michigan Wolverines, the Congressmen, who know who I am. You can indict me, but you can’t judge me without my consent, and, if you convict me of what I did not do, all hell will break loose.”
Paradox: two indictments — opposite responses
At his arrest, Jesus makes a telling reply, a question and a declaration. “Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a bandit? Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not arrest me,” he says. Then comes the parody of the Roman legions who occupied Jerusalem: if he wishes to defend himself, twelve legions of angels would stand with him.
‘Legion’ is the Latin (Roman) word for a Roman military unit, a battalion of some 2,000 soldiers. Jesus’ “twelve legions” do not bear arms; they are angels (messengers), not soldiers, and their number (24,000) far outnumbers the Legions that occupy Jerusalem. Furthermore, Jesus is not to be mistaken for a ‘bandit’ (i.e., an armed insurrectionist). Jesus sees himself as a teacher of Wisdom and Truth. Even when charged with a capital offense, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, makes no claims for himself other than as a teacher. It’s quite a contrast with an indictment in the age of QAnon.
What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country? Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely [sic] hates the USA, 2023!
Donald Trump, Truth Social, March 24, 2023.
“Then you are a king!” said. Pilate. “You say that I am a king,” he answered, “for this reason I was born and have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth hears my voice” (John 18:37).
Within hours, on what we now call Good Friday, the Jesus who bore the cross of truth cried out a plea for mercy: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Gordon C. Stewart, Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), 49 two to four page meditations on faith and public life; Brooklyn Park, MN, April 2, 2023.
Views from the Edge 