Local residents have called the police response to the first bombing in Austin, Texas, which killed 39 year-old construction worker Anthony Stephan House on March 2nd, underwhelming. The victim was a person of color, and there had been a drug arrest at a somewhat similar looking home in the neighborhood three days earlier, so investigators decided early on that that first bomb was misdirected retaliation, though you could drive an aircraft carrier through the holes in that theory. Then this past Monday, two more bombs went off, one killing 17 year-old Draylen Mason, a high school senior and promising musician, and another injuring 75 year-old Esperanza Herrera, three victims of color, two African-American and one Latina. What is increasingly looking like a series of hate crimes has been further complicated by the fact that the third bomb was, it turns out, misdirected, with a different address on the package, though that address has not been made public.
These bombs were very sophisticated, leading some to invoke a name from our past. But let’s start first at Harvard in the middle of the last century, where Dr. Henry Murray ran the Psychological Clinic from 1937 to 1962, except for his period of service in the OSS during the Second World War. Murray developed an approach he called personology, which sounds very New Age guru, but isn’t, Murray engaged in decades of experiments using human subjects, even supervising Timothy Leary’s early research, which might suggest a progressive edge, but Murray turns out instead to be a sinister figure, best known for the experiments he ran at the end of his career.
Twenty two Harvard undergraduates were subjected to what Murray described as “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” attacks designed to damage their sense of self and core beliefs. The goal was to measure their response to extreme stress. No ethics panel would approve of such an experiment today, for while one might argue that the subjects granted Murray the authority to subject them to the experiment, it was not a transaction between equals. Murray had knowledge and power the young students did not have. And while we live in an age where “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive†attacks designed to damage sense of self and core beliefs have become commonplace, they are still not moral.
One of the subjects of Murray’s evil experiment was a brilliant 17 year-old mathematician from Chicago, the same age as Draylen Mason when he was struck down this week. Despite what many now believe was profound psychological damage caused by Murray and his cabal of mad scientists, the young man would go on to finish his Harvard degree, a doctorate at Michigan, and would become a young professor at UC Berkeley. Then he abruptly resigned and moved to a cabin in Montana. When industrial and real estate interests started destroying the wilderness near his home, he started sending bombs, sophisticated bombs.
He came to be known as the Unabomber, after the FBI working title when he was still unidentified, an unsub as popularized in television fiction. By the time Ted Kaczynski was caught, seventeen years into his bombing spree, he’d killed three and injured another twenty three.
Kaczynski has become an archetype of the anti-social personality, and Montana a sort of mythical land for sociopaths, though in truth, there are plenty of great people in Montana, and anti-social behavior happens pretty much everywhere, from the anti-government profiteering of the ranching Bundy family in Nevada to the anti-government profiteering of the Koch Brothers, who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, the finest daddy’s oil riches could buy.
Senator Elizabeth Warren famously took down those who claimed to be self-made. She was right. They eat food that is safe because we all pitch in and pay for inspections, because we give power and authority to the FDA. They employ workers who have enough education to work because we all pitch in and pay for public education, even those of us who don’t have kids in school, because we give the power and authority to tax and spend for the common good to states, municipalities, and school districts. Their goods and services travel on highways built with state and federal funds and over an internet created by the US Defense Department, bought and paid for my you and me. Mark Zuckerberg has nothing without the internet. Their private jets are piloted by licensed pilots in airspace made safe by the FAA and their mostly empty homes in the Hamptons stand through hurricanes because Suffolk County, New York employees building inspectors, even if the woman cleaning all eight bathrooms is undocumented and doesn’t speak a word of English.
Civilization exists because we willingly and sometimes unwillingly grant power and authority to others, entering and ending relationships, born into systems that can promote the common good or very much not. Authority and power are commodities we rarely name, rarely discuss, but as the #MeToo movement has reminded us, they are there, real, in almost every human interaction. And all too often, your relationship to power and authority is down to random luck, genetics and geography.
And here is Jesus standing before Pilate, claiming that the brutal Roman governor only has power over him because God allows it.
We recognize this framing, salvation history as divine drama, each character merely playing a part. We can push back, for the entire frame suggests that the Roman occupation is itself part of God’s great plan, and Hebrew theology had been moving away from the idea that Yahweh uses foreign rulers to punish the Hebrews for several centuries.
What we are seeing here is an attempt by the gospel authors to recast Jesus, to give him agency when it would be so easy to see him only as a victim, as the scapegoat, for he was a scapegoat. In fact, authority and power are core themes of this entire section of the text, the claim that the Jews did not have the authority and power to execute, Jesus’ claim that any authority Pilate has is the will of God, the claims of the bloodthirsty rabble that they have no king but Caesar. In an age that worshiped rulers as gods, there is much at stake, the rabble betraying a core Hebrew belief about divine power.
We have lived in this narrative for way too long, a story the early Christians created because they could not fully grasp how Jesus could be both divine and victim at the same time. They had to place Jesus fully in control, the co-architect of his own destruction.
Maybe there is another way of approaching the story that honors our tradition and honors the divine in Jesus but also allows us to acknowledge that victims are sometimes just victims, that Jesus was brutally killed by an occupation army that took pride in brutality, that was drenched in blood, and that he showed tremendous courage and faith both in coming to Jerusalem, where he knew he would be at risk, and during his trial and execution. Maybe, just maybe, the greater harvest is to be found in letting Jesus be fully human, one more human crushed by human authority. For we know what it looks like when human crushes human. We have seen the face of evil and brutality. We have wept.
Jesus, aloof and suicidal, more divine than human, is of no use to me in my daily life. He might serve the purposes of those who want us to accept unnecessary suffering in this world in hope of some reward in a future world, but he doesn’t serve those of us who experience suffering, who witness suffering, and who insist on creating a world that eliminates the sort of cruelty and suffering human’s all too often inflict on one another.
The Jesus who is of use to me is the Jesus who makes a prediction that doesn’t come true, who loses his temper at times, who weeps in the garden, who is prepared to die for what he believed in, confident and yet not quite, so that he still asks if there is an out… Take this cup away from me, but if I must, I will.
He’s assaulted at the home of the High Priest. He’s flogged. He has a crown of thorns on his head. He will be executed because destruction is easier than creation, and because hate and anger can sometimes be louder than love. Because destruction is easier than creation, and because those who tell us what can be are often sacrificed at the altar of what once was.
Jesus is Freddie Gray, murdered by the state because it can, because the state has power, and because he was considered worthless. Murdered because we grant that authority.
The Romans had the power and authority not because it had been surrendered to them, not because they were somehow more noble or exemplars of humanity. They were no more chosen than any other race, for God is the God of all. Roman power and authority rested on the dripping cold steel of countless centurions and on the fear radiating from rotting corpses on crosses in every town in the empire, a warning to those who dare resist Caesar’s lust for power and gold. Sure there were those Roman roads, but like so much of our own history, they were paved over stolen land with stolen labor.
The author Jerusalem Greer, an Episcopalian, reports that her son, Wylie, was one of three that chose to walk out of their rural Arkansas high school on Wednesday, the one month anniversary of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Greer’s child and the two others were given a choice of punishments. They chose corporal punishment, violence inflicted on children to punish their non-violent protest of violence inflicted on children. As she puts it, “This generation is not playing around.â€
Another boy was punished when the school created a binary, protest or go to the designated non-protest zone, and he could not give his heart to either, for he felt that to protest was to politicize the deaths but to join the opposite group would be to dishonor the dead. And while many of us can disagree with his reasoning, with the misuse of the term “politicize†to describe youth rising up and claiming power, demanding that they not have to risk death to get an education, we can easily see that his punishment, punishment of a child who exercised his conscience, was another misuse of authority and power.
We know about the misuse of power, and we know power can victimize the innocent, and sometimes all we can do is retain our dignity in the face of brutality.
But that isn’t the whole story. Our story doesn’t start or end with blood in the courtyard at dawn, with a spear in the side at three in the afternoon, with a gunshot while celebrating mass or during last period in a public school.
Because sometimes victims are victims but love still wins. Sometimes power and authority are not the same thing. And sometimes we need to reclaim our power, to take back misused authority. But all too often, like Pilate, like the principal of Greenbrier High School, we misuse the power we have, or worse, surrender it without a fight to the worst, to the angriest and cruelest, as long as we ourselves are not the victims.
And yet…
Jesus was a victim. And Jesus was so not a victim.
Not everyone who is dignified and courageous in the face of persecution is going to come back out of the grave. Bonhoeffer was a victim of the Nazi state, Romero of a US-backed regime. For them, dead was dead. But they lived on in the way they changed lives. Both reclaimed the power of their faith from forces that had twisted the Way of Jesus into something that authorized power and poverty in the same way that Jesus himself took on those of his own time who had twisted the Way of Moses into something that authorized power and poverty. Jesus reclaimed the prophetic tradition of justice and love.
They say it is darkest just before the dawn, and we are in a dark time in the Jesus story. He looks powerless. He looks like a victim. He will be a victim in the ways we humans understand victimhood. It doesn’t get much worse than than public torture and execution of a completely innocent man, guilty only of denouncing cruel power and authority.
Of course Pontius Pilate has power, for he has a legion at his back, and, at least at the moment, still has the trust of the madman who rules in Rome, for the man who rules in Rome is unhinged. But maybe Pilate doesn’t have real authority. Maybe Jesus, even as victim and as scapegoat, knows that love is the greatest authority, for God is love, and love is patient, and the dawn is coming.
When the bombs and grenades come, and they come to so many lives these days, may we stand firm with the authority of love. May we, like Christ, acknowledge that in the end, the only one who has power over our spirits is the one who called those spirits into being. May we reclaim our power and our voices. It is going to take courage to create faster than they can destroy. But we have the greatest Creator of all on our side.
May Anthony, Draylen, and Esperanza rest in power. May we live in it.
Amen.