The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scriptures: Matthew 26:14- 27:66
There’s a lot going on right now to cause fear. If you’re brown or black or speak with an accent, you may fear being targeted by ICE and detained. If you’re an active member of the armed forces, you may fear being sent into a war for which the objectives are unclear and the end uncertain. If you’re a person with a limited income, you may fear that the rising prices of gas and groceries and just about everything else might force you into some tough choices sooner rather than later.
Fear is a survival mechanism. It’s a brain response, one of the earliest that appeared in our human evolution, to tell us when we may be in danger. Like anger, fear is a neutral feeling. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about it. What makes fear either helpful or dangerous is how we respond to it.
And in today’s Passion reading, there are many lessons in responding to fear. In fact, this event which is central to our faith, to our understanding of God and the world, could have only happened because fear attains a critical mass, distorting people’s sense of love and justice so profoundly that they pour that fear into one singular figure, Jesus, hoping that if they destroy him they can also destroy their fear.
The chief priests fear that Jesus’ ministry would destroy the power they’d built up with the Roman occupiers, and they respond to that fear by conspiring to have Jesus killed.
The disciples are overcome by fear when the chief priests arrest Jesus, and their responses to that fear range from cutting off an ear to fleeing to denying three times that they don’t know him.
When the Judeans had laid palms and their cloaks in the street as Jesus entered Jerusalem, they believed he was coming as a conquering king who would violently overthrow the Romans. But when they see that he means to overcome oppression by another way, when he instead turns over the tables of the money changers in the temple proclaiming justice above all else, when he declares that the greatest commandment is love, they fear that the kind change they want isn’t coming. They respond to that fear by calling for Jesus’ death and threatening to riot.
When Jesus is brought before Pilate, Pilate fears that he’s going to lose control of the city. He responds to that fear by forfeiting justice for the sake of an easy solution, sending an innocent man to be killed.
All of these fears at their foundation are honestly justified. Will this man destroy my livelihood? Will he make my already bad situation worse? Will he get me killed?
But their fear causes them to lose sight of what is good and just and loving. It causes them to toss aside their core values in order to achieve a sense of safety and resolution, however hollow and temporary, as quickly as possible.
At Bible Reflection on Tuesday, it came up a few times how people hated that the congregation’s only part in the Passion reading is “Let him be crucified!” I wonder if that’s uncomfortable for us because it causes us to recognize the great power our fear can have over us, the ways our desperate need for even a false sense of security might distort our core values of love and justice in how we respond to that fear. Maybe saying “let him be crucified!” helps us to recognize who or what we may scapegoat in our own lives, who or what we think we need to destroy, in order to destroy our fear.
And we all scapegoat. Right now, this administration is scapegoating immigrants, trans folks, even all Democrats in order to help people easily bypass the fear and precarity of their lives. But we do it, too. Some of us scapegoat people in red hats and who watch FOX news, thinking that if we could just get rid of them, we could go back to normal.
But you don’t destroy fear by destroying that which makes you afraid. You destroy fear at all. You transform it. The way Jesus does: by praying.
Jesus is terrified. In the garden of Gethsemane, he pleads with his disciples, “Remain here, stay with me.” He doesn’t want to be alone as he faces what he knows is coming. And what is coming is nearly unthinkable, unbearable.
But he doesn’t look around to see who he can pour his fear into, so that they and his fear may be destroyed. He gets on his knees and prays. He begs God, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” Even Jesus, the Son of God, asks, Isn’t there another way to get around this suffering, this death?
But that’s just the beginning of his prayer. He starts where so many of us start our prayers: with a plea. Please change this situation, God. And that’s a good place to start. It’s how we name our fear, and naming it is the first step in learning how to respond to it.
But a lot of us have been taught that if we believe hard enough and in the right ways, God will reward us by granting our wishes.
That’s not how prayer works, and Jesus knows it. So after his plea to God, he immediately turns to the real power of prayer, saying, “Yet not what I want but what you want.”
“Not what I want but what you want.” With these few words, he turns his fear over to God. Now I’m sure he still feels afraid, but he now lets his trust in God carry that fear. He lets his trust in God carry him towards, yes, suffering and the cross, but also, as we’ll soon find out, transformation and resurrection.
“Not what I want but what you want.” Jesus teaches us that prayer is the practice of trusting the limitlessness of God’s love, even on—maybe especially on—winding, thorny, painful paths, knowing that these paths of suffering always—always—have the capacity to lead us into transformation, if we can engage our fear with courage and love rather than blame and destruction.
God doesn’t wipe out suffering and death, nor does God send suffering and death upon us, because suffering and death are in and of themselves meaningless. But God also never leaves us alone in our suffering and death. And through Jesus, God tells us, “suffering and death are not the end of the story.”
That’s what next Sunday is about: where there is suffering and death there is also resurrection. Maybe not the resurrection you thought you wanted, and maybe not within the confines of this life. But God will always—always—transform whatever you fear most into liberation and love—if you’re willing to say, “Not what I want but what you want.”
Amen.
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