Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Crux est mundi medicina” “ The cross is the medicine of the world.” These words are engraved in stone and rest over the entrance to the guest house here at the Monastery of the Holy Cross — they are hard to miss, and they are a bold claim. A very bold claim. And I’ll confess, on some days, I feel that they may be too bold a claim. There are days when I walk past that inscription, sigh, and shake my head, wishing we’d toned the message down just a bit. Is the cross the medicine of the world? Really? How? I imagine that each of us here can immediately call to mind examples of how the symbol of the cross has been co opted for the purposes of imperial expansion or selfish gain, or can call to mind examples of well-intentioned efforts by the church that have resulted in great harm -- all in the name of the cross. But the claim persists, etched in stone, even when I struggle with it — that somehow, in spite of all of that, the cross remains the best medicine for the world.
Before we think a bit more about how the cross may be the medicine we need, it might be good to consider the malady for which the cross is allegedly the cure? There are about as many answers to that question as there are people who have asked it, but I want to spend time together this morning exploring one way of understanding our human problem and how the cross might be the best medicine for that ill.
I’m going to start somewhere we might least expect for thoughts on our diagnosis — the arena of U.S. politics — but please don’t panic, we’ll only stay there for a moment.
In the the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election, an short-lived contender in one of our major parties’ primary processes shared his diagnosis of our national malady as he understood it — he shared that he believed we were in the midst of a “crisis of belonging” and that our extreme political polarization as a nation and tendency to demonize those on the “other” side of the political aisle were, at their core, symptoms of this “crisis of belonging.” I think he was onto something.
This crisis of belonging has “ailed” us since the dawn of our human story — this sense of estrangement coupled with a longing to belong —to belong within our community, to our God, and with ourselves. We see these tensions echoed in our sacred texts as early as the story of Cain and Abel. One of our primary problems as humans is that we tend to conceive of belonging as a limited resource, and we tend to turn our striving to obtain that limited resource into a zero-sum competition with those around us.
One of philosopher René Girard’s key insights was that we humans tend to build social cohesion on the back of exclusion. And these dynamics work themselves out no matter how large or small the community is — be it as large as a nation state or as small as a family, a group of friends, or if we are not careful, even a religious Order. As rivalry and competition grow within the community (along with their attendant social tensions and, in some cases, violence) human societies will often select a scapegoat —a person or group who is blamed for the turmoil and conflicts within the community. The scapegoat becomes the target for all of that collective blame and hostility, and is often subjected to violence or expulsion as a means of purging the community of its tensions and conflicts.
This often happens subconsciously, but the striking thing is that this process works — at least temporarily. For a season, social cohesion and sense of safety in belonging are restored, but in the long run, this mechanism only perpetuates cycles of violence, as the social order, the “sense of safe belonging,” is maintained via cycles of ritual expulsion and violence. The irony of building community by this mechanism is that one is never actually ever safe — subconsciously we all know that we might find ourselves selected for expulsion at the next round of sacrifice— and this leads to deep, subconscious anxiety at both the group and individual levels.
This mechanism for social cohesion is at work around us all the time. And we participate in this way of being together all the time, I participate in this way of being together all the time.
My go-to example for how this dynamic might play itself out innocuously is to ask, “What is the fastest way to bond with a group of Rotarians? Well, crack a joke about the Lion’s club! And what is the fastest way to bond with a group from the Lion’s club? Crack a joke about the Rotarians!”
We can laugh at relatively harmless examples like this, but they point to darker outworkings of this mechanism. History, of course, is filled with more insidious examples of what happens when particular groups are made the scapegoats for social ills and unrest. The repeated scapegoating of Jewish people in the early 20th century led to the Holocaust, the scapegoating of Native Americans peoples led to the genocidal policies of our own early government and those across the Americas.
Over time, our mechanisms for sacrificial expulsion have become increasingly sophisticated, a bit better hidden, but they are still there. We may not have religious structures in this country that engage in ritual murder to reestablish social cohesion, but we do have a criminal justice system rife with systemic injustices that provides us with scapegoats all the time — typically in the form of black and brown young men.
On the smaller, more intimate scale of our personal lives, gossip and shaming, the identification of a group “problem child” within our small communities — all of these actions participate in that same system of violence that, in the short run, make us feel safe and as if we belong, but ultimately contribute to the cycles of violence that tear our world and our hearts apart.
Now, you may be reasonably asking at this point, what in the world does this have to do with the cross? How is the cross medicine for this illness?
“The Gospels show us that Jesus understands this mechanism,” of inclusion via exclusion; (Allison, 152-153) of maintaining social cohesion and order through expulsion, and Jesus understands that the religious and political structures of this world depend on this mechanism and therefore often unconsciously shore it up. Through his life and ministry, Jesus lures the mechanism and these institutions into behaving according to their usual patterns, and that, predictably, gets him killed. He dies a death of shame and suffering on the edges of the City —lifted high on the beams of a cross. Jesus dies, as countless others have and will continue to die; in fact, he’s surrounded by two others dying the same death that he is— on the fringes of society, sacrificed to the idols of shaky cohesion and fragile peace.
But Jesus does this precisely in order to reveal that the whole exercise is unnecessary — that there exists the possibility of another way of being together. And as we come to understand that it was God’s very Self that died on the cross that day, we discover that God is in no way involved in these mechanisms of inclusion via exclusion — stripping them of any imagined divine imprimatur.
The Way of Jesus that is the undoing of this Way of the World, was described for us in our Epistle reading this morning — it is the way of self-emptying love, the way of kenosis. It is the way of a love that is grounded in the unending flow of the life and love of the Trinity, and as such, it is a love that is secure enough to not grasp for belonging as if it were a limited resource acquired at the expense of others. As such, it is a love that is grounded and secure enough to actually inhabit the places of exclusion on behalf of others, and as Jesus does this as the Innocent Victim, he reveals this victim mechanism for what it is, and breaks the cycle of violence with forgiveness, exposes the injustice of scapegoating, and opens up for us a New Creation — a new way of being human — a new way of being together.
This New Creation springs from the Way of the Cross, where belonging is not governed by zero-sum rivalries, but by the boundless, ever-flowing, fearless love and mercy of God. This is the way we are born into through faith and the waters of Baptism. This is the Way we are invited to walk at the foot of the cross.
The Way of the Cross runs counter to how we are conditioned to behave and to how we see the world around us functioning each and every day. And when we are faced with the opportunity to walk the way of the cross it can very much feel fraught with the risk of death — though for those of us who are protected by layers of privilege, we are usually only facing some form of social death — nonetheless, it is a death.
But this is the way we are invited into. It is the way we have been inaugurated into by Jesus’ work on the cross. And as we come to trust a bit more in the boundless love of God for us, perhaps we can begin to grasp and strive a bit less. As we let that love flow through unclenched hands and hearts, perhaps we can learn learn to stand in the places of exclusion on behalf of others, to break the cycles of violence with forgiveness when we experience it, and in so doing, in fits and starts, and however imperfectly, we can participate in ushering in this New Creation.
“Let this mind be in us which was also in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on the cross.”
In the name of God: Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing, Amen.
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