Matthew 27.27-54 16 March 2008
“SHAME CRUCIFIED”
When I was a boy, I divided my time between the Detroit suburbs where I grew up, and the dairy farm where my father grew up. When I got a Daisy BB gun rifle for Christmas, my mother crisply informed me the rifle was meant for the farm. So I patrolled grandpa’s fields outside of Cass City, MI for alien or global threats.
Knowing Martians and Nazis were rare in Tuscola County, my grandpa gave me a long list of birds never to shoot at, and a short list of birds who devoured his crops and livelihood. They were acceptable targets. Robins were on the long list never to fire upon. But not long after I spotted a robin poised like still-life on a fencepost with its fat breast protruding. Taking aim, I didn’t believe I’d hit it. But it fell like a stone from that fencepost. As I ran to it, instead of feeling like Heming-way triumphant on the African savannah, my heart sank. For in that bleak March landscape, devoid of sunshine and color, I peered down at the robin’s red blood saturating its red breast. I felt like the kid who murdered spring before it arrived. My grandfather later saw that red robin and gave me a look that I’ll never forget.
Do you have memories, when you recall them, even decades later, that still have power to make you wince and say to yourself, “Oh my, I can’t believe I did that!” And the shame of it still penetrates you as though it were the first time. Today I preach about this piercing shame and what God has done about it on the cross.
Such talk reminds me of the artist Rembrandt and his work “The Three Crosses.” When you study it, you first see the cross in the center, the one Jesus died upon. As you examine the crowd at the foot of his cross, you’re immediately taken in by the various facial expressions and postures of people involved in the awful crime of crucifying the Son of God. At the edge of the painting lurks a furtive figure, almost hidden by the ever-present shadows in Rembrandt’s work. Who is that? Experts claim the figure is Rembrandt’s self-portrait. Yes, he was confessing his part in crucifying Jesus. I suppose it is one scene we can all paint ourselves into.
The cross and our human shame were linked together from the beginning. We tend to make a big deal about the pain Jesus endured on the cross. Revivalists describe the metal-tipped lash and Jesus’ flogging in detail. Physicians excru-ciatingly document how the crucified would actually slowly suffocate to death. In these weeks newsmagazines often put Jesus on their cover and play up his pain.
But what the early Christians dreaded most about the crucifixion was not its pain, but its shame. The public humiliation of it all most agonized the early church. The letter to the Hebrews claims that, “for the sake of the joy that was set before him, Jesus endured the cross, disregarding its shame.” The word cross was considered vulgar, and not mentioned in polite company. After all, crucifixion was reserved for slaves, rebels, hardened criminals, the sub-human, the reprehen-sible than human. It was shameful. The formula for sentencing a crucifixion read: “Executioner, bind his hands, veil his head, and hang him on the tree of shame.” Sometimes the condemned were even killed before they were crucified. And the humiliation of shaming the sentenced became the whole point of crucifying them.
Shame resonates through today’s gospel lesson, the Passion narrative. (v. 28) “The soldiers stripped Jesus and put a scarlet robe on him.” Shame exposes. (v. 29) “After twisting thorns into a crown, they put it on his head.” Shame mocks. (v. 42) "He saved others; he cannot save himself.” Shame derides. (v. 44) “The bandits crucified with him taunted him in the same way.” Shame invites ridicule from all. (v. 46) “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Shame isolates.
Can you see what is going on? Jesus’ enemies use the cross to kill his body. But they use shame to kill his spirit. Isn’t that what shame does? And they seem to succeed. For Jesus is fully discredited. His lofty mission is in shambles. His following is scattered. Jesus’ dream of God’s reign is scorned and accursed. Shame has apparently condemned everything he lived for and defined his name.
Of course, this isn’t the end. God brought Jesus back to life to vindicate him, his mission, and his people. No reassurance is more profound than this resurrection. No reassurance commends to our souls exactly what we need like Jesus’ rising. It is the reassurance that shame does not have ultimate power to break our spirit.
But we can’t access the reassuring grace if we quickly rush to Jesus’ resurrection without pausing first at his crucifixion. That is the temptation, skipping the messy, ugly stuff, being ashamed of our shame-based world, as we are. But shame is not so easily banished. The cost was higher then and it is now. Paul writes that Jesus bore our shame for our sake. “Christ redeemed us from the curse,” he wrote to the Galatians. (3.13) Until the final day, we follow Jesus in bearing the cross as well as its shame, knowing that shame cannot kill our souls. Bearing his cross and “disregarding the shame” means letting Jesus’ generous sacrificial love rule where selfish human pecking-order political instincts typically take over. For just as Jesus absorbed our shame, we disavow all circles still perpetuating it.
I heard a story about a new recruit who entered basic training with the Marines at Paris Island. He was a little out of step with the rest. And in an environment as regimented as that, you set yourself up for ridicule, pranks, derision and shaming
In the particular barracks to which this young Marine was assigned, the degree of meanness was especially high. The other young men did everything they could to make a joke of the new recruit and humiliate him. One day someone came up with a bright idea. Let’s scare the daylights out of the young man by dropping a disarmed hand grenade upon the floor, and pretending it was about to explode. Everyone else was in on the joke, and they all prepared to guffaw at his expense.
The hand grenade was thrown into the middle of the floor, and the warning was yelled, “It’s a live grenade, it’s a live grenade! It’s about to explode.” They fully expected the odd kid would go nutso-hysterical and run shrieking from the threat. Instead, the young marine fell on the grenade, hugged it to his stomach, and yelled for the other men to flee the barracks. “Run for your lives! You’ll be killed!” The other Marines froze in stillness, ashamed of their cruel and juvenile assault.
So Jesus did not so much end shame with his willing sacrifice on the cross. But by allowing our shame to be crucified with him, Jesus disarmed it. He stripped shame of its final death-dealing. For after dying, Jesus was raised. And as he arose again, shame did not get up with him, but stayed down in the dust where it belongs. By enduring the cross, Jesus suffered the worst that shame could do to any human being. Then he was vindicated by God. In doing so, he secured our worth in God’s ultimate scheme of things. No shame, whether just or unjust, petty or spectacular, “can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
I heard another story about a man in Korea who lived in the fourth century A. D. He had two sons. The elder son rose to become the Chief Justice in that country. But the younger son traveled a different direction and became an infamous thief.
The elder son loved his younger brother, but was unable to persuade him to mend his ways. Eventually, the younger son was caught and brought before his judge brother in the courtroom. Everyone smirked, “Well, we know how this will turn out.” They thought the younger brother would get off because of his Chief Justice elder brother. But at the close, the elder sentenced the younger to death.
On the day of his execution, the elder brother came to the prison and said to his brother, “Let’s swap places.” The younger brother nodded, thinking once they realized that they held the elder brother, no way would his execution take place. The younger brother went up the hill to watch the proceedings. His brother was brought up at dawn. And much to his horror, his venerated brother was executed.
Filled with remorse, the younger brother ran down the hill and told the guard his name. He claimed that he was the criminal who should be executed. The guards said: “There’s no sentence outstanding on anyone with that name.” Since the crucifixion of Jesus, the same can be said over us, even the ones we have writ-ten off as doomed. “There’s no sentence outstanding on anyone with that name.”
Maybe that can help us see how the cross creates a community of people who, no longer afraid of being defined and destroyed by their shame, can admit their failures and confess our need for God. Since we know shame cannot destroy us, we need no longer lie about it or foist it on others. So many are unable to ask for forgiveness. What a lonely, burdened, cold, and bitter existence that certainly is!
We can ask for our forgiveness—of God and one another—because we know it has been granted in its ultimate form, and this form was vindicated for all eternity.
Such is the way of Holy Week. We pause at the cross of Christ despite our shame, lurking with Rembrandt in the wings of that evil deed. It dawns on us that Jesus has broken for all time the vicious, horrible chain of being shamed and shaming others. That condemning others as worthless—even the guilty—is no longer acceptable after Jesus. As we witness others using shame to kill the spirit of others, as Jesus’ followers, we step in and say no more. For Jesus took upon himself not just our rebellious sin against God, but the lingering shame as well. Such is the way through and beyond humiliation. Such is the road to eternal life. Amen.
Gentle Savior, you declared God’s presence among us in a gracious and festive way. If we are unable to stand by you in your hour of anguish, it’s because we never expected God would save the world in such a way. It’s because when we see you hanging there, without comfort in your affliction, without words from heaven in the deadening silence, with no dramatic intervening from above in your suffering and torment, we simply cannot comprehend such a thing. But you not only understood that there would be suffering in your glory, you faced it, enduring the worst we can imagine, and did not despair of God. You did not curse the executioners. You silently bore the derision, the scourging, and even the crucifixion, staring down the worst of horrors, calling to the last upon your God.
All of this you bore for us, suffering and dying that the way we treat each other hear and now should be transformed, that we might be outfitted for eternal life. O Lord, be with us in every hour of darkness and torment. Help us to endure our hours of tortured question-ing of God. Teach us the meaning of dying to ourselves in such a way that God’s unfathomable purposes might yet break through in some unforeseeable new dawn.
