He Pushed Our Buttons

Good Friday

Text: John 18.1-19.42

Delivered at a combined Presbyterian-Lutheran service

This last Sunday I did something a little different for Palm and Passion Sunday. I decided to tell the story of Jesus’ passion in pictures, not using overtly religious icons, but by a judicious selection of images that came up in Google image searches. Preparing the montage was emotionally overwhelming for me. The problem with Google, even when you use filters, is that you cannot control what comes up when you type in “lynch mob”. You cannot “unsee” those images of unspeakable violence, depictions that make me sick. Obviously I’m not going to show those on Sunday morning. But it did impress upon me in a very visible way how in his sufferings Christ encompasses all the suffering of the world, right there in a Google search.

None of this is to pre-empt a question we rightly ask today: why did Christ suffer? Maybe to the more dark Lutherans and Presbyterians among us that seems like an easy question to answer, evocative of that scene in Hannah and Her Sisters when Max Von Sydow, playing Frederick, a cynical New York artist, tells his girlfriend Barbara Hershey as she arrives home late: “You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz. More gruesome film clips, and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question "How could it possibly happen?" is that it's the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is "Why doesn't it happen more often?"  That is dark! But don’t deny it. There’s a part of you that is asking that same question!

Why did Jesus suffer? For some 2000 years the church has tried to avoid the pain behind this question. We’ve come up with various atonement theories – Jesus died to pay Satan off, or to pay God off, to give us a model (which we can never really live up to) some of these theories work, some do not.

So why did Jesus die? Are you ready? He pushed our buttons. And he pushed just the right ones. I think Jesus was a genius! I consider myself a reasonable person, but I’m also a Dad. When just the right button is pushed, watch out! My poor kids know this well, because they know which buttons to push to transform a mild-mannered Lutheran pastor into a raging maniac. Jesus is that child pushing humanity’s buttons. And when he does, watch out!

So what are the buttons?

Smarter people than I have grappled with that question, but if I were to take a stab at it I would say that one button he pushed was our need for purity. Jesus was amazingly cavalier about whom he ate with, whom he touched, and whom he spoke with. Allowing a woman wash your feet with tears and dry them with her hair? That was poor form in his day. Touching a leper? Healing on the Sabbath? Those may be the purity codes he broke then…but ask yourself: who is unclean to you? And now imagine Jesus breaking bread with that person. Unsettling.

Another button may be about our need for certainty. There’s a prescribed way that God works…right? But Jesus just doesn’t seem to care what the theology books…or even scriptures for that matter, say. “You have heard it said…but I say to you”; that takes some hutzpah! Forgiving people without a priest, without a sacrifice, and criticizing the temple to boot? “Don’t mess with my God!” people clamor. Don’t believe me? Just change the liturgy, and see what happens!

The last button I can think of: the need to keep God at a distance. And Jesus brought God painfully near. And as he said earlier in the gospel of John: everyone who practices uselessness hates the light and avoids it (John 3.20). In Jesus we saw too much of ourselves. Peter caught in his denials. Judas in his betrayals. We didn’t like what we saw. And we let that get in the way of the bigger picture, that in him we also see the grace of God inviting us into the very life of God. Those who love the light come to it, so that their deeds –good and bad – are seen to have been done in God (John 3.21).

Jesus pushed our buttons, but it was for a good reason and a healing cause. Brene Brown, researcher and storyteller on shame and vulnerability said that one day the rector at her Episcopal Church clarified 10 years of confusion for her when he said, "In order for forgiveness to happen, something has to die." It may be an expectation of a person, a unfulfilled dream, a grudge, whatever, something has to die. And all these churches that are so cavalier about forgiveness simply do not have enough blood on the floor. 

Today, as Jesus pushes our buttons and we strike back with a vengeance, there is blood on the floor. But it’s God’s blood. To break through to us, and our need for blood, God is giving us what we wanted. And saying to us – this is what forgiveness looks like. This blood is spilt to reach you, that you may see the extent to which I am willing to go to reach out to you, and to heal you, and to claim you as my very own.

And if that pushes our buttons…so be it.

+++ Sources and Influences

Hannah and Her Sisters,Orion Pictures, 1986.

David Lose. Making Sense of the Cross (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress) 2011.

Marcus Borg. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (New York: HarperCollins, 1994) 46-68, on purity codes and how Jesus engaged them.

Brene Brown's video clip on theworkofthepeople.com, "Grace Is Not Attractive"