First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Humanity's Child

We don’t really talk about the figure of Jesus all that much, here at the humanist First Unitarian Society. But on this Palm Sunday morning, as our nation heads into the fifth year of our adventure in military interventionism, Jesus is much on my mind. Not the Jesus of next Sunday, all risen and shining; not the Jesus of Galilee, healing and inspiring the local peasants with his novel notions of god. Certainly not little lord Jesus asleep in the hay. No, I’ve been thinking of the Jesus who doesn’t appeal much to liberals – the betrayed, accused, abused Jesus; the agonizing Jesus of the crucifixion. I’ve been thinking of the women, the disciples, who the story tells us stood there with him, helpless, through the long hours as he suffered and finally died. We don’t tell that story a lot, in our tradition, and we find Mel Gibson’s pornographic celebration of Jesus’s suffering distasteful. And yet that story haunts me these days, especially on this anniversary of the war I have watched in helpless dismay for five incomprehensible years. But then, I am easily haunted.

I am haunted by the young man of modest means who wanted to go to college, and who felt that maybe he owed some service out of his youth and strength to the nation that had nurtured him. The young man who thought he would be rescuing people from hurricanes or fighting wild fires, and instead found himself with a rifle in Iraq for six months – which became a year, which became two years. A young man who was lucky, who came home in one piece as far as anyone could tell, but who woke up night after night screaming in terror and shame from the things he had done, and finally put a bullet through his brain in his parents’ bathroom. The crucifixion is not just a story from 2000 years ago.

I am haunted by three sisters traveling through the night for ten hours on a greyhound bus, a trip their relatives can only afford for them to make once a year, to see their mother in the federal penitentiary where she is serving a 27 year mandatory minimum sentence for drug trafficking, because her cousin’s boyfriend asked her to mail a money order for him. The youngest daughter has no memory of her mother other than in prison; the oldest has just started her period, and was hoping to ask her mother about it. But the prison was on lockdown when the girls arrived, and so they make the long journey home, to wait for next year. There are crucifixions of the spirit as well as of the body.

I am haunted by the teenager coming into clarity about his emerging sexual identity, whose face is forced into a flushing toilet by his equally uncertain, and threatened, classmates. Or who is shot in the back of the head during chemistry lab, or tied to a fence and left to die of his injuries from a beating. Crucifixion takes many forms.

I am haunted by the girls from rural Cambodia, rural Poland, rural Mexico, lured to the cities by the promise of jobs with wages, and escape from the endless drudgery of the farm – shipped across national borders, their passports confiscated, beaten and humiliated, whose daily rapes serve the implacable impulse of some men, and the profit of others. They hang themselves, sometimes, when they can find the means; death at least is the end of crucifixion.

I am haunted by the man who cannot sleep, because every time his eyes close, he feels again the water filling his lungs, the unbearable pressure to breathe, the desperate gagging for air, the bewilderment of what it is that the waterboarders want him to say. Who does not know if he will ever be able to let another person touch him where they put the electrodes, and sent pain singing through his nerves and bursting in his brain until he could think of nothing for days and days and days. Whose fingers are gnarled from the breaks that knit themselves all crooked, who cannot remember the sensation of trust. Your body can survive crucifixion, but some more vulnerable part of you never does.

I am haunted by the tiny body of a two year old, scalded all over red as a lobster by a rageful mother, a toddler whose broken bones and burn scars mutely testify that this was not his first encounter with her fury. Too little for the drugs that might ease a more developed nerve system, what is his life, if he lives? What has his life been, if he dies? Crucifixion can be an intimate, as well as a public, act.

I am haunted by the grandmother who lies, fevered and coughing, on a ragged mattress in an airless shack, unable to swallow, with the cancer eating away at her bones and no money for medicine, after a lifetime of being dusted with pesticides right along with the vegetables she was picking for our dinner tables. Sometimes, crucifixion unfolds in slow motion.

I am haunted by the captive at Guantanamo Bay, after five years in limbo, in a cell as big as a king-size mattress, with no letters, no lawyers, no charges, wondering how his wife is managing, wondering how his children have grown, wondering whether the world has forgotten him altogether. I am haunted by the Jewish child who will never walk or read because she happened to be riding in a bus that suddenly became a flaming inferno in order for someone to make a political point. I am haunted by the Palestinian family watching as the Israeli bulldozers push down the walls of their home. I am haunted by the woman in Afghanistan, raped by her neighbor, and then stabbed to death by her dishonored brother. I am haunted by all the starving children, the mass graves of genocide, the drug addicts poisoning themselves, the refugees drowning in leaky boats and suffocating in shipping containers. I am haunted by the memory of lynching parties and concentration camps, of witch burnings and pogroms and gulags, and all the human sacrifices upon which cultures erect themselves.

In the Introduction to Against Forgetting, an anthology of 20^th century poetry of witness, Carolyn Forche writes:

In 1957, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote this brief paragraph entitled "Instead of a preface":

This is, as both Akhmatova and her anthologist Forche would argue, the poet’s unique responsibility; to describe that which is in the magnitude of its cruelty and suffering, for most people indescribable. And I would suggest that there is a responsibility unique to the religious community – to anything that might legitimately be called a community of faith – a responsibility to preserve that description, when the poets and the narrators have achieved it. We, who would urge the claims of truth, of reason, of human kinship and of compassion, have an obligation to see to it that the stories are handed on, that the realities of human suffering are not swallowed up in the holes of oblivion, that violence and oppression do not win in the end. Anyone who believes in justice and peace, who is haunted by the specters of history’s crushed innocents, must make it our business to remember, to show up, to stand at the foot of the cross every year, and speak on behalf of those whose voices are ripped from them, whose cries are drowned out by the guns and the crowds, whose words are blown away across the oceans and tundras and deserts of the world’s indifference. Standing at the foot of the cross is not a sentimental Easter photo op. Standing at the foot of the cross is looking all these stories, and the millions more like them, squarely in the face, and refusing to turn our eyes away. Standing at the foot of the cross is ceasing to be blithe about human nature and the human condition.

Do you want hope, and reassurance? Come back next week. The traditional liturgy for Good Friday, you know, ends in silence and darkness, with the extinguishing of the last candle in the sanctuary. Despair is real in our experience, no matter what comes next. This war is a an on-going crucifixion, which may perhaps, some day, end in a resurrection we cannot now foresee; many things are possible. But for now, we are still here, at the foot of the cross, haunted by the stories that must not be forgotten, if we are to keep faith with those whose truth has been entrusted to us.

In the gospels it is said that Jesus, quoting the book of Daniel, referred to himself as ‘the son of man’; a phrase which is opaque to us today because of its gender specificity. But try another translation:

And later:

By calling himself humanity’s child, it seems to me that Jesus was placing his own story in a larger context, identifying with all those who experience oppression and suffering at the hands of other people. In this way he summoned those who sought to follow him to remember not merely the events of his personal fate, but the universal story that haunts us all, in every generation; the corruption of power, the indifference of some people to the pain they inflict on others, the endurance and resistance and witness of the human spirit in the face of that cruel enormity. Sometimes, all we can do is to refuse our assent, and like the poets and story tellers, bear witness, so that there are no holes of oblivion in which the wicked may hide forever the truth of their actions. Sometimes it will haunt us, the seeming littleness of our resistance, when all we can do is to stand at the foot of the cross, and refuse to assent, refuse to look away, refuse to forget. Sometimes the suffering feels overwhelming, and the crucifixions that happen over and over again, and yet again, down throughout history and continuing to this day and tomorrow, appear to be more than I can bear. I am, after all, easily haunted.

And so I welcome Palm Sunday, and Good Friday, with their narrative of humanity’s child and his betrayal and suffering and death at the hands of corrupt, self-serving power. Life is like that, and the human spirit in which I place my trust has to be willing to stand at the foot of the cross, open-eyed, and bear witness to this least flattering of truths about our species. Redemption comes, of course, sometimes, mostly; in ambiguous, unpredictable ways, trumping despair and cynicism just when we have gotten comfortable with them; too late for everybody’s happy ending, but salvaging enough so that those of us who are left are willing to carry on. I daresay that it will arrive on schedule next Sunday, don’t worry. But for now, this week, there is only the haunting truth that humanity’s child has been crucified anew in every human generation to occupy this planet so far, that America has never been what America is called to be, that the young dead soldiers too are humanity’s children, and our only choices are either to collude in the cover up, or to tell the unspeakable truth about all of it. The promise of comfort offered by complicit silence is a lie; it always has been, and it always will be. The only real peace to be had at the foot of the cross lies in the searing truth, and the insistent witness that speaks on behalf of the voiceless; the words of the poet who has the power to describe that which is otherwise indescribable. That peace alone we may ask for in this moment of haunted suspense, this week when we recall the inexorable tragedy of humanity’s child, and begin another year of crucifixion in Iraq; the peace that is more than the temporary beautiful ignorance of war, but an achievement of the human spirit amidst the most difficult and haunting realities of all that we know. For that peace let us labor, let us yearn, let us sing.