Semon: The Art of Battling Giants

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Jesus being Jesus and the Bible being the Bible, it’s hard to get any clear read on what really went down some 2000+ years ago in Jerusalem. We only hear the story interpreted through layers of political agendas, starting with the agendas of the gospel writers themselves. We know that a prophet named Jesus was crucified by the Roman state. We know that his followers claimed to have seen him alive after his crucifixion.

 

We don’t know for sure even the reason for his execution. Most of the gospels seem to suggest that it was the Jewish establishment that wanted him dead because he threatened the religious power structure. They pressured Pontius Pilate, who is cast as a reluctant but spineless bureaucrat, to order his crucifixion. But these gospel accounts were written 50 years later, at a time of tension between the Jews and the early Christians. The Christians were trying to ingratiate themselves to the Roman Empire. So they had some incentive to make it look like the Romans had been the good guys, just a little confused, and the Jews were the real perpetrators of this travesty.

 

A different reading is that the Roman authorities saw Jesus’s dramatic, theatrical entrance into Jerusalem that I talked about last week, with crowds and crowds of Jews surrounding him and hailing him as a king, and they figured they were about to have an insurrection on their hands. There wasn’t supposed to be any king except for Caesar. This guy, whoever he was, was a serious political problem and they’d better get rid of him before the situation got out of hand. The Roman soldiers did not seem reluctant at all. They seemed to revel in torturing him. And the sign that Pilate affixed to the bottom of the cross clearly stated the charge against Jesus. “King of the Jews,” it said.

 

Whichever interpretation you subscribe to as to the primary driving force behind his execution, it’s clear that the institutional giants of his day did not like him. And I think we can probably all agree that the execution itself was unjust. Jesus had not actually done anything wrong. He had not committed any crimes, did nothing in secret, he had not hurt anybody. In fact, if you believe the stories, he had actually healed and helped people. He was just a prophet in the tradition of Hebrew prophets, with a powerful message to convey. And when he was arrested and interrogated, he remained completely nonviolent. When his people started to draw weapons, he called them off. He passively allowed himself to be publicly abused and killed when he probably could have done otherwise.

 

Jesus was unjustly killed and he identified with exactly the kinds of people who today are unjustly killed, people literally executed through our court systems, or people whose lives are stolen from them by extreme poverty, racism, gender discrimination, and violence. He spoke for and to the poor and the oppressed. His teachings turned the traditional hierarchies on their heads, saying, “the first shall be last and the last shall be first,” and “blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God; blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be filled.” His whole ministry was about exactly inverting expectations. He substituted a radical religious reality for the familiar social reality of money and status. Jesus was the underdog, representing underdogs, and implicitly battling the giants of church and state (in this case temple and state) arrayed against him.

 

Then, as now, when an innocent person is executed, something is terribly, terribly wrong. And on some level everybody knows it. Nothing could have been a worse strategic blunder for the Romans or for the Jewish establishment. Because now, instead of Jesus being in one place, now he was everywhere. Now he spoke with the authority of the dead. At least before, you could locate him. You could contain him. For a brief moment, you could make a thing of him, just a body; strip him of his humanity, his power, and his dignity. But that moment where he seemed defeated was fleeting. Now the tomb was empty and he was nowhere to be found. Invisible to his enemies, hyper-visible to his followers.  So here’s another thing we know: something of Jesus survived the death of Jesus. The attempt to kill him and what he stood for fundamentally failed.

 

If the authorities back then had been able to read Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, David and Goliath, they might have guessed this was going to happen. Gladwell makes the case that, contrary to what we normally think, it’s not the extremely rare exception that the underdog prevails, but it’s actually surprisingly common. When you look at military history, for example and take all the wars that have been waged between two countries in which the size and military might of one was ten times that of the other, it turns out that the bigger country only wins 72% of the time. (You’d think it would be close to 100%.) Take it a step further and look at countries with a ten-fold size difference where the smaller country refuses to fight the way the bigger country wants to fight, using unconventional or guerilla tactics. Then the smaller country actually wins 63% of the time! So, in Malcolm Gladwell’s words, “To put that in perspective, the United State’s population is ten times the size of Canada’s. If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada.” (Malcolm Gladwell is Canadian, by the way – full disclosure.)

 

Gladwell’s book goes through a fascinating study of example after example of this. Underdogs prevail. An underfunded girls basketball team from a small high school becomes the undefeated champion, competing against way better equipped teams from much larger schools. People with learning disabilities become successful entrepreneurs and even president of the United States at astonishing rates. The little boy named David defeats the giant warrior named Goliath. In each case, the supposedly weaker party succeeds despite and sometimes because of their weakness.

 

This is the key point in Gladwell’s book – that sometimes the very thing that puts you at a disadvantage forces you to creatively reinvent the rules of the game to amazing effect. You develop new kinds of skills to compensate for the areas where you are weakest and you approach the world with a fresh kind of offbeat vision. You play a different game and suddenly your powerlessness becomes the very root of your power. It can be disarming, it can be thrilling, it can be wildly successful.

 

Jesus was playing a different game. He was horrified by what he saw as the hypocrisy and disingenuousness of the wealthy Jewish establishment of his day. He had an alternative, radical vision of what it means to be a religious person and he wanted to spread this message. But being an ordinary carpenter from a poor family, there was no way he was going to be able to enter the world of money and power and change the system from the inside. So he went rogue and came at it from the outside.

 

He became a guerilla spiritual teacher, preaching in fields and on beaches, convincing people to leave their homes, their jobs, and all their possessions and follow him. He knocked over the tables of the moneychangers and dined with prostitutes. He refused the conventional terms of success, which then as now involved the accumulation of money, status, and power. He created new terms of success in which the current losers became the winners and the winners became the losers.

 

Jesus was playing a different game. And who are the winners in that game? “Blessed are the peacemakers,” he said. “Blessed are those that hunger and thirst for righteousness… blessed are the merciful… blessed are the pure in heart…” Success in this game is measured by how loving and compassionate you are. Don’t bother accumulating wealth on earth, he said, “but store up treasure in heaven where moth and vermin do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal.” Not only does wealth not get you a spiritual life, according to Jesus, but it actually may hinder you. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” He contested all the social values of his day and invited the people into an inverted, parallel spiritual reality.

 

When Pontius Pilate asked him point blank whether he was King of the Jews, Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over… But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” For Jesus, the reality of God with its message of love, peace, and compassion for the downtrodden was so much more vivid than the material world, he was willing to die for it. He was the ultimate underdog who prevailed.

 

You might argue this point, noting that he actually didn’t prevail. He died an awful death and most likely stayed dead. How can that be called “prevailing?” Well, for one thing, the Roman Empire, which executed him, is long gone while Christianity is now the biggest religion in the world. But more importantly, through his bodily death and a resurrection somehow experienced by his followers, he proved the reality of exactly the spiritual realm of which he taught. You can destroy someone’s body, but love will not die. The struggle for justice will not die. The spark that makes us both human and divine will not die.

 

And this is the Easter message of hope. In the ambiguous space of the empty tomb lies all of our dreams. It’s the giddy space of possibility, in which the rules don’t have to apply. Power does not always win; the powerless will rise again and again. Brute force does not get the final word. The voices of the compassion and peace will be heard over the din of violence. Truth is indomitable.

 

We all battle giants in our lives. There are moments in each of our journeys when powerful forces, either within our own hearts or out in the world, are arrayed against us. There are moments when Pontius Pilate is inside us as patterns we can’t break, fears we can’t shake, sorrows we can’t bear. There are moments when we feel powerless in the face of the giants doing violence to the earth and its most vulnerable creatures. At those moments, when we feel small and daunted in the face of vast power, Easter is for us.

 

Easter teaches us that whenever we feel like underdogs in whatever fight we’re in, we are upheld by a force far stronger than any earthly giant. We have untapped resources still to be unearthed. We are embraced by a loving universe, lifted by compassionate hands. We have nothing, really, to fear. The Universe propels us inexorably toward wholeness with a power and a love so great that death itself cannot stop it.