Tuesday in Holy Week
1993 (Year A), 6 April / Holy Week
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
The intention of these little talks is to try and bridge the gap between the historical events of the passion of Jesus and our own lives and experiences. One way to do that is to understand what really happened during the passion and I suggested last night that there was a martyrdom. Jesus was a martyr and I told the story of the death of another Christian martyr, Paul Schneider. In the process I briefly drew parallels between the two deaths. Tonight I want us to think of two more deaths to see what can be learnt from them. I believe it will help us to bring Jesus’ passion even closer.
I am aware that many people die martyr’s deaths – not just the good and holy. I don’t think that that lessons the usefulness of the word when we apply it to Jesus. It means rather that we should look all the more closely at the vision which martyr’s preach and their ‘fruits’, after all it is by them, we are told, that we will know them.
Dietrich Bonheoffer was an academic theologian. He was a member of the Confessing church in Germany which had to grapple with the totalitarian state of Hitler’s Germany. He was appointed head of the illegal theological seminary, or training college, in Finkenwalde, Germany.
In 1939 he visited New York and his friends warned him not to return to Germany. They wanted him to stay at a Seminary in New York, but he knew that his place was in the conflicts which lay ahead in Germany. He went home and continued his work in the Confessing Church but at the same time he joined a resistance group with Admiral Canaris and Colonel Oster – the men who were eventually to try an assassinate Hitler with a bomb. The group was active in German intelligence. Bonheoffer became the group’s courier. He was arrested on 3rd April 1943 and murdered on the 9th April (Good Friday) this year 1945.
There are several things to notice. Bonheoffer moved from church resistance against the German State to political resistance. His martyrdom was a political martyrdom for Christ’s sake, whereas Paul Schneider’s was one for faith in Christ’s name. He himself said that his power to resist came from the inward discipline of prayer, meditation and immersion in the presence of the divine Spirit.
As Schneider, he was not a passive participant in his suffering. He returned voluntarily to Germany. He knew exactly what he was doing. And whilst I’m sure he would have preferred it to have been different he chose his fate.
Archbishop Romero, ‘the people’s bishop’ in El Salvador was born in 1917 and consecrated Bishop in 1970 and Archbishop in 1977. It occurs to me now that I’ve managed to choose three men – I’ m sorry about that and will do better next time. Shortly after he became Archbishop, the ruling military junta rigged the elections and during the demonstrations a Jesuit parish priest was murdered. Romero went to the place of his murder spending the night with his parishioners. He said later that was the most important time of his life, for it was that night when he was converted. Up to that time he had been a conservative churchman. All that changed when he recognised the connection between the persecution of the church and the repression of the people by the ruling minority in his country and their ‘death squads’. Now he declared that, ‘the crucified God became present in the crucified men and women of history ... In the disfigured faces of the poor and oppressed of his people, he saw the disfigured face of God’. Eventually he was drawn into political conflict and was shot during mass by a paid assassin in front of the altar of his church.
Now I am aware that things are never entirely clear. Things do overlap but I think that Archbishop Romero’s martyrdom gives us new insights. In Schneider’s death, we saw suffering for faith’s sake. In Bonheoffer there was resistance against an unjust and lawless power. Now with Romero there is a participation in the sufferings of the oppressed people. Suffering for what was believed to be true, resistance against an unjust power and now participation in the sufferings of the oppressed.
Let’s look again at Jesus’ death and try to understand what happened. He died the death of faith. Of one totally committed to his religious vision, to his call and he died because of it. He died with a loud cry of torment, ‘My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me’. The notion that Jesus’ last words to the God whom he called upon ‘Abba, dear Father’, could have been, ‘You have abandoned me’, could surely never have taken root in Christian belief unless the terrible words had really been heard in Jesus’ death cry. Even in this total desolation, this complete isolation, he is still seeking to communicate, Job like, with God. Faith even in the face of his final experience of God – forsakenness.
To the very end he knew he felt he was God’s son and yet he experienced God’s silence. The eclipse of God. Hell. These things, the awful absence of God are at the very heart of the Christian experience. They are our tradition. They are attempts to describe the abyss, a sinking into nothingness.
Jesus died the death of a resistance leader. Jürgen Moltman – a German theologian – says that he was crucified between two Jewish freedom fighters and points out that in Mark’s account of Jesus’ arrest; he asks why they had come for him in the night, as if he were the leader of a revolt. They came for him like that even though they could’ve arrested him in the temple during the day. And to arrest rebels was the prerogative reserved for Roman soldiers, so he was a victim of Rome’s despotic rule over Israel. He must have roused messianic expectations among the people of Jerusalem. Otherwise the anxiety of the priests and the swift action taken by the Romans is inexplicable.
Jesus died the death of a poor man. The Son of Man from Galilee, without power, without rights and without home. He suffered the fate of a slave in the Roman. St Paul says he took the form of a servant. In this sense ‘the sufferings of Christ’ are also the sufferings of the powerless masses of the poor in this world, who have no rights and no home; and in this sense their sufferings too are Christ’s sufferings.
All this may too seem to distance us from Jesus. Talk of martyrs when we’re not likely to be called in this way may not help. The crucial thing, I believe is that in each of these deaths, Christ is enduring the garden of Gethsemane and being re-crucified. For me, the passion comes that much nearer. Tomorrow I want to try and bring it even closer and look at events in our lives which take us right into the garden and to the foot of the cross. AMEN