September 14, 2008
(Holy Cross Day)
Let The Same Mind Be In You
by
The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Isaiah 45:21-25 • Psalm 98 or 98:1-4 •
Philippians 2:5-11 • John 12:31-36a
(From
The Lectionary Page)
The Sommer family encounters a paradox most evenings, and in this I suspect that we are not alone among families with school age children. As you know, a paradox occurs when two opposing truths, or two opposing realities, are held in tension. In our case, Cady’s need for sleep is clearly in tension with her need to stay on the computer for just please five more minutes, Mommy. This particular paradox is generally resolved by either mommy or daddy pulling rank; would that ALL might be so easily resolved.
Take the feast of the Holy Cross, for example, which we observe today. It is a Feast of our Lord that came into being early in the fourth century following the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. According to Eusebius, Constantine ordered a complex of buildings to be built in Jerusalem “on a scale of imperial magnificence as an object of attraction and veneration to all, the blessed place of our Savior’s resurrection.” What issued forth was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which was dedicated on this day in the year 335. In excavating the site believed at the time to be Golgotha, the Empress Helena – apparently, the first buildings and grounds director of the church – is said to have discovered the cross upon which Christ himself was crucified. Hence the name of the feast day.
Paradoxes abound. The same Roman Empire that ordered the death of Jesus of Nazareth ordered a church to be built, 300 years later, to venerate his resurrection. If we can for a moment suspend our postmodern disbelief and assume that Helena did manage to find the very cross in that place just outside the city walls of Jerusalem, consider this: here was Constantine, a Roman Emperor at the apex of his power, whose political and military hegemony was unrivalled in the west, seeking to venerate a symbol which, in Roman culture, was one of shame, degradation, and scandal.
Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. But he legalized it. And in legalizing it, he freed the Church to begin to think systematically about its faith. The councils of the church that formulated foundational doctrines, such as the Trinity, could only have happened in an environment where one’s survival was no longer in question. It must have appeared to people that the prophecy in Isaiah was finding new life. “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth. For I am God and there is no other. To me every knee shall bow and every tongue shall swear.”
And yet by becoming as a baptized Christian, the emperor changed forever the very face of Christianity. In very short order, the church developed tremendous power, wealth, and influence which would continue, virtually unabated, until the 20th century. True, we have a heritage of magnificent cathedrals, music, literature, theology, spirituality, and more. We also have a heritage of religious wars, crusades and pogroms, and centuries of church-approved anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny. Through the centuries the cross evolved from being a powerful symbol to a symbol of power within western culture.
And when that happened, the Church, paradoxically, lost much of its capacity to speak prophetically from the margins to those in power.
Our reading from Philippians is a powerful corrective to this, paradoxical as it too is. Paul writes, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but…humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Paul reminds the Church in Philippi, as he has reminded countless generations of Christians since, of the central paradox of our faith – that power is made perfect in weakness. That Christ embraced the fullness of the human condition, including most especially human mortality and the existential vulnerability that goes with it. The exaltation of the resurrection is real, as real as the death that prefigured it. Christ had the capacity to wield enormous power from the cross, to vanquish his foes and to demonstrate once and for all that he was the Son of God. But the means to vanquish the powers and principalities of the world come not by exercising power over others, but by subverting the very power structures which have been in place since the dawning of civilization. In this case, it meant Christ dying a scapegoat’s death in order to reveal, once and for all, that true power lies not in hands of anxious humankind, but in the gracious hands of God.
And that we who are baptized, as Paul writes in a different Epistle – the Epistle to the Romans – are baptized into Christ’s death. The image was scandalous in the first century, and no less so today, twenty centuries later, when we baptize little Henry Galus. Baptism does not initiate us into a prosperity club. We are not sealed as Christ’s own forever so that we can engage in power over others with impunity. Rather, we are assured, that in Christ’s sacrificial death on a cross, death no longer has dominion over humankind. With the assurance of that good news alone are we able to encounter the challenging directive that Paul issued the Church in Philippi – let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. Only then are we able to reclaim our place at the margins of society – the place from which Dr. Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to name but a few recent luminaries, called the world to justice and equity.
