April 5, 2009
Let’s
think together on this Palm Sunday about the epidemic of sin. Given the right set of circumstances,
do you think you could participate in a mob or a riot? Given the right set of circumstances,
do you think you could cry out for the death of an innocent man? Or let me put it this way, do you think
you are morally superior to the crowd calling for Jesus’ death? Are you morally superior to the
religious leaders or the soldiers or Pilate? Was that judgment place, Gabbatha, especially full of
psychopaths, or sadists, of people from bad homes with especially blood-thirsty
genetics?
For
a very long time, Christians read the story of the passion, and blamed the Jews
for killing Jesus.
“Christ-killers,” they called them. It seems astounding since all the disciples, the ones who
ran away, and the women who had the guts to show up at the crucifixion were all
Jews. It seems astounding since
the soldiers and governor were all gentiles. Nevertheless, it is very common, very easy, to assume there
is something qualitatively
different between oneself and the perpetrators of evil.
Is
there? To my knowledge, none of us
gathered here today have ever participated in a crime against humanity. So, either we are qualitatively better
than those people who crucified Jesus, or there must be another explanation.
*Remember
that strange social science experiment at Stanford in the 1970’s. You know, the one where 75 people
volunteered to be in jail, as the jailed or the jailors for two weeks. They put the volunteers through a
battery of tests, looking for the most healthy, sane, ones. Finally, with 21 people from good
homes, no criminal records, no red flags, they opened their prison. Inside of 24 hours, the jailors became
sadists. They shut down the
experiment in six days because it got so sick.
What
happened? Why did basically
decent, sane, normal people go evil?
The environment itself was a hothouse for sin. It was a context in which people’s darker impulses could
take on a life of their own. What
happened there wasn’t so much an issue of choice; it was a perfect setting for
an epidemic.
Fortunately,
we are not put in those situations very often. But they do exist, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised, or
horrified, to discover that some of you have been in situations that effected
your good judgment, that some of you have done things that, to this day, make
no sense to you—like you weren’t even the same person.
That
is the power of sin. It’s like a
virus. Most of the time, it’s
dormant, or not so bad that it really hurts or kills anybody. But, given the right circumstances,
bam: an epidemic.
This is why, in baptism, we don’t just renounce whatever evil may happen to be inside of us (and it probably isn’t as bad as it must be in those other horrible people). We renounce the world and the devil too—sin that is lurking, itching for a chance to become a plague of crime, perversion, addiction, suicide, or greed.
But in his innocence, in his freedom, a deeper, more mysterious power was at work in Jesus—the power to redeem, the power to atone, the power to have mercy, the power to forgive, the power to give lives back, the power to restore dignity to the jailors and the jailed, the power to disarm the virus that is always waiting for the right time and place to become an epidemic. That power for life is there, freely given, to anyone who wants it, to anyone who will accept Jesus Christ as the antidote, as their savior. That power for life is there, freely given to anyone who wants it, to anyone who will bow to the innocent, humble, healer, Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews!
*Special
thanks to Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can
Make a Big Difference,
for the insights on the Stanford experiment, and on how sin is like a virus,
waiting to turn into an epidemic.
Comments