Violence and Glory

This morning began in the way most of my mornings begin. A quick breakfast and out the door to the office- where I safely confine myself to a desk and read and write.

This morning had two deviations. The first was an innocuous chat with my friend Amy. We are hosting a Seder dinner on Thursday for Maundy Thursday and needed to run logistics. As conversations are inclined to do, we found ourselves also chatting about The Passion (the Mel Gibson movie) and how unsettling it is.

Then I returned to my office and read about the attacks on Brussels. And while that bombing is tragic and unsettling because it shakes our Western sensibilities, I've found much more coverage on it than on either the bombings in Ankara or Istanbul that happened in the last week. Or for that matter one of the continued bombings occurring in many other places in the world that, to be blunt- aren't former imperial powers (which is a nice way of saying WASP-y).

And I can't help but see the connection between these two occurrences.

It's Holy Week and on Friday, Christians in most traditions will recall the crucifixion of Christ. Mel Gibson's movie depicts the events from Maundy Thursday onward in graphic detail. There is certainly something important in recalling this violence. The Gospel accounts of the final 48 hours of Christ's life are inherently graphic. He is beaten. He is whipped. He is nailed to a cross. But ultimately this violence is redemptive. It ushers in peace. As Kathryn Tanner in Christ the Key writes,

"The cross is the ultimate expression of God's loving choice to be with sinners, in all the sufferings of a spiritual and physical sort that burden human life in its sinful condition. The cross is the final act of divine humiliation... in a divine self-emptying that makes room for a world of pain, sin, and death within the very life of God. It is the cultic sacrifice to end all sacrifices. It is the agonizing birth of the new creation to be revealed..."

The cross is the only redemptive violence in the history of the world because it ushers in mercy and forgiveness, not more violence.

When I watch Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ (which, admittedly I've only done once)- I miss the redemption in the midst of the attention to the violence. We live in a world that glorifies violence. We live in a society that breathes in violence and terror like air. We are addicted to what has been aptly called "tragedy porn." And as I listened to the BBC's reporting on Brussels, it became clearer why this bombing and why that movie draw people in- its because we recognize ourselves in the story, especially as Americans.

We see the graphic violence put on Christ and it unsettles us, but it also legitimizes a worry that all Christians are undergoing that same level of persecution. It inspires calls to action to reclaim rights (which we never should have claimed). From the safety of our movie theaters and couches we vicariously experience horror and tragedy and feed on it to substantiate a perverse vindication that the world (likely America) is persecuting Christians in the same way.

We watch the graphic violence of attacks on European cities and we see the attack on ourselves.

I wonder, though, if Christians in countries in the middle of an active war would flock to The Passion or the 24 hour news coverage as wholeheartedly. If maybe the real presence of violence wouldn't make our obsession with it repugnant.

I was in Istanbul just over a week ago. I was meeting a group from my church on a pilgrimage to Ephesus. The travel agency had arranged a pick-up from the airport to the hotel for me. In the thirty minute drive, the person in charge of getting me from point A to point B and I had a deep conversation- or as deep as one can get late at night. He was Muslim and we discussed the differences between Christianity and Islam, about the differences between the sects in each. We spoke of the indifference rampant in the West towards the refugee crisis- not exactly that there aren't people that care, but that people only care to the extent that it directly impacts our lives. Then he showed me a video from his hometown, eight miles from the Syrian border. It's a town that is regularly bombed accidentally. The missiles that are used (by several sides) don't have GPS- so they will go off course and hit non-targets, like this town. That day there had been 3 explosions, one of which had been filmed on live television.

There are places in the world where the bombings in Brussels are an everyday occurrence.

There are places in the world where people live in real fear of being killed because of their religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political allegiance, gender, or just because they are there.

There is real violence in the world.

And it unsettles me that there are pockets (or larger) of Christians that still find some perverse pleasure in watching it unfold. That we claim to be appalled by violence, but still support war and guns and the death penalty and torture. That The Passion of the Christ is one of the highest, if not the highest, grossing Christian films of all time. We can only glory in violence because we don't live with it.

We dwell so long on the violence of the cross that we've forgotten what the cross destroyed- that God said "no" to violence and said "yes" to mercy. To glory in violence is to deny the resurrection. We are, as Barbara Johnson writes, an Easter people living in a Good Friday world. Let us not add to the violence by reveling in it when we proclaim that the call for violence has been destroyed. Let us stand in solidarity with those who still suffer because creation is in the process of being redeemed, but not seek out self-serving violence.



Kyrie eleison.