From Tenderness, A Revolution

Luke 13:34 "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 35 See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”’

Take a moment to look at the painting projected on the screen. Notice everything, all the oppositions and ambiguities, but mostly notice how those unfold themselves to you. What do you see first? The blood red sun behind those apocalyptic clouds, clouds that look more like smoke than any storm I’ve ever seen? Do you first see the gentle pink and the hopeful patch of blue in the upper left corner, persisting somehow beyond the darkness? Or are you drawn to the ancient city caught between the dark and the light? At first, I wonder if this is a storm gathering or dissipating, if the people are running into the city for shelter or poking their heads out to see what the wind has blown over? I wonder if that red sun is rising or setting, if this is the end of the day or the beginning? At a glance, maybe it’s all of those things at once.

But then, maybe your eyes drift to the foreground, to the bright rocks and the shadows on the lower right. The first time I looked at this painting, it took me a moment to notice them, and another moment for them to resolve into forms, but those shadows—the shadows of three figures hung from crosses—focus the whole scene. We’re standing on Golgotha. That’s Jerusalem in front of us. This is the Crucifixion.

The painting is Jean Leon Gerome’s “Jerusalem.” Instead of looking at Christ as an object of devotion or an archetype of suffering, Gerome puts our perspective alongside the crucified, in the position that John the Baptist would occupy in more traditional version of the scene—we’re not looking at Jesus, we’re looking with Jesus.

With that knowledge, the clear sky and the storm and the city caught between them take on new meanings—perhaps Jerusalem is both of these realities surrounding it. As we look alongside the shadows of Jesus and the two failed revolutionaries next to him, maybe we still see the place that represented hope for so many generations: the place where David wrote the Psalms and where people are singing them in the Temple; the place where the Maccabees revolted against the Empire and found that one day’s worth of oil lasted them eight, that there is an abundance beyond scarcity; the place where Jesus’ parents brought him as a child and Simeon blessed him and recognized him as their peoples’ hope. But maybe we also see the way the city recedes into the distance, out of our reach, and the clouds gather in front of it, and we might remember that this was also where he had to cast the money changers from the Temple, and where just the day before the crowds cried out “Crucify him, crucify him!” This is where Pilate and Herod live, where they’ve co-opted the faith of the people to further their bloody, extractive ends. We see all of this, looking from the vantage of the crucified.

In all this complexity, this layering of hope and despair, I hear an echo of our Scripture this morning, another scene where Jesus stands over Jerusalem. A group of Pharisees (a detail that somehow gets left out when Christians demonize the Pharisees or Jews more generally) has come to warn Jesus that Herod is already plotting his death. And on hearing this news, Jesus promises to go on his way, but not before he looks out over the city and laments, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the name of the Lord.”

In a similar way to how Gerome’s painting layers together despair and hope with the subtly growing recognition of where we actually are, I think Jesus also speaks in multiple emotional tonalities in this one lament. It makes me wonder how an actor would choose to recite the lines? Do these lines invite us to thunder in our righteous anger against Herod and all other petty tyrants across the generations? I think they do. Or should we read them gritting our teeth with grim determination that the day of the Lord will come, one day, and everything will be made right, even if that day is not today? I think we should. Or do we take a deep breath and let the anger melt into sadness so that the tears run down our faces as we cry, “I wanted to gather you to myself like a mother hen gathering her chicks—I wanted this all to be so different than it’s turned out to be, and I still don’t see any good reason why it shouldn’t have been that way.” I think we do. To act out this scene would require us to hit all of those notes at once because they’re all true. In Jesus’ lament, anger and tenderness, tenderness and anger weave into and out of one another like the thorns on the crown he’ll wear to the cross.   

Often these days, as I look out on our world, I find myself wanting to hold on to both anger and tenderness, and finding it difficult. There are plenty of forces, political and psychological, that would have us choose one or the other. We’re supposed to fixate with optimism on the blue sky or despair that the black cloud will choke out everything. We’re supposed to foreclose on tenderness to feed our anger, or repress our anger so that we don’t burn anyone with it.

One of the things I’ll miss about standing up here to preach every week is the chance to hypothesize with clarity, for you and myself, what I think the Gospel entails for us in this moment. Clear-eyed conviction is really important in a world where those in power are constantly equivocating, telling us to be polite, to be reasonable, to consider both sides, to compromise, to remember things are nuanced and complex and messy and grey, while they perpetrate every kind of straightforward bigotry and brazen class war. The Powers want to curb our anger and promote “civility” in order to keep things exactly as they are, so it’s important to look at the Powers of this world, and into the depths of our own hearts, and name with conviction the hatred and oppression that we find. It’s important to be able to tell the Machiavellian foxes behind daises and pulpits and executive desks that we see them for what they are; we recognize what they’re doing and we’re not going to hear them out just because they call their trans- and homophobia “family values” or their racism “law and order” or their endless extraction of our labor our “responsibility.” It’s good to remind each other that God is angry on our behalf that the world is like this.

We should hold those convictions and we should be uncompromising in them. We shouldn’t parlay with fascists. And yet, at the very same time, over the years I’ve found myself feeling that something in my voice has grown shrill in my own ears as I’ve had to repeat those convictions over and over again. I wonder if in trying to speak to the moment we unknowingly match pitch with the moment. The problem is not the convictions themselves, but I do wonder if we can let our voices lapse into monotony by constantly speaking back to the awfulness around us.

There is plenty in this world, this creation, that I find mysterious and ambiguous and that I don’t know what I think about. And even when I do know what I think, I very often don’t know how I feel, or how I feel is constantly changing. I know that I believe in the possibilities of church and art and labor organizing and socialism, but on a day to day (or second to second) basis that belief might feel like determination or joy or serenity or futility or pleasure, or any combination of those. Likewise, I know that transphobia and white supremacy and patriarchy and capitalism are evil, and, as a person, I might feel that conviction as sadness or pity or despair or delusion or rage, or any combination of those. Part of me wonders if maintaining that polyphony of experience isn’t as important for our humanity as having the right convictions, or if letting the expression of our convictions become monotonous doesn’t itself undermine them. I wonder, can righteous anger remain tender? Can we stay open and receptive to all aspects of our humanity without compromising our convictions?

I fear that flattening out the emotional range of our experiences into anger or despair, or fear, alone causes something to harden in our souls. We might notice this dynamic in particular if we were we to stand on Golgotha today and look out over Jerusalem right now, where deeply felt and yet reductive cries of “Never Forget” have given people a thirst for Palestinian blood. As someone with Jewish heritage myself, I know people whose relatives were murdered by fascist regimes in the 1940’s, and who because of that would advocate for every possible human rights cause in the world…except for that of Palestine. They hear of 50,000 murdered Palestinians and with a bitter reduction respond simply that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” There’s anger there, but no tenderness, no openness to other tonalities, variations of thought and feeling and action that could save so many lives.

The poet Carl Phillips speaks, I think, of some of these dynamics in his poem “Fixed Shadow, Moving Water.” He writes:

One friend tells me everything’s political,another says nothing is, we just make it political.By “we”, he means human beings, I assume— what’s political to a fox curled in sleep,or a pond, or a sycamore in winter with no leaves leftto stop the snow falling through it? I have loved you for less time than I have loved some others,but none more deeply than you; no one moreabsolutely. Which, as if inevitably, amounts to a hierarchy of sorts, doesn’t it? Value,then the power that comes with it—soon enough,the distribution of power, who gets to do the distributing…

But if we make of tenderness a countervailing force, the   two of us—

If we can make, from tenderness, a revolution—

There’s a lot that I love about this poem, the rejection that’s also a synthesis of the binary between the two friends’ perspectives, the way the poet sifts the seemingly a-political natural and romantic imagery until he finds (like the shadows in Gerome’s landscape?), yes, a kind of politics holding there beneath what many people seem to mean by that word.

But I think what I love most of all is the way that the last lines, already conditional, break off, halting, leaving us to wonder if the poet just can’t bring himself to finish them or if he’s inviting us to. Part of me responds to those lines, “If we make of tenderness a countervailing force…If we can make from tenderness, a revolution—” and thinks, “Yes, if, but what then?” Another part of me thinks “That’s beautiful, that’s all I want!” But then another part of me answers, “No, that’s sentimental. What kind of countervailing force is tenderness really? The line’s unfinished because there’s nothing more to say. It’s a dead end.” And then another part of me answers back, “In a world as brutal as ours, how could a real revolution, another world, be anything but tender if it’s not going to re-establish the world we already have? How could we bring it about by anything but tenderness, even if that hope is beyond speech?” I wonder if all of these voices are right?

When Jesus stands over Jerusalem, knowing that Herod will send him to the cross, it would be so easy for him to flatten out his experience, to protect himself behind a carapace of bitterness. How often do we do just that when someone or some place disappoints or hurts us? But Jesus stands over Jerusalem and looks upon it with anger and melancholy and perhaps even the subtlest hint of hope. Before he empties himself on the cross, he opens himself to grief. He lets the polyphony of life sound in his soul, and speaks with the full countervailing force of his convictions and his tenderness, all at once. From there, he goes, in all vulnerability, to face down the Powers of this world on the Cross, and when he rises, he rises with his wounds. And even then, with all the power of risen glory, he doesn’t castigate those who doubted him: he invites them to put their hands in his wounds and he feeds them and he breathes his Spirit on them, the Spirit who will move them to hold all things in common. All things: our money and our debts, which cause us so much shame; our fears, our joys, our worries, our hopes, our resolve, our wavering, all of it in common, gathered together like the chicks under a mother hen’s wings.

Friends, we don’t live in tender times, and we don’t live in times that reward righteous conviction. But we don’t have to let these times machine down our souls. We don’t have to silence the polyphony of our experiences—it’s crucial that we don’t. We can take our ranks among the struggling and look out on the world together, letting those sights unfold before us and allowing them to situate us. We can be angry at injustice and sad that it should’ve been so different and hopeful that it still could be. We can speak those laments to one another in all their complexity and multiplicity and reaffirm one another in our convictions. We can keep telling the truth, laughing and crying and shouting, sometimes all at once. If we’re going to orient our lives around the story of Jesus in a hard, hard world, then it’s our calling to hold all things in common, to make of tenderness a countervailing force, from tenderness, a revolution—

Amen.