Sermon – April 11, 2010: His Blood on Us
Sermon for Sunday, April 11, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
His Blood on Us
Acts of the Apostles 5 : 27-32, Revelation 1: 4-8; John 20: 19-31
At a men’s club in eighteenth-century England those present discussed whether one
would, if beset on the road by an armed robber, shoot him. Being a highwayman, which is
what such robbers were called, like many criminal activities in England at that time, was a
capital offense. One man gave his opinion that if he were to shoot him during the robbery
he could be more sure that he was being responsible for the death of the criminal than if he
were to swear against him in court at a later date. It was always possible that the wrong
man might be arrested, but appear, under different circumstances, to be the guilty party.
It was said that in the heat of engagement a man might be willing to shoot another,
for fear of losing his own life otherwise; and that taking the other’s life that way would make a
man less uneasy than testifying against him in cold blood with the knowledge that he would
be hanged. Still, one man wondered, actually shooting the man on the road, knowing that
he was the criminal menacing one with a deadly weapon, still might weigh on a person’s
conscience and drive him mad with remorse.
It is useful to get a little distance from our current culture by going overseas and back
a couple of centuries to be reminded of the enormity of taking another’s life. People have
always murdered each other much less in England than we do here, and we may imagine
that something like the fear of God may have operated more strongly on men’s minds a
few centuries ago than it does now. But murder is a strong word; distinguished from
manslaughter and killings in self-defense by reasonable consideration, and distinguished
from the grim business of slaughtering enemies at war.
Warfare is another theater of the business of men taking each other’s lives, and it is
instructive about how deep the instinct is to avoid killing one’s fellow human being. Studies
about combat done after World War II–now nostalgically regarded as a war generally
absent of most moral quibbles–discovered that most soldiers resisted aiming at the
enemy, and that most shots went over the heads of attackers. Armies around the world
adopted automatic weapons in the latter twentieth-century partly because technology made
them available but also because scatter-shooting weapons made even unwilling soldiers
more likely to hit their opponents.
Many former combatants are haunted by the sanctioned violence they did to other
men. One moving moment at a funeral I attended was a son’s speaking about his father’s
having kept all his life, like a kind of talisman, the little black-and-white photo of a wife and a
child which was on the person of the Japanese soldier he’d killed hand-to-hand during an
island assault. He’d almost never spoken of it, just kept it in his own wallet all his life.
A related phenomenon is the instance of the semiretired hunter. Lots of men who
went into the woods decades ago and came back with their deer at some point give up the
shooting. They still might go, they still might even climb in the tree stand. They’ll be part of
the camp, and be happy for their fellows who get their buck. They don’t become antihunting.
They just prefer no longer to kill.
I have gone on a bit about what I would consider a natural repugnance at killing other
creatures–it’s an aversion which one gets over, like most losses of innocence, as one
continues, because the boy shooting woodchucks on the farm as a kind of pest control at
first is horrified by what he’s done but eventually becomes proud of being a good shot–
anyway, I’ve gone on about an instinctive recoiling at life-taking because we can be lulled,
by constant violence in entertainment and in some kinds of political rhetoric, into forgetting
that the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is second-nature to the human conscience.
I’m talking about this because I’m reading the lesson from Acts about the apostles
being brought before the high priest’s council and I hear the anxiety in the reaction of the
council when they say, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this man’s name, yet here
you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s
blood on us.”
See, they’re not saying, “We think you are misrepresenting what God is trying to do,
and that’s why we want you to be quiet.” They aren’t concerned about a rival religion or
even a Jewish heresy as much as they are concerned about blood guilt. They know their
scripture: they know the first great crime between persons is Cain’s killing Abel, and the
Lord God Almighty’s hearing the appeal for justice and retribution speaking to him from
Abel’s blood that’s seeped into the ground–it’s inescapable, it’s a doom which would be
visited upon Cain if God didn’t arrange for cities of refuge for him, if God didn’t mark him to
show a vengeful world that he was already judged but being preserved by God. Oh, the
high priest and the council don’t want anyone’s blood on their hands.
Fast-forward a couple of thousand years, to a sixties childhood. There’s a guy who
has a bread route with a van, he sells bread to people in their homes, he delivers it fresh
from the bakery. It’s from the nearest city, not many miles away, but it’s a different world, a
world of neighborhoods, of Italian groceria and a Jewish bakery. This man’s Jewish. The
kids hardly know what that means, except they know that people in the Bible were Jewish.
One day the man appeals to the family to whom he’s delivering a weekly loaf of cheese
bread and doughnuts. His kids are coming home in tears; the other children are taunting
them, calling them “Christ killers.” No, no, the customer family says, indignant for this man
and his children. No, that’s not why God sends a Savior into the world, to give license to
kids to make people of a different faith a target for malice and bullying.
When you read today’s scriptures with this in mind you notice how the gospel
lesson begins: “…the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear
of the Jews.” See, from the perspective of John’s gospel, the disciples have people they
fear, people who threaten them. They have opponents, enemies, and these enemies are
the Jews.
Twenty centuries of anti-Semitism didn’t just come out of nowhere. Jewish people
have been persecuted, lied about, legislated against, and made scapegoats over and over
for all kinds of reasons, but one dominant reason is that anti-Jewish feeling was there in the
earliest Christian community and found its way into scripture. There’s a history behind this.
It is especially true with the gospel of John, which makes clear references to the expulsion
from the synagogue of Jews professing faith in Jesus as the Messiah, which took place in
the latter part of the first century. Some scholars suggest that a desire to ingratiate
themselves with the Empire led early Christians to overemphasize Jewish responsibility
for what was manifestly the Roman execution of Jesus; if that’s true it’s not too much to the
purpose. The problem we inherit as Christians is that the New Testament remembers
Jesus being rejected by the leadership of his own people, and by their consciousness of
having become a new version of the Chosen People, has left the status of the Jews at
least ambiguous. Dialogue has ceased, it’s each party to its corner and come out fighting.
Baptists have a similar prejudice, historically speaking, with regard to the Roman
Catholic church. It was the Roman church which was trying to enforce a single approach to
Christianity back during the Reformation and which was active in suppressing sectarian
movements like those which gave rise to the Baptists. Baptist theology is emphatically
non-Catholic in much of its teachings and traditions, and there are plenty of little independent
Baptist churches which still, all this time later, will teach that the Pope is the antiChrist.
Religious reform always has an element of rejection, which it gets both from being rejected
by the group it aims to reform and from its own logic that the old order is wrong.
What are we to do now? It is not enough to point out that everyone we meet in the
gospel of John, except for Pontius Pilate, is a Jew. We retain the principle of Thomas,
which is to say we retain the principle that the whole fabric of our faith rests upon the
crucifixion and resurrection both really having taken place. Therefore, Jesus was executed,
and certainly with at least the collusion of Jewish officials. They were his countrymen, but
after his resurrection, not all his countrymen were given to be witnesses, and in fact the vast
majority of Jews were unpersuaded that he had been sent by God, died, and was
resurrected. So his followers had to find a way to negotiate that, and the first instinct was to
find fault.
I am for living and letting live. I am for an approach not too different from that
suggested at the council, about not taking matters into our own hands, but seeing what God
will do. However it is that there are others in this world who don’t believe in Jesus as the
revelation of God, it is clearly a betrayal of Jesus to do anything but love those people. If
Christ is the king of all the kings on earth, as the apostles proclaim in today’s verses, then
Christ is everyone’s ruler. In some sense God must be able to work that out. To the
extent that Christ is our ruler, we must be those who prefer to suffer violence than to inflict it,
those who choose to overcome hatred with love.
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