In response to the sermon this past Sunday, Colleen Peters passed along a series of quotes from four very significant theological writers: Richard Foster, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, and Frederick Buechner. We thought it made a lot of sense to share these words here, as they provide enough food for thought to keep us all nourished for a good while. 

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First up is Richard Foster, from his landmark book Celebration of Discipline:

“Confession is a difficult discipline for us because we all too often view the believing community as a fellowship of saints before we see it as a fellowship of sinners. … therefore we hide ourselves from one another and live in veiled lies and hypocrisy. But if we know that the people of God are first a fellowship of sinners, we are freed to hear the unconditional call of God’s love and to confess our needs openly before out brothers and sisters. We know we are not alone in our sin. The fear and pride that cling to us like barnacles cling to others also. We are sinners together. In acts of mutual confession we release the power that heals. Our humanity is no longer denied, but transformed. … Bonhoeffer writes, ‘a man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person. As long as I am by myself in the confession of my sins everything remains in the dark, but in the presence of a brother the sin has to be brought into the light.’ … The discipline of confession brings an end to pretense. God is calling into being a church that can openly confess its frail humanity and know the forgiving and empowering graces of Christ. Honesty leads to confession, and confession leads to change. May God give grace to the church once again to recover the discipline of confession.”

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Next, an extended excerpt from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship:

“Confess your faults to one another” (James 5:16) He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, not withstanding corporate  worship, common prayer and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness, the final breakthrough to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered  among the righteous. So we remain alone in our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is that we are sinners!

But it is the grace of the Gospel, which is so hard for the pious to understand, that it confronts us with the truth and says: You are a sinner, a great, desperate sinner; now come, as the sinner that you are, to God who loves you. He wants you as you are; He does not want anything from you, a sacrifice, a work; He wants you alone. “My son. Give me thine heart” (proverbs 23:26) God has come to you to save the sinner. Be glad! This message is liberation through truth. You can hide nothing from God. The mask you wear before men will do you no good before Him. He wants to see you as you are, He wants to be gracious to you. You do not have to go lying to yourself and your brothers, as if you were without sin; you can dare to be a sinner. Thank God for that; He loves the sinner but He hates the sin.

Christ became our brother in the flesh in order that we might believe in him. In him the love of God came to the sinner. Trough him men could be sinners and only so they could be helped. All sham was ended in the presence of Christ. The misery of the sinner and the mercy of God – this was the truth of the Gospel in Jesus Christ. It was in this truth that his church was to live. Therefore, He gave his followers the authority to hear the confession of sin and to forgive sin in his name. “Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.” (john 20:23)

When he did that Christ made the Church, and in it our brother a blessing to us. Now our brother stands in Christ’s stead. Before him I need no longer to dissemble. Before him alone in the world would I dare to be the sinner that I am; here the truth of Jesus Christ and his mercy rules. Christ became our brother in order to help us. Through him our brother has become Christ for us in the power and authority of the commission Christ has given to him. Our brother stands before us as the sign of the truth and the grace of God. He has been given us to help us. He hears the confession of our sins in Christ’s stead and he forgives our sins in Christ’s name. he keeps the secret of our confession as God keeps it. When I go to  my brother to confess, I am going to God.

So in the Christian community when the call to brotherly confession and forgiveness goes forth it is a call to the great grace of God in the church.”

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On to C.S. Lewis, from The Weight of Glory:

“Now it seems to me that we often make a mistake both about God’s forgiveness of our sins and about the forgiveness we are told to offer to other people’s sins.

Take it first about God’s forgiveness. I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing. Forgiveness says ‘Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology, I will never hold it against you and everything will be exactly as it was before.’ But excusing says ‘I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it, you weren’t really to blame.’ If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites. Of course in dozens of cases, either between God and man, or between one man and another, there may be a mixture of the two. Part of what seemed to be at first the sins turns out to be really nobody’s fault and is excused; the bit that is left over is forgiven. If you had a perfect excuse you would not need forgiveness: if the whole of your action needs forgiveness then there was no excuse for it. But the trouble is that what we call ‘asking God’s forgiveness’ very often really consists in asking God to accept our excuses. What leads us into this mistake is the fact that there usually is some amount of excuse, some ‘extenuating circumstances’. We are so very anxious to point these out to God (and to ourselves) that we are apt to forget the really important thing; that is, the bit left over, the bit which the excuses don’t cover, the bit which is inexcusable but not, thank God, unforgivable. And if we forget this we shall go away imagining that we have repented and been forgiven when all that has really happened is that we have satisfied ourselves with our own excuses.

There are two remedies for this danger. One is to remember that God already knows all the real excuses very much better than we do. If there are real ‘extenuating circumstances’ there is no fear that He will overlook them. Often He must know many excuses that we have never thought of, and therefore humble souls will, after death, have the delightful surprise of discovering that on certain occasions they sinned much less than they had thought. All the real excusing He will do. What we have got to take to Him is the inexcusable bit, the sin. We are only wasting time by talking about all the parts which can (we think) be excused. When you go to a doctor you show him the bit of you that is wrong – say, a broken arm. It would be a mere waste of time to keep on explaining that your legs and eyes and throat are all right, the doctor will know that.

The second remedy is really and truly to believe in the forgiveness of sins.  A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in it: from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour. But that would not be forgiveness at all. Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it. That, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it.“

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And finally from Frederick Buechner, with words that speak to the principal text for the sermon, 1 John 1:8-9:

“The gospel is bad news before it is good news. It is the news that man is a sinner, to use the old word, that he is evil in the imagination of his heart, that when he looks in the mirror all in a lather what he sees is at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob. That is the tragedy. But it is also the news that he is loved anyway, cherished, forgiven, bleeding to be sure, but also bled for. That is the comedy. And yet, so what? So what if even in his sin the slob is loved and forgiven when the very mark and substance of his sin and of his slobbery is that he keeps turning down the love and forgiveness because he either doesn’t believe them or doesn’t want them or just doesn’t give a damn? In answer, the news of the gospel is that extraordinary things happen to him just as in fairy tales extraordinary things happen. … Lear goes berserk on a heath but comes out of it for a few brief hours every inch a king. Zaccheus climbs up a sycamore tree a crook and climbs down a saint. Paul sets out a hatchet man for the Pharisees and comes back a fool for Christ. It is impossible for anybody to leave behind the darkness of the world he carries on his back like a snail, but for God all things are possible. That is the fairy tale. All together they are the truth.”

As Rowan Williams notes in his book Tokens of Trust, “Only three human individuals are mentioned in the Creed, Jesus, Mary and Pontius Pilate.” In the Apostles’ Creed—the baptismal declaration of the ancient church—we proclaim a belief in Jesus Christ, “conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit,” “born of the Virgin Mary,” who “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” It is sometimes observed that in naming Mary and Pilate, the Creeds are thereby rooted in a very particular time and place in history. But for Williams, there is more to it than this. Both the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds name Jesus, and then “the one who says ‘yes’ to him; and the one who says ‘no’ to him. You could say that those three names map out the territory in which we all live.” That is the territory between affirmation and renunciation; between Mary’s words in Luke 2—“May it be done as you have said”—and Pilate’s refusal to make any choice other than the politically prudent one—“So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.”

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That there was any hesitation on the part of Pilate to have Jesus executed is perhaps the most surprising piece in the gospel narratives. In Mark’s account there are few words exchanged between Pilate and Jesus, yet he still hesitates when the crowds begin to call for Jesus to be crucified: “Why, what evil has he done?” The other gospels have more dialogue, and show Pilate wrestling at a deeper level with the prospect of sentencing a presumably innocent man to death. Matthew includes a detail not offered by any of the others; that “While Pilate was sitting on the judgement seat, his wife sent word to him, ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.’” (Matthew 27.19) Some biblical scholars have interpreted all of this as a bit of a gloss on the part of the gospel writers to shift the blame away from Pilate and the empire he represents, and squarely on to the shoulders of the Jewish authorities, revealing both a latent anti-Semitism and a desire to not offend Rome. But I don’t buy it.

For one thing, those gospel writers were all Jews, and on the whole they understood Jesus to be not a replacement for Judaism but a fulfillment and recapitulation of the ancient covenant. Certainly in the case of Matthew’s gospel, the intended audience is a Jewish one. At times John’s gospel does feel more hostile, but his issue is more with those who place themselves in open opposition to the Jesus movement than it is with Judaism as a whole.

And for another, the reality is that the Roman Empire was hostile to the church, and remained so for the better part of 300 years. As an Empire, it didn’t much care about a new religion built around some itinerant Galilean peasant preacher, except when it looked as if that movement had the potential to become a substantial social force. Then the heat gets turned up. Even if the gospels of Luke and Mark are both pretty clearly addressed to Gentile audiences, the fact remains that to be a believer—Gentile or otherwise—was fast becoming a dangerous prospect.

And here’s the thing. Pontius Pilate, in his role as Governor and procurator of Judea was notoriously violent and ruthless. One ancient source notes that a complaint was lodged with Caesar to the effect that Pilate was “inflexible, stubborn, and cruel,” and at one point he was actually recalled to Rome to give account for the violence of his administration. And Rome had a pretty strong stomach for violence.

Yet all four of the gospels tell—each in its own way and each with unique details—that confronted by Jesus, Pilate hesitated.

At least some of you will know the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the rock-opera version of the passion story from the early 1970s. In that telling, Pilate initially comes across as arrogant and self-assured:

To which a soldier answers, “Someone Christ, King of the Jews.”

And when Jesus answers (as he does in Mark…), “That’s what you say,” Pilate responds with a kind of fury:

Yet a little later in the narrative, Pilate is neither arrogant nor enraged by Jesus, but rather baffled.

As the lyricist Tim Rice imagines things, there is something close to compassion in Pilate’s voice. Yet with words that echo the narrative from John’s gospel, Jesus answers,

“You’re a fool Jesus Christ,” Pilate replies, and again he is all self-assured arrogance, and the path to execution is again opened.

As portrayed in Jesus Christ Superstar, Pilate is essentially confident in his power. There are other ways of understanding him. I would like to read some extended sections from Frederick Buechner’s book, Telling the Truth, in which a whole other side of Pilate is explored. For Buechner, Pilate is a bureaucrat (which is actually true; any authority he has can in fact be pulled out from under him by Caesar, in whose name he serves), and to make the point the story is recast in the late 1970s.

[Pilate] is essentially a law-and-order man, and he is maintaining them as best he can. If the malcontents, the eggheads, and the bleeding hearts, want to carry on about rottenness at the heart of things, that is their business. His concern is with the rottenness in the streets, and his business is to keep the ship afloat from day to day. All in all he is not doing a bad job of it. There are no major complaints from Rome. The Jews are happy enough with their Jewish puppets. And he himself, if not exactly happy, is happy enough.

[Once at the office, his wife phones and talks to him about that recurring dream she’s been having.] When his wife finally hangs up and he swings back to his desk, he finds he is no longer alone. They have brought the up-country messiah in for questioning. Pilate is caught off-guard, and before he knows what he is doing, he takes a cigarette from an onyx box on his desk and lights up.

The man stands in front of the desk with his hands tied behind his back. You can see that he has been roughed up a little. His upper lip is absurdly puffed out and one eye is swollen shut. He looks unwashed and smells unwashed. His feet are bare—big, flat peasant feet although the man himself is not big. There is something almost comic about the way he stands there, bent slightly forward because of the way his hands are tied and goggling down at the floor through his one good eye as if he is looking for something he has lost, a button off his shirt or a dime somebody slipped him for a cup of coffee. If there were just the two of them, Pilate thinks, he would give him his carfare and send him back to the sticks where he came from, but the guards are watching, and on the wall the official portrait of Tiberius Caesar is watching, the fat, powdered face, the toothy imperial smile, so he goes through with the formalities.

“So you’re the king of the Jews,” Pilate says.  “The head Jew,” because there hasn’t been one of them yet who hasn’t made that his claim—David come back to give Judea, back to the Jews.

The man says, “It’s not this world I’m king of,” but his accent is so thick that Pilate hardly gets it, the accent together with what they have done to his upper lip. As if he has a mouth full of stones, he says, “I’ve come to bear witness to the truth,” and at that the procurator of Judea takes such a deep drag on his filter tip that his head swims and for a moment he’s afraid he may faint.

He pushes back from the desk and crosses his legs. There is a papery rustle of wings as the pigeon flutters off the sill and floats down toward the cobbles. Standing by the door, the guards aren’t paying much attention. One of them is picking his nose, the other staring up at the ceiling. Cigarette smoke drifts over the surface of the desk—the picture of his wife when she still had her looks, the onyx box from Caesar, the clay plaque with the imprint of his first son’s hand on it, made while he was still a child in nursery school. Pilate squints at the man through the smoke and asks his question.

He asks it half because he would give as much as even his life to hear the answer and half because he believes there is no answer and would give a good deal to hear that too because it would mean just one thing less to have to worry about.  He says, “What is truth?” and by way of an answer, the man with the split lip doesn’t say a blessed thing. Or else his not saying anything, that is the blessed thing.  You could hear a pin drop in the big, high-ceilinged room with Tiberius grinning down from the wall like a pumpkin, that one cigarette a little unsteady between the procurator’s yellowed fingertips.

Perhaps too ordinary a picture of a man history remembers as “inflexible, stubborn, and cruel”? Perhaps. But then again, when the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote her book about the trial of the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann, she subtitled it, “The banality of evil.” Part of what Arendt came to see was that Eichmann was a functionary, a bureaucrat, and someone willing to carry out the agenda of the regime, regardless of the shape of that agenda. We imagine true evil must be somehow devious or maybe even glamorous. Oftentimes it is little more than prudent; a necessary, even routine decision, that leads to yet another necessary and routine decision. Banal. Calculated. Killing.

“[O]ne of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, ‘You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’” (John 11:49-50)

Why have I dwelt so much on the figure of Pilate, on this day on which we surely should be focusing on the passion and death of Jesus? Because like Pilate—the arrogant Pilate who is momentarily stopped in his tracks, or the prudent Pilate who has a decision to make, or maybe the harried Pilate who just needs to take the path of least resistance (the truth be damned)—we do all sorts of things for all kinds of justifiable reasons. If we can’t see something of ourselves in the awful figure of Pontius Pilate—in the one who says ‘no’ to Christ, and so chooses self-interest and self-preservation over all else—we might as well stop this liturgy now and all go home.

The problem is, if we’re honest we can see in ourselves something of Pilate. And of Judas who betrays him, Peter who denies knowing him, Thomas who will later doubt the possibility that there is anything beyond death, and all the rest of the cast of characters in this story. That’s why we can’t call it all off and just go home.

In the end, pray that we can see in ourselves something of Mary, who dared to say “yes” under the most extraordinary of circumstances, and who was willing to stand by her son even as he died on his cross.

And pray that we can see in ourselves something of the centurion who stood slack-jawed at the foot of the cross and confessed, ‘Truly this man was Son of God.’

Pray that we can hear that unnamed centurion, and speak with him, and find something of ourselves in him. Because for all that he, too, was just doing his job, he still saw—and spoke to us—the truth.

Amen.

Jamie Howison, Good Friday 2012