Robert Barron - Let Christianity Be Weird
Peace be with you. Alleluia. Alleluia. Happy Easter to everybody. Just a few weeks ago, I was in London giving a series of talks, and I had a public conversation with the popular historian Tom Holland. Tom Holland's written a number of books about the Roman Empire especially, but he wrote a book a few years ago, highly recommend it to you, called "Dominion". And what he does in this book is he tries to show how decisively influential Christianity has been in the shaping of our Western culture, that many of the values we take for granted, individual human rights, care for the poor and the marginalized, and this sort of thing, are not general values. In fact, he would say they weren't held in the Roman Empire at all, on the contrary.
So why do we hold them? Well, it's the influence, he said, of Christianity. These aren't universal moral truths. They came from this very peculiar and strange religion. That's why he said when we had our public conversation, I think someone from the crowd asked him, "What should we do? What's the call of our time?" and he said, "Let Christianity be weird". I like that. Especially when I was coming of age, there was a tendency to reduce Christianity to a vague mysticism or a moral system. Jesus was a fine ethical teacher from long ago, and we follow his principles and all that. Oh, well, ho-hum, who cares? I mean, if that's all Christianity is, I quit, because there's all kinds of ethical systems and all kinds of nice, inspiring moral teachers. Who cares? Who cares?
I'm with Tom Holland. Let Christianity be weird, because Christianity is weird. And a lot of the weirdness, everybody, focuses on the thing we celebrate today. Let's look first at the cross. And Tom Holland spends a lot of time talking about this, because he knew very well from his studies of ancient Rome exactly what the cross meant. I'll come back to this, but I'm wearing this lovely pectoral cross. And here it is, it's jeweled and it's beautiful, and I'm wearing it as a religious decoration. So we associate the cross with pious feelings. Ancient times? Ancient times, I mean, they'd think I was out of my mind. If they saw someone like me and they said, "Well, there's a religious leader," they'd say, "What's he wearing? With jewels on it? A cross"?
It'd be like someone wearing an image of an electric chair or noose or gallows. The cross was this brutal, brutal instrument of torture. The Romans, they think, picked it up from the Persians, but boy did the Romans perfect it as a means of putting someone to death in the most horrific way possible. Typically, someone was stripped naked, because the humiliation was part of the torture. They were crucified in a public place so people could see them. They were roped or they were nailed to these pieces of wood, and then they were just left there. And the torture was the slow bleeding to death and slow asphyxiation that produced this excruciating, literally, pain.
And then when the person died, they typically were not removed from the cross. Their bodies were left there to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field to devour. The cross was so terrible that it was reserved for the worst enemies of Rome. It was reserved for the lowest people in society. I mean, to die on a cross would've been considered the most abject kind of failure. And so, remember Tom Holland: "Let Christianity be weird". How indeed weird it was when these first Christians came bursting into the Roman world holding up the cross. Paul said, "I know one thing: Christ, and him crucified". "You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? You before whom Christ was displayed crucified".
Crucified? What's this man talking about? To speak of someone who died on a cross, well, that means he's the worst failure. To be saying, "Well, here's the Messiah. Here's the new king, the Lord, Jesus 'kyrios', the new Lord. And he was crucified". Well, it's lunacy, it's ludicrous. It's the supreme weird claim. Okay, so why do they do it? And that comes to my second weirdness, which is all about today, Easter Sunday. Again, everybody, when I was coming of age, there was a tendency to explain Easter away. "Oh, the disciples, they felt so bad about what they had done, but then they felt forgiven and so they expressed that in terms of these kind of wild stories. Or it was a symbolic way of saying that the cause of Jesus lives on in us. It was a literary device, it was like a legend or a myth to talk about the Resurrection of Jesus".
Let Christianity be weird everybody. And with that in mind, look at our first reading for Easter Sunday. Here's Peter's great address in the Acts of the Apostles talking about this figure: "You know what's happened all over Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached". Well, if you're telling a story and you say, well, I met the guy up in the Twin Cities and I saw him in Rochester, and then something happened in Winona that was really interesting, I mean, would you think I was trading in a legend or a myth? No. Oh, okay. Tell me more about this guy that was in the Twin Cities then Rochester and Winona. That's about a real person.
Peter says, "we are witnesses of all that he did". We're not talking about someone that I vaguely heard about as a legend. Johnny Appleseed, that's a legend. No, no, we are witnesses. We knew this man. We saw him. "They put him to death by hanging him on a tree". Now there's the Jewish way of talking about the horror of the cross. They saw it. They saw it. "This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible, not to all people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance".
We're not in a galaxy far, far away. We're not 'once upon a time' here. No, no, Galilee, Judea, and Jesus, we knew him and we witnessed his death on the cross. But God raised him and made him visible. Then this is my favorite line, everybody, and I suggest for your Easter contemplation, find it. It's in chapter 10 of the Acts of the Apostles, this passage. But here's the line I love: "He was made visible, not to all people, but to us", listen now, "who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead".
Let that sink in. So this Jesus who was put to death on a Roman cross, and mind you, the Romans knew how to put people to death. Don't bore me with this theory about, oh, Jesus just swooned on the cross and then somehow staggered severely wounded from his tomb. I mean, give me a break. The Romans knew how to put people to death. And these witnesses, they saw it. This Jesus rose from the dead, and we ate and drank with him. I mean, we're not talking about myths and legends here. We're talking about real flesh-andblood people who experienced something that was so staggering, overwhelming, and, let's say it with Tom Holland, weird. It caused them to go careering around the world to announce this message.
Think of these people. In the Gospel we hear about Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb. Mary Magdalene, who knew him; he cast out from her seven demons. Mary Magdalene, who loved him; she comes earlier to the tomb. John, the beloved disciple, comes running to the tomb when he hears this news. I love this too. Let me just read you that little passage from the account in John. So she sees and she runs and gets Simon Peter, and then they both run to the tomb. "He bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in". When Simon Peter arrives, he goes in and he sees the cloths and the cloth that had covered his head, but it wasn't with the other cloth, but was rolled up in a separate place.
Here's what I want you to see. If you're dealing with a myth or a legend, you wouldn't deal with details like that. Who cares? Who cares where the head cloth was? This has all the feel and texture to me of something that was vividly remembered. "Do you remember that, when we first came in the tomb? He wasn't there, but the burial cloth? Remember how strange that the head cloth was rolled up somewhere else"? Let Christianity be weird, because the Resurrection was this staggering, one-off, weird event, listen now, which made sense of that equally weird event of the cross.
Now they got it. Now they got it. The cross indeed represented all the power of the world. Tyrants have always predicated their power upon the fear of death. The cross, you come up against Rome, we will do this to you. We will crush you. It's worldly power in its rawest form. It's the story of the world, everybody, from beginning to today. It's the war of all against all. You mess with me, I'm going to mess with you. That's the cross. That's what it meant to ancient people. See, why was it, then, that they were able to hold this up as a kind of taunt? I know you think this is meant to scare me. It doesn't. It doesn't anymore. I'm going to hold it up.
In fact, I'm going to put jewels on it like this. That's a taunt to the powers of the world. Because in the light of the weird event of the Resurrection, they knew that God's love is more powerful than anything that Caesar can muster or anything that any of Caesar's successors can muster. You think this scares me? No, it doesn't. I'm going to put jewels on it, and I'm going to hold it up as the sign of the conquering king. Now look, everybody, Tom Holland again: keep in mind weird Christianity. What's the danger? The danger is you look around a Christian society, let's say like ours, in my country, in America, in a lot of Christian churches, there are a lot of these around.
A lot of these crosses up on top of steeples and on top of buildings and people wear them as jewels. But "Oh yeah, the Christian Church, what a nice little place. Yeah, a nice little place off on the side, not doing any harm. God bless them". Or "That nice lady, she wears this cross. That's lovely. It's nice, harmless".
That's what they want. That's what they've always wanted. The powers of the world. They want to domesticate Christianity, make it harmless. But the one thing this is not is harmless. Because this jeweled cross means the powers of the world have been defeated. God's love is greater than anything that's in the world. Therefore, it turns the world upside down. Christianity has always been, from the beginning, a kind of revolution. And in the measure that it ceases to be a revolution, it ceases to be itself. So on this great feast day, this culminating feast day, this day of days, the day of Easter, of Resurrection, let's remember the power of our Christianity. Let our Christianity be something weird, because it thereby changes the world. And God bless you.