I was invited by Ben Stewart, my wonderful colleague at LSTC, to offer some remarks on Good Friday during his hour of the Triduum Project live stream going on during these holy days. This section of the archived stream (along with other sections) can be found on the Vinyl Preacher YouTube channel, as The Triduum Project Live Stream #3 (still going on as I post this). It’s about two hours into that video, I believe.
For those who simply want to read my remarks - and thus miss my brief performance of a bit of Pilate’s part in Jesus Christ Superstar - the text is below.
Two notes (since I don’t have time right now to learn the fancy Markdown stuff and make these proper endnotes):
1) I make reference to “Ian” at one point. This refers to Ian Coen-Frei, a current MDiv student at LSTC and soon to be LSTC alum and powerful pastor. He made some remarks earlier in the stream, so if you haven’t already, I encourage you to find his remarks on militarism in the John passion narrative in the archived video.
2) I refer to the work of Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Specifically, I reference insights from one of her books, Economies of Abandonment. It’s not an easy read, but it holds powerful insights into the mechanisms of contemporary imperial power.
When I think of the passion, I always find myself reflecting on the 1973 film adaptation of Jesus Christ Superstar. I didn’t grow up Christian, and it was really the first point of emotional connection I had with Jesus and his death on the cross. Ben suggested that I might talk about some of the emotions at play in Jesus’s trial, and I think that Jesus Christ Superstar does an amazing job of highlighting the varying emotions that were propagated by imperial power of the sort that sustained Rome, even as that led to its eventual downfall. In the film, when Pilate asks, “You’d crucify your king?” the crowd cries out in unison, “We have no king but Caesar! Crucify him!” And when Jesus fails to plead for his life, Pilate howls with rage, blaming a victim of imperial power for his own suffering, “Don’t let me stop your great self-destruction/Die if you want to you misguided martyr/I wash my hands of your demolition/Die if you want to, you innocent puppet!”
In the text of John 19, these same emotions are present. The crowd’s emotions have been finely tuned by the ever-present influence of imperial violence, as described by Ian. They fear what will befall them, as an already conquered subject people of Rome, insisting that they have no king but the emperor. They desire to be on the right side of imperial violence, passionately demanding the crucifixion of a man they had cheered not even a week before. And this fear and desire meld together to generate the kind of murderous rage that has characterized legal and extralegal lynchings across the centuries of US American history…that characterizes some political rallies today.
In the text, Pilate experiences his own imperially-shaped emotions when he is confronted with a crowd that insists that he take personal responsibility for the execution of a person he has already declared innocent. He is afraid of the people he has been commanded to exploit, knowing that while this Judean mob might not be able to liberate their land, they could kill one Roman governor. And he is filled with rage at the very idea that in order to maintain the appearance of Roman dominance, he must personally order the execution of someone he finds no case against.
In the crowd and in Pilate, we witness the danger of the shaping of emotion by imperial power…the lethal affective alchemy by which fear, desire, guilt, and pride are transformed into the singular demand that an innocent man be brutally executed.
And on the receiving end of that execution, there is Jesus, hanging from the cross, experiencing his own emotions. Love and heartache at relationships cut short, which he expresses when he brings together his mother and the disciple whom he loved. Exhaustion and thirst, which he expresses when he says his next to last words in this narrative: “I am thirsty,” seeking a small mercy from enemy soldiers.
This Good Friday, nearly all of us are on the receiving end of imperial power – some communities, such as black communities here in Chicago, more than others. The kind of imperial power we witness at play right now is not the overt violence of the cross—though that is certainly present in our world—but the kind of power anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli describes as abandonment, the power of Empire to withhold what is necessary for life from those deemed inconsequential or recalcitrant.
We witness the power of imperial abandonment as human and nonhuman lives are callously weighed against the demands of corporations and the pride of a corrupt tyrant. We suffer insecurity and isolation, if not debilitating illness, because our society has been structured to ensure the wealth of the mighty, not the safety and security of the many.
I can only pray that the Empire that wields its power in these ways will find its end before Empire’s downfall is assured by the total devastation of this planet. But perhaps that is a hope for Easter Sunday. On Good Friday, at the height of imperial power’s apparent victory, we may find ourselves exhausted, thirsty, desperate for relief from heartache or very real material deprivation. When he was in that position on Good Friday, our savior sought to comfort his loved ones and to care for his body as he could…and if that’s where anyone is on this Good Friday or even this Easter Sunday—not particularly reverent, but just hurting in our body and our heart—know that Christ is with them.