False Testimony
Mark 14:53-65
Click here to view the full sermon video, titled "False Testimony"
This morning our journey through the passion narrative brings us to the home of the high priest, where Jesus faces the first of two trials. It’s long been said that the two topics that one should steer clear of in polite conversation are religion and politics. You can understand why. Religion is often a very personal thing in someone’s life. Disagreement doesn’t just feel like a matter of opinion, it feels like a question of salvation. If the first commandment is to love God with our whole heart, then to have someone contradict, challenge, or disagree with us about the very thing to which we’ve given our hearts, well that’s sure to raise the defenses, which can in turn poison the politeness of our conversation. Then there’s politics. Even when we didn’t have access to the 24 hour news cycle, , talk radio, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and social media to amp up the siloing of our political divisions, there was an awareness that to voice a political viewpoint was to risk alienating someone who belonged to the opposition. So, while it’s understandable that people attempt to steer clear of talk about religion and politics, it’s also unfortunate. Faith is essentially personal, but when it becomes private we miss the opportunity to be known at our deepest level and to share what is most meaningful to us. Politics is an exercise in the will of the people, that's us, the polis. It's often reflective of the things we are passionate about. These subjects can tell another so much about us. Maybe that is why we think it’s better to refrain from them. Better not to let anyone know too much about us. They might not like us.
It’s likely not the reason most people avoid talking about either, but the passion narrative and the trials of Jesus are object lesson in just how dangerous and deadly religion and politics can be. First Jesus is put on trial by the religious leadership of the day. I had an encounter not long ago with an older gentleman who took issue with something I had said in a sermon. “You said that the Romans executed Jesus.” “Yes,” I said. “But that’s not true,” he argued. He then went on to explain that the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate whom we’ll meet in a couple of weeks, tried not to have Jesus crucified, but was forced to do so by the “Jews”. His words. He continued to tell me how growing up in New York that is what he was taught by his Roman Catholic church and that he and his friends referred to their Jewish neighbors as “Christ killers.” It was a painful reminder that the way the church has told this story, and this part in particular, has had deadly and devastating ramifications for Jewish people for centuries- from the crusades, to the inquisition, to the pogroms of Czarist Russian, to the final solution of the German Reich. The problem, however, is that it makes a blanket claim against Judaism and its practitioners that conveniently blinds us to a far more serious threat. Because it isn’t the faith tradition of one people that is at issue, it is the way in which institutionalized religion of any kind can become toxic when its leaders are willing to sacrifice the innocent in order to protect their power, position and authority. The most immediate example would be the way churches of all stripes covered up or protected the chronic sexual abuse of children by priests, missionaries and evangelists who occupied positions of trust and power. It’s what happens when practicing Christians, Muslims, Jews and others silence, murder, or ostracize anyone who speaks out against them or challenges their authority. As writer and teacher Barbara Brown Taylor so pointedly observed, “Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform.”
Our first clue that something is amiss and this trial represents an effort by a group of leaders and not a whole people or religious tradition is that the whole thing takes place in the dark of night, in clear violation of rabbinic law. What follows is a kind of kangaroo court- a term that originated in the American South to describe the extra-judicial hearings used to justify the practice of lynching. Like that horrific practice, the trial Jesus was subjected to attempts to use false testimony about him to reach an outcome that was pre-determined going in. It reminds me of the way so many people read the bible. They decide ahead of time what they hope to find, usually something that will reinforce or support their existing belief or conclusion, then they go looking for anything that will affirm what they already believe, instead of listening for a Word from God that might change them.
All of which is to say that it is our own religious impulses and not some other that are most guilty of misrepresenting Jesus for their own purposes. Many of you may have heard me talk about my experience of this in my early twenties. At that time, I had stopped going to church for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with my own failures. In the summer of 1992, I was attending an outdoor festival with friends when we were approached by a volunteer with a clipboard. She explained that there was a ballot measure in the upcoming fall election that sought to prohibit existing municipal statutes in the state of Colorado giving protective status to people based on their sexual orientation. Essentially making it illegal to discriminate against someone in housing or hiring for being gay. This ballot measure would strip them of those protections and make such discrimination legal. “Who got this thing on the ballot,” I exclaimed with disgust. The answer, “Christians out of Colorado Springs.” “Well, I’m Christian,” I said,” and not only would something like this be unconstitutional, it’s a complete misrepresentation of Jesus.” Years later, as I considered a call to pastoral ministry, it was in part motivated by a desire to give voice to something other than this often hateful false testimony about Jesus.
The truth is that religion allied with power will always have a problem with Jesus, because as the apostle Paul puts it in his letter to the church in Corinth, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. Every time people of faith use the levers of power to prop themselves up or to promote their particular brand of religion as is happening in the state of Texas with proposals to post the Ten Commandments in public schools, or to forgo trained counselors in favor of untrained chaplains, they are like those who misconstrued Jesus’ own words in his trial before the high priest, trying to kill who Jesus truly is in order to have a false version of him that is more palatable and pleasing to their own agenda rather than God’s.
The sad irony is that such impulses are exactly what contribute to Jesus’ death. As Jesus himself suggested in his sermon on the mount, we would do well to remove that rather sizable plank from our own eye before we go looking for the specks in the eyes of our Jewish brothers and sisters; starting with our recognition that Jesus himself was and is Jewish.
Ultimately though, it isn’t the false testimony of those seeking to preserve their own religious power that condemn Jesus. It is Jesus’ own words about himself. It is instructive to us to see that his initial response to the misrepresentations about him is to remain silent. I don’t know many who would do that. It’s likely what gets us into so much trouble. I know it’s what gets me into more trouble than if I were to remain silent. But when asked point blank if he’s the Messiah, there are two ways to read his response. The one found in our translation is direct. “I am,” says Jesus. Said this way, these are loaded words because they echo the very name that God gives to Moses at the burning bush, the name that forms the consonants from which we derive the name Yahweh. But language is a funny thing, and we could just as easily invert those words into a question, so that Jesus answers the question of the high priest with a question of his own; something we’ve seen him do any number of times when questioned by religious authorities. “Am I?” The truth is that Jesus knows that the knives are out for him, that it isn’t just his words about the destruction of the temple that have them threatened and angry with him. It’s what the temple represents. Not a single religion, or a people that still believe and practice their faith to this day. The temple represents all the edifices that we erect in order to worship God, only to end up worshipping ourselves and the power we think such things grant us, the authority, the status, the privilege that is always our undoing. There’s much conjecture about who and what Jesus means when he talks about the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power. But if he’s the one who is seated there, then they are not. And Jesus would rather die than let us persist in the delusions of our owns grandeur. If we are saved from anything, perhaps being saved from that would allow us to more easily speak and share the good news that life is worth and about so much more than that.