Psalm 22
The entirety of the Gospel of John
Sermon by Joel Crouse
Stay here now, in the crowd lining the path to Golgotha, while Good Friday confronts us with a story we would rather not hear.
Jesus is arrested, tortured, humiliated, and executed by the machinery of government: the Roman soldiers who are just doing their duty. Pontius Pilate, the weak leader, who would rather hide comfortably behind a lie than save an innocent man from death. The executioner who nails Jesus’s hands and feet and tortures him, as he has done to so many others.
And all around him, stand crowds of people, the human mob. Some join in, throwing stones, taking out their rage on a man they do not know. Many, many more do nothing at all. They watch. They turn away. They say, “This is not my concern.”
In his book on the moral history of humanity, philosopher Jonathan Glover writes that the greatest moral catastrophes of the twentieth century were not only the work of perpetrators of evil and injustice. They were also created by the silence of those who stood nearby. Glover argues that cruelty thrives under three particular conditions: 1. when ordinary people convince themselves that someone else will act; 2, when we tell ourselves that nothing can be done; or 3, when we accept or ignore the suffering of others as simply the cost of keeping our own lives intact.
Good Friday is the story of God’s entering that world of bystanders.
A world like Jozefow in 1942.
Józefów was a small, poor town in eastern Poland. Before the war, 2,800 Jewish residents lived there, with long roots in the community. After the Nazis invaded, another 1,100 Jewish people were relocated there, despite the lack of resources. By 1942, overcrowding, hunger, and a typhus epidemic had devastated the residents.
On a summer morning that year, Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of about 500 men from the city of Hamburg, were given orders to round up the town’s Jewish residents in the forest and shoot them.
The reserve police battalion was composed of ordinary people much like us: middle-aged husbands and fathers who had been drafted into police service. Postal clerks and dock workers and salespeople with no special training, who had never before fired a gun at a human. They weren’t idealogues. They were ordinary, regular people, as we understand ordinary and regular people to be.
The Major of the Battalion, Wilhelm Trapp, was shocked by this order. He shared it with his men, and then made this offer: anyone who did not feel up to the task could step out. No punishment or consequences.
There were, as I said, 500 members in the battalion. Of that 500, about a dozen took up that offer. The rest remained, and on that day and into the night, they dragged families from their homes, marched women, children, and elderly to the forest, and shot them at close range. They murdered fifteen hundred people.
As the accounts show, many of the men who did this cried about it. They got drunk. They threw up. But they didn’t stop. As some later said, they were too afraid of being seen as weak or disloyal. Or as one man later said, “I didn’t want to be laughed at.”
What pushed them forward, Glover writes, is not unlike what held the rest of the townspeople quiet while they watched their neighbors being taken screaming into the woods. It is not unlike what stopped the crowd from rescuing Jesus, despite knowing that he was innocent.
The list includes the following: Conformity – once Jesus started up that hill, it was harder to stop. Obedience to authority – after all, didn’t Pontius Pilate sign off on this? Fear of social censure: what if someone judges me for speaking out? Moral numbing: the first step, the first bullet is hardest, the second and third step, the second and third bullets are easier. Diffusion of responsibility: I am not in charge; what can I change? And crowd momentum: everyone is doing it, everyone is thinking it; I might as well go along to get along.
Above it all, this phrase: Not my business. Not my business.
The massacre at Józefów, like the murder at Golgatha, was possible only because people fell silent in the face of evil.
They are all there on Good Friday -- ghosts in our own hearts, reminding us of times when we fell silent when we should have spoken up. The indifferent bystander who looked up at the noise as Jesus processed to the cross and then went back to sweeping her stoop. The complicit bystander who joined in because being angry felt good, or because going along was safer than resisting. The fearful who saw the injustice and wept for Jesus, but were too cowardly to act.
Afterward, many of those bystanders, who would have gone away, perhaps felt shame and convinced themselves that they weren’t responsible.
But this is Good Friday. It is not only the story of what was done to Jesus. It is the story of what was not done for Jesus. It is the story of what happens when a crowd decides that someone’s suffering does not merit their intervention.
Dr. Glover suggests a solution: moral imagination – the ability to recognize humanity in the one who is suffering and feel responsible to help them.
And so, on Good Friday, we are asked: where do we stand? Whose suffering do we see?
But God is not calling us to a life of guilt. Good Friday is a call to courage.
And we find it there, in the shadow of the cross, among our last group of bystanders. There we find the women who walked with Jesus as he stumbled, and stayed with him, powerless to save him, powerless to do anything but bravely bear witness so that he knew he was not alone.
Even when hope was gone, they resisted with love. Amen
