The Killing Curses
Luke 23: 33-43, Colossians 1:9-20
November 25, 2007
Rochelle A. Stackhouse
I want to begin today by reading to you a poem by the English poet William Butler Yeats called “The Second Coming.”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reed shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats wrote
this poem in the wake of World War One, when all he could see in the world was
the terrible waste and destruction of thousands of lives, soldiers and
civilians, from Europe, the Middle East, northern Africa and
Though my
first response to reading the poem again was to think how apt it was to today’s
reality, I also wonder if this is how the disciples, the women, Mary and all
who loved Jesus felt that day Jesus hung on the cross outside the gates of
Jerusalem. Like the days of the Roman Empire in which they lived, we also live
in a culture that is so pervaded by violence that we come to think of it as
normal. Another shooting in
The War on Terror. Listen to our language! When I was young, President Lyndon Johnson declared a “War on Poverty.” Soon after the government engaged in a “War on Drugs.” Given the considerable lack of success of those two wars, what hope do we possibly have for a “War on Terror?” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
In the midst of all this, and when everyone wants only lighthearted or heartwarming stories for the Christmas season, we get a story about God come to earth who allows himself, while being mocked by soldier and thief for his weakness, to be tortured and killed in a public spectacle. And then one of this Savior’s foremost spokesmen prays that other followers may be “made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, “ proclaiming that in this bleeding, crucified, man “all things hold together” and that all “powers were created through him and for him.”
How can we possibly describe Jesus as powerful in a time when the definition of power so clearly involves brute force, shock and awe,, whether on a street corner in New Haven or the Blackwater mercenaries in the streets of Baghdad or a young woman wearing a suicide vest or a wealthy CEO forcing low level employees into poverty? How can we possibly understand Jesus as powerful in a time when we proclaim from the streets of New Haven to the halls of the White House that the way to defeat those who would harm us is to use the weapons of those who would harm us? The way to conquer evil is to use the weapons of evil. As someone told me recently, “it’s the only thing those people understand.” The only alternative seems to be that we passively allow ourselves to be sacrificed and let the “bad guys,” those “rough beasts,” take over the world, even more than they already have. This is exactly what the first thief was trying to get across to Jesus. “If you really are the Son of God, then by all means this would be the time to summon down the angel armies and show the Romans and the religious leaders alike how wrong they are! Why are you just hanging there?”
Jesus does not respond to that first thief. His only response is to the second thief, the one who simply asked to be remembered by Jesus in the Kingdom of Heaven, and his words indicate they both will be dead soon. Jesus didn’t argue his cause, he simply refused to let himself be defined by the definitions of power familiar to a street thief, or to a ruler affiliated with the Roman Empire. He refused to use the weapons of the enemy to defeat the enemy.
As Yeats so sadly observed, when violence is allowed to reign, then “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” When we use the metaphor of violence as an organizing principle in trying to end poverty or the ravages of the drug trade and drug use or the horrors of terrorism, we simply buy into the enemy’s definition of the issue. Which is why it is rare that any war on anything actually solves the problems that led us to the war to begin with. Yeats’ war in the early 20th century is a prime example of that, for World War One and its aftermath still sit at the root of many of our problems in the Middle East and Africa and Eastern Europe a hundred years later!
If, as Christians, we truly believe that Christ does reign, that what Paul wrote to the Colossians has any truth to it, then sooner or later we have to say, “Stop.” And we have to live like we mean it. If we believe that what was born in Bethlehem so long ago was God in the flesh, not a god come with a punishing sword, but with hands of healing, words of forgiveness, a desire for reconciliation, and a new definition of power rooted in the strength of love not force, and willing to risk death rather than relinquish that love, if we believe this, then we have to stop saying that there’s no way except that of the “rough beasts.” We have to proclaim at every level that, like Jesus, we cannot use the weapons of the enemy to defeat the enemy. Civilians cannot walk the streets of New Haven in armed patrols trying to scare away the bad guys. We cannot torture prisoners to get information we think might protect us from terrorists who are out there torturing prisoners. We cannot kill those who kill either to get revenge or to try to frighten other people so they won’t kill. Underlying all this and most important is that we need to change our way of thinking; we need to begin by refusing to allow ourselves to believe that love, forgiveness, reconciliation, and hope in the face of evil are signs of weakness, for that mistaken belief underlies our giving in to the fear that makes us think we can take the weapon of the enemy and somehow use it righteously. It has never worked that way. It never will. We are called to commit ourselves to a deep exploration of the untapped power of love.
The English author J.R.R. Tolkien also came out of the fighting of World War One, having himself lived through the trenches as a soldier. In his epic novel, The Lord of the Rings, his central metaphor for power is a ring, a ring that was made by the evil powers of his Middle Earth. All throughout the story, those who are against evil struggle with thinking they might use this ring to defeat evil, but whenever they try, they fail. They simply become what they have hated. In the end, the only way the world was freed of evil was by destroying the ring. Tolkien’s literary descendent, J.K. Rowling, came to the same conclusion at the end of the Harry Potter books. Even at the end, in the final battle between Harry and Lord Voldemort, the epitome of evil, Harry refused to use a “killing curse” to defeat him. Some of the “good guys” urged Harry to use the tactics of the enemy to defeat Voldemort and his followers. But even at the last moments, Harry clung to the power of love, and he offered Voldemort the possibility of repentance. He refused to use Voldemort’s weapons against him.
Can we only consider this kind of power in literature, and literature for children or young adults at that? Does it only work in fiction? Does being grown up mean we stop believing in the power of love? Are these stories we are about to read with the coming of Christmas merely lovely stories, like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, without any claim on our lives or world?
Was Yeats right after all? Do we only look at our world with the fear of what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem and how we can kill it? I do not, or at least I try not to. I pray you do not. With Paul, here is what I pray for all of us: “May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from Christ’s glorious power (a power rooted in love), and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to God, who has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” It is time for those who follow Jesus to find in the power of love a passionate intensity. Amen.