THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS
Mark 8:31-18
Jeff VamosThis is the second Sunday in Lent, and the second Sunday in a sermon series on the theology of the cross. As I've put this series together, I've found it to be quite a challenge to say, in this short bit of time, anything terribly meaningful about that symbol at the heart of our faith that is so strange and paradoxical. So, I thought it would be best to try to make it simple today, and to use stories , primarily one story, written by Ursula LeGuin, as a way to explore the meaning of the cross.
But first, a review of last week, and an introduction to this week. Last Sunday, you'll recall that I spoke about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness as a story about the ethics of ends and means. The temptation was to use worldly means, involving a small moral compromise, to accomplish the good ends of the Kingdom of God. We might imagine that the temptation for Jesus was to use just a little tiny bit of worldly force, suspend a little bit of human freedom, make a little compromise with evil, to bring about ultimate good, to bring about a worldly utopia--to bring about a perfect world. But, Jesus didn't choose that means to accomplish the end for which God had sent him.
So, what means did Jesus use to accomplish his purpose, to accomplish the goal of the Kingdom of God? This week's scripture lesson deals with that--the means Jesus chooses to get the job done. And, as we hear the scripture today, we hear that this was shocking to his disciples. This story comes after Peter's confession--Peter's recognizing that Jesus is the Messiah, the most important person ever to walk the face of the earth. And they all had expected that he would be the next big thing, the next King who would install them in his cabinet; they were going to hitch their wagon to his star. But instead, he predicts his own death. "...He began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again." He says this, and moreover, he tells them, "If any of you want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What will it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your soul?"
Instead of predicting his success, Jesus predicts his death. His failure. It's almost like that commercial you might have seen on TV, remember, the one with the kid who says, "when I grow up, I want to be a drug dealer...." "When I grow up, I want to be homeless." That's what it must have seemed like. "When I'm done, I want to be crucified like a criminal in Jerusalem." It must have seemed utterly stupefying to them.
And we really can, then, empathize with Peter, who chastises Jesus for that. "God forbid!" he says. We can hear him saying, "Now, what is that going to accomplish? You're getting killed? What will that do?"
There are many answers, I suppose, I could give to that question--many very complex answers in very well trod territory. But for today, I'd like you to consider just this one: Jesus' death was meant to expose a lie. Or perhaps better way to put it: to bring to light a secret about human life, a secret about the way we attempt to find human happiness, that has been hidden from the foundations of the world. It's a secret that has to do with Caiaphas's strategy when he faces Jesus: "It is better that one man should die, than the whole nation perish." It has to do with our need for a sacrifice--for a victim--in order to be happy. Jesus death is a "no" to our worldly way of securing the greatest good: it exposes a choice we all make, all the time, whether we're aware of it or not. But now, there's a shadow, the shadow of the cross hanging over these choices. We can no longer say we don't know.
OK, so now you're thinking: that's all very abstract and obscure. What is he talking about? A secret about human life; a choice about how we find happiness. The cross is a no to the world. What does that mean?
Maybe this will help express what I mean. Maybe the story of Christian Berger, when I was about 9 years old, will help illustrate how this thing works. OK--so Christian Berger was a kid nobody liked. He had bright red hair; he was a goofy guy, especially because he had red hair, and people enjoyed making fun of him. Of course, there were times they made fun of me as well, I was in that same goofy class as Christian Berger at times, and those were times I was glad that there was a Christian Berger with his red hair to take the focus off me.
So one day, it was a cold late-winter Indiana afternoon, snow on the ground, not quite freezing. And two other friends and I were hanging out in the snow, playing in the snow. It was the perfect kind of snow, the perfect weather for packing nice snowballs. They packed together so tightly, almost like ice. And then we saw himÑChristian Berger, his red hair in stark contrast to the snow, walking down the street. We looked at the snowballs in our hands, and looked at Christian Berger, and each without speaking knew what would be hilarious fun. We started chucking the snowballs at Christian Berger. He started running down the road, and we laughed. We laughed hilariously. We especially laughed hard when one of my snowballs hit his head. I understood later that it made him bleed a little bit.
I'm ashamed of that moment now, but at the time, it was a profound moment of happiness; it bound us all together as brothers; we bonded in that moment, in all that laughter and hilarity.
The ugly truth that the cross exposes is how our happiness, our well being, the well being of the nation, requires someone to be the victim.
Does that sound far-fetched? Do you believe that? Consider the fact that our economy, for example, requires people to be unemployed. Do you remember Alan Greenspan several years ago talking about how there was too little unemployment. There were not enough workers out on the sidelines--and our economy was in danger of heating up too much because too many people were working. Do you remember? We can't get to zero unemployment. Some need not to work for our economy to be healthy.
Some must suffer for us to be happy. Human community requires victims. Do you think it's not true?
In a short story by science-fiction writer Ursula LeGuin called "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," the narrator describes a utopian society called Omelas, in which the residents of the city of Omelas enjoy perfect human happiness. It is a place where there exists joy without guilt, and where people achieve without pain those things like courage and valor, things we generally cannot achieve without the existence of pain and risk and suffering.
But what's notable about this society is that it is not so different from our own. In the words of the story, "They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy....There was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us."
But as the narrator describes this seemingly perfect society, she divulges the compromise that the people of Omelas have made to achieve their happiness, the bargain they have agreed to. Hidden away in a in a basement of one of their buildings is a child, a pathetic little child who sits in tiny dark closet amidst brooms and mops, who is fed on a half bowl of corn meal and grease, and sits all day in its own excrement. "Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition and neglect."
And "they all know it's there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there." Their young go to see it as a rite of passage into adulthood. "They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.
"Many do feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all these explanations. But, they know the terms: to exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement, the happiness of one small child."
The story forces us to ask ourselves the question: what would you do? What would you do to see such a child, to understand such a bargain? What if that were the society in which we were living? (He says with irony.)
What would you do if you understood, in fact, that it was God down there, in that basement, in that closet, suffering for us? What would you do?
There's a strange thing that happens to those upon whom the shadow of the cross falls. They find themselves walking away from that kind of happiness, that kind of bargain--which they might have been happier not knowing about, before that shadow came. They find themselves walking with, for example, Christian Berger; they find themselves taking an icy snowball for him. They find themselves companioned in their own grief and suffering. They find themselves losing a kind of false life, in order to gain something else, something perhaps more real.
They find themselves doing what a few people from Omelas actually do as well. Because, the narrator of the story tells us that "at times, one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates...the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields....They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."
Amen.
March 12, 2006
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