Complicity
with Rev. Alex Lang
April 15, 2022
On Good Friday we are going to discuss a challenging question: As a follower of Jesus, how do we know when we’re being complicit in causing harm to others without even realizing it? Come and explore this important question tomorrow night at 7pm!
The Scripture
Matthew 26:36-75
When Jesus had finished saying all these things, he said to his disciples, 2 “As you know, the Passover is two days away—and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.”
3 Then the chief priests and the elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, 4 and they schemed to arrest Jesus secretly and kill him. 5 “But not during the festival,” they said, “or there may be a riot among the people.”
6 While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of Simon the Leper, 7 a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table.
8 When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. “Why this waste?” they asked. 9 “This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.”
10 Aware of this, Jesus said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 11 The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. 12 When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. 13 Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”
14 Then one of the Twelve—the one called Judas Iscariot—went to the chief priests 15 and asked, “What are you willing to give me if I deliver him over to you?” So they counted out for him thirty pieces of silver. 16 From then on Judas watched for an opportunity to hand him over.
17 On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Where do you want us to make preparations for you to eat the Passover?”
18 He replied, “Go into the city to a certain man and tell him, ‘The Teacher says: My appointed time is near. I am going to celebrate the Passover with my disciples at your house.’” 19 So the disciples did as Jesus had directed them and prepared the Passover.
20 When evening came, Jesus was reclining at the table with the Twelve. 21 And while they were eating, he said, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me.”
22 They were very sad and began to say to him one after the other, “Surely you don’t mean me, Lord?”
23 Jesus replied, “The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me. 24 The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born.”
25 Then Judas, the one who would betray him, said, “Surely you don’t mean me, Rabbi?”
Jesus answered, “You have said so.”
26 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.”
27 Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. 28 This is my blood of the[b] covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. 29 I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”
30 When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.
31 Then Jesus told them, “This very night you will all fall away on account of me, for it is written:
“‘I will strike the shepherd,
and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’[c]
32 But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.”
33 Peter replied, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.”
34 “Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”
35 But Peter declared, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” And all the other disciples said the same.
36 Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” 37 He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. 38 Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”
39 Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
40 Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked Peter. 41 “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
42 He went away a second time and prayed, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.”
43 When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. 44 So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing.
45 Then he returned to the disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? Look, the hour has come, and the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners. 46 Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!”
47 While he was still speaking, Judas, one of the Twelve, arrived. With him was a large crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests and the elders of the people. 48 Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them: “The one I kiss is the man; arrest him.” 49 Going at once to Jesus, Judas said, “Greetings, Rabbi!” and kissed him.
50 Jesus replied, “Do what you came for, friend.”
Then the men stepped forward, seized Jesus and arrested him. 51 With that, one of Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear.
52 “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. 53 Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? 54 But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”
55 In that hour Jesus said to the crowd, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me? Every day I sat in the temple courts teaching, and you did not arrest me. 56 But this has all taken place that the writings of the prophets might be fulfilled.” Then all the disciples deserted him and fled.
57 Those who had arrested Jesus took him to Caiaphas the high priest, where the teachers of the law and the elders had assembled. 58 But Peter followed him at a distance, right up to the courtyard of the high priest. He entered and sat down with the guards to see the outcome.
59 The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for false evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death. 60 But they did not find any, though many false witnesses came forward.
Finally two came forward 61 and declared, “This fellow said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days.’”
62 Then the high priest stood up and said to Jesus, “Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you?” 63 But Jesus remained silent.
The high priest said to him, “I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God.”
64 “You have said so,” Jesus replied. “But I say to all of you: From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
65 Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “He has spoken blasphemy! Why do we need any more witnesses? Look, now you have heard the blasphemy. 66 What do you think?”
“He is worthy of death,” they answered.
67 Then they spit in his face and struck him with their fists. Others slapped him 68 and said, “Prophesy to us, Messiah. Who hit you?”
69 Now Peter was sitting out in the courtyard, and a servant girl came to him. “You also were with Jesus of Galilee,” she said.
70 But he denied it before them all. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
71 Then he went out to the gateway, where another servant girl saw him and said to the people there, “This fellow was with Jesus of Nazareth.”
72 He denied it again, with an oath: “I don’t know the man!”
73 After a little while, those standing there went up to Peter and said, “Surely you are one of them; your accent gives you away.”
74 Then he began to call down curses, and he swore to them, “I don’t know the man!”
Immediately a rooster crowed. 75 Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken: “Before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.” And he went outside and wept bitterly.
Matthew 27: 1-66
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If you have been here during Lent, you know we’ve been doing a sermon series called Breaking the Cycle: Discovering Our Spiritual Roots. This is a series that focuses on the various problems that prevent us from experiencing our spirituality. One of the most interesting aspects of being human is the fact that we seem to constantly be dealing with competing interests within ourselves: bodily needs, emotional needs, mental needs.
Each week we’ve been dealing with a different emotion and how that emotion can both enhance and prevent us from being in touch with our spirituality. This past Sunday, we dealt with the emotion of anger. I explained how our feelings of anger usually stem from feeling hurt or wronged by someone. Our anger can point us to the fact that we have been the subject of injustice. However, if we hold onto that anger, if we let it consume us, then our anger can ruin our lives.
At the end of that sermon, I explained that forgiveness is at the core of being able to release your anger. And the way that you forgive someone is by letting go of the transgression and moving forward. However, what I discovered is the only way I could move forward is by loving the person who had hurt me. By showing them love, it enabled me to move past the hurt and pain, which stopped me from being angry.
Finish reading
But loving someone who has hurt you is a hard thing to do, particularly if they’ve hurt you in a deep way. This is when I explained how that can only really happen with God. It is only through God’s unconditional love that we find the strength to love those who have hurt us. And tonight is perhaps the fundamental example in the Christian faith of what forgiveness and unconditional love are really all about.
In the Christian faith, we speak of Jesus’ crucifixion as an act of unconditional love. Through Jesus’ death, we in the Christian faith understand that God has forgiven us of our sins. Jesus’ death helps us to understand that God is willing to forgive all of the thoughts, words and deeds that have caused harm to ourselves and others. Indeed, this is why we call this day Good Friday. It’s a day where we celebrate the knowledge that God will never hold our mistakes against us.
But what I want to focus on tonight specifically is the scope of the mistakes God is forgiving in your life. Sure, I think all of us can understand how we need to be forgiven when we say something hurtful to another person or when we perform an action that causes harm to another person. It’s easy to understand how we’re at fault in those one-on-one situations. Where I see Christians struggling is in accepting how they can be culpable for the much larger problems in the world.
For instance, what about the mistakes we make when we think we’re doing the right thing? What happens when we hurt somebody simply because we’ve been taught to think and act in a certain way and we can’t see how those thoughts and actions are hurting the people around us? What happens when we believe we are in the right, living a good Christian life, and then we are confronted with the fact that maybe we’re not?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because I saw a movie called A Hidden Life. This is a movie that came out a few years ago and it poses this very question: As a follower of Jesus, how do we know when we’re being complicit in causing harm to others without even realizing it?
Let me set the stage for you. It’s 1939 and a peasant farmer named Franz Jägerstätter lives in a small village in the mountains of Austria. Franz is married to Franziska and they have three young daughters. Hitler’s army has taken control of Austria and is beginning to train and enlist the men for the war effort. Before we watch this first scene there’s a couple things you need to know. First of all, this is a true story. Franz was a real person and this is actually based on his life. Secondly, at the time this was taking place, everyone in Austria was expected to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler and Franz has been struggling with this. In this scene, Franz has come to a church to a help a painter who paints frescos of scenes from the Bible. [clip]
There is so much in what this painter says that I think is so true. Let’s take a look at something he said, but we need to reorder his words: “I paint their comfortable Christ with a Halo over his head. What we do is just create sympathy. We create admirers. We don’t create followers. Christ’s life is a demand.” This painter is setting up an interesting dichotomy. Are you an admirer of Christ or are you a follower and what’s the difference between the two?
Well, an admirer is someone who looks on from afar with little to no investment in the cause. As an example, there were plenty of white people who were admirers of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. There were plenty of white people who admired his efforts and agreed that racism is wrong. But the vast majority of those same white people were not willing to march with him. They were not willing to put their reputation or their safety on the line. Only a very small percentage of white people were willing to stand next to Martin Luther King Jr. and be his follower.
Being a follower doesn’t just mean intellectually agreeing with someone or writing a check to support their cause. Being follower means walking in their footsteps. It means leaving behind the comfort of your home and getting your hands dirty. It means truly standing up for what you believe and not running away when the going gets tough. Christ’s life is a demand meaning that, if you’re truly a follower of Jesus, then you must be willing to sacrifice.
So here’s the difficult question that comes from this scene in A Hidden Life: does worshipping Jesus in a church, like what we’re doing right now, make you a follower of Jesus or an admirer of Jesus? Well, the answer given by the painter, which is an indictment of all of us sitting in this room, is that worshipping Jesus in a church makes you an admirer, not a follower.
Now don’t get me wrong, worship is an important aspect of our relationship with God and Jesus, but simply coming to church does not make you a follower of Jesus. To become a follower of Jesus, you have to walk in Jesus’ footsteps outside of these walls. You have to live the way Jesus lived, which means you have to sacrifice.
And when faced with the need to sacrifice, most of us are not willing to take that next step. We just read this evening about how all of Jesus’ disciples, when faced with the opportunity to sacrifice, abandoned Jesus. They looked the other way and denied ever having known him. And those are the people who were literally with him when he was walking the earth. Even Jesus’ own disciples were admirers and not followers. And the reason why is because it’s much easier to say you believe in sacrifice than it is to live out that sacrifice.
As the movie goes on, Franz becomes more and more conflicted with the oath to Hitler that he is now required to take. Whereas everyone else seems more than willing to simply swear their allegiance to Hitler, Franz sees who Hitler is and what he stands for and is unwilling to make such a declaration. Indeed, he starts to voice his opposition to Hitler. The next scene I want to show you is between Franz and the mayor of the town. Word has gotten around the village that Franz is refusing to take the oath. Let’s watch what happens.
Now I think a lot of us would like to believe that we would be like Franz. We all know what Hitler stood for and what he did, spreading hate and racism and murdering more than 10 million people in concentration camps. But this movie is true to life. Franz was the only person in his village who was willing to stand up and say, “This is wrong. We should not be following this man.” But rather than become someone who everyone admires for his morality and his principles, he becomes an outcast.
As you heard the mayor say, “You’re a traitor.” Now I know many of us would say, “No, not me. I would stand strong against Hitler!” Would you though? Because you have to realize that when you don’t take the oath, there is a consequence for your actions. Those who didn’t take the oath to Hitler were executed. This is quite serious. This isn’t just a matter of standing up and saying, “I disagree with Hitler.” This is a matter of life and death. By making that statement you will be sacrificed.
Knowing the outcome, would you still stand up and say you disagree with Hitler? Would you be willing to be killed? Franz had a wife and three little girls. Faced with that situation, where would your faithfulness fall? To whom would you be loyal? Would you be faithful to Hitler so you could save your life or would you be faithful in following God by doing the right and moral thing, rejecting everything that Hitler stands for?
The disciples were faced with the same situation. They had families. They had children and they had a choice: They could be faithful to Jesus and stand with him at his trial, which would have resulted in their deaths; or they could be faithful to the Roman government, deny their allegiance to Jesus and preserve their lives. All of them chose to preserve their lives.
Remember what the painter said, “They look up [at the paintings of Jesus] and they imagine that if they lived in Christ’s time they wouldn’t have acted as the others did.” But we would have. In all likelihood, we would have abandoned Jesus as well. The disciples were complicit in sending Jesus to the cross. They didn’t push back. They didn’t try to stop it. They just blended in with everyone else and said, “I’m not going to sacrifice myself.”
You see, this is what we call communal sin. It’s a sin that’s committed by no one person, but is the result of everyone being complicit and saying nothing. This is, perhaps, the most overlooked aspect of the Good Friday story. Jesus’ execution was a community sin. It happened because nobody was willing to step in to stop it. Nobody was willing to risk themselves and break from the pack. Nobody was willing to follow in Jesus’ footsteps.
Franz followed in Jesus’ footsteps. He refused to swear an oath to Hitler. He was placed in prison and given every opportunity to change his mind. People would say to him, “Think about your wife. Think about your children. Just say the oath, believe what you want.” It seems such a trivial thing doesn’t it. They’re just words. And most people would say, “They don’t mean anything.” But that’s just the thing. They do mean something. And it does make a difference.
So yes, Good Friday is a reminder that God forgives our individual sins. However, Good Friday is also a reminder that we need to be forgiven for our communal sins. For the moments where we blend into the crowd and are complicit because we are too cowardly or indifferent to stand up for what is right. When we say, “It’s not my problem,” or we ignore those lone voices who are standing up and speaking out, like that of Franz Jägerstätter.
So I’ll give you a few examples of what I mean. There are the obvious ones of racism or climate change where it’s easier for us to be silent than to act. But I want to bring up something that’s happening right now that is fairly similar to what was happening to Franz in the 1940s. Over in Western China, there is an ethnic minority known as the Uyghurs. They are of Turkish descent and predominately Muslim, which means they do not identify with Chinese communism, which is atheistic. They dominate an area that is rich in natural resources and China wants to exploit those resources for their own personal gain.
Therefore, the Chinese have taken a note from the Germans and have built concentration camps. The Chinese government has even placed them in the same uniforms worn by the Jews during the Holocaust. To date, there are more than a million Uyghurs who have been placed in these concentration camps and the reports from within the camps are horrific. There’s rape, murder, torture, and starvation.
Are we going to sit idlily by, the same way we did in the 1930s and 40s, and just blend in? Or are we going to demand that our country do something meaningful about this horrific human rights atrocity rather than just say we’re not sending officials to the winter Olympics? I often hear people say, “If I was alive back then, I would have stood up for the Jews.” Well, you’re alive now and you can stand up for the Uyghurs if you so choose. Now’s your chance to not blend into the crowd and make a difference.
A Hidden Life ends with this quote by George Eliot: “…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” When Franz stood up against Hitler, nobody cared. Nobody even noticed. He didn’t start a movement of Austrian resistance. He simply said, “This is wrong and I cannot do this.” And what this quote from George Eliot is telling us is that it’s men and women just like Franz, the unsung martyrs who slip through the cracks of history and receive no recognition for their act of heroism that make the world a better place.
I want to end my sermon with one last clip from A Hidden Life. This scene is after his arrest. His wife has come to see him. It is his last chance to sign the oath before he will be executed. I want you to pay particular attention for how this scene is designed to mirror exactly what we read tonight with Jesus’ trial and execution. And as you leave here tonight, my hope and my prayer for you on this Good Friday is that you might be inspired to live your life without complicity. That you might be willing to do what is right no matter the cost to you personally; to stand up; to speak out; to walk the lonely road even when everyone else has abandoned you and is telling you that you are wrong; to be a follower and not an admirer. Amen.