This sermon was preached on Wednesday, April 25 at All Saints' Chapel, Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, CA for the Feast Day of St. Mark the Evangelist. The readings for this sermon were: Isaiah 52:7-10, Ephesians 4:7-8,11-16, Mark 1:1-15, and Psalm 2.
One night, sophomore year of college, a group of my friends and I gathered around the television in the common room at precisely 8:00pm. We had all heard, through various means, that President Obama was about to make an address to the nation. No one had a clear guess as to what was happening, but it seemed very unlikely to be any sort of good news. A few minutes after 8:00, President Obama emerged to announce that Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda terrorist group, had been killed in an American military operation. This was, the President wanted to stress, Good News for all Americans. Amidst a swirl of images of American grief and unity after September 11th and the usual rhetoric about American exceptionalism, our President used the word “justice” several times. We can turn to those who lost loved ones, he declared, and say to them “Justice has been served.” The civilian and military leaders who worked so hard to bring about this “most significant achievement” can feel satisfaction in the results of their “pursuit of justice.” And of course, at the end, Obama intoned the familiar promise of America as one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.
The TV news stations flipped immediately after the speech to scenes from all over the country, where other college kids just like me were celebrating in the streets, cheering and waving American flags, spontaneously breaking into song. I felt a kind of wild joy in that moment, watching them, a strange release of relief. But then, almost as suddenly, my stomach twisted and I felt sick. It felt wrong to revel in the killing of another. And it did not feel like justice. None of this, we all knew, would end the mutual bloodletting, the terrible war. None of this would make the world a safer, more peaceful place.
Today we celebrate the feast day of the earliest Gospel-writer, Mark the Evangelist, bringer of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Our reading from Isaiah extolls the virtues of the one who brings good news to God’s people—news of safety and victory and the promise of peace. And we are, indeed, still in the season of Easter: a time for sinking into the Good News of the resurrection.
But then there’s this Psalm. I had the option of cutting it down to spare us the unsettling bits in the beginning but I knew that I couldn’t. It’s tempting, too, to simply read this Psalm--especially just the second half as we had the option to do--as if it is written from the perspective of an oppressed people, hoping for liberation from Empire, or for a new Messianic age under God’s sovereignty. And perhaps that is indeed what it meant to the communities that treasured and preserved this Psalm throughout the centuries. And yet. And yet, in the Psalm, it is the other nations that cry out for liberation from bondage and oppressive yokes, and it is the Lord that gleefully, derisively, keeps them crushed and possessed by the chosen king. In this time, in this moment, this Psalm, force me to confront the truth that many times in our individual and communal lives, our Good News is someone else’s Bad News.
...[The One] whose throne is in heaven is laughing; the Lord has them in derision…you shall crush them with an iron rod...
This Psalm may not sound to me like the God I want to worship, but it certainly sounds like human beings. And if I’m being honest, like me. See, there’s a word for this wild pleasure: schadenfreude. It’s used to capture that shameful sort of enjoyment one feels when something unfortunate happens to someone we can’t stand. Like when I see that the Yankees have lost miserably, or when I hear about how a certain corrupt politician’s dirty dealings are finally catching up to them in a deliciously humiliating way.
If envy is the pain we feel when someone gets something we think we deserve, then schadenfreude is the secret thrill we get in watching someone get what they had coming to them. It’s pretty easy to see how envy is destructive to community life. After all, it’s the only one of the seven deadly sins, and the only emotion, that makes it into the Ten Commandments. Schadenfreude, in its deceptive pleasure, can be just as insidious, in part because it looks and feels like justice, yet can blossom into pure evil. This week, I learned that some historians argue that the collective feeling of resentment toward the relative prosperity of the Jews during 1920’s Germany helped to fan the flames of German anti-Jewish propaganda leading up to the Second World War. Could that reordering of the rightful place between “us” and “them” have felt like justice?
In a world twisted by sin, victory always means defeat. Safety and peace means keeping someone out or keeping someone dead. In the words of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian villain, “Better never means better for everyone…It always means worse for some.” Your Good News is my bad news. In this limited view, justice can be nothing more than just deserts.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus brings Good News to all people, often crossing significant ethnic and cultural boundaries to do so. His Good News is sometimes hard news, like when he confronts the wealthy young man or condemns the hypocritical synagogue leaders. And Jesus encounters many who cannot accept the vision of the Kingdom of God he has to share. He warns of words falling on deaf ears again and again, even as he urges the disciples that the Good News must be proclaimed to all nations. And the Good News of God is this: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe.”
To be an Evangelist, to carry forward the true Good News, is to proclaim a way that demands repentance and change. It requires the recognition that God’s way is not our way. It means Good News that’s actually for all, even those who cannot accept it.
The Good News is that God’s justice is bigger than we can imagine, beyond what we can grasp. That is at once comforting, and terrifying. It means that as Christians, we are to strive for a more complex vision of justice than envy and schadenfreude tempt us with. One that does not leave behind the suffering of the oppressed, and yet does not trap us in pleasure-seeking revenge. Jesus’s prophecies are not of sunshine and rainbows, but a way forward through pain and suffering and the utter destruction of the societal ordering we know.
So how do we discern the difference between justice and schadenfreude?
Certainly not by what feels good. Now I have learned, or rather I’ve been learning for some time now, that shaming myself for my emotions is generally not a useful strategy. But I have also learned that honest self-examination in the light of the Gospel can bring about true transformation.
I’ve also been coming to terms with the fact that envy and schadenfreude are particularly difficult and important things to speak about in a seminary. People’s most extreme experiences of envy are often reserved for those closest to them, their friends, their colleagues, the people’s whose life paths are most similar to theirs. When vocation and identity become intertwined, someone else’s success can feel like a judgment on our own, just as someone else’s failure can feel like vindication.
Striving for a higher vision of justice means recognizing when I deceive myself into celebrating short-sighted pleasures without moving toward the pain of reconciliation. This task is inextricably connected to working every day to free myself from the casual habits of envy and schadenfreude, and the easy answers of do and do not deserve.
When I attempt to hold in my mind what God’s justice might one day look like, I can see its seeds beginning to be planted all around us. Like the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a new museum dedicated to the memory of the thousands of victims of white supremacy in the United States. In a New York Times article about the museum, Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the museum’s Equal Justice Initiative, explains that the destructive legacy of this racial terrorism has to be acknowledged and faced, but that it’s especially difficult to begin that work in what he calls “the most punitive society on the planet.” “I’m not interested in talking about America’s history because I want to punish America,” he says. “I want to liberate America.”
Those seeds, they look like repentance. They look like belief that Good News can eventually, in the end, be good news, liberation, and justice for all.
One night, sophomore year of college, a group of my friends and I gathered around the television in the common room at precisely 8:00pm. We had all heard, through various means, that President Obama was about to make an address to the nation. No one had a clear guess as to what was happening, but it seemed very unlikely to be any sort of good news. A few minutes after 8:00, President Obama emerged to announce that Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda terrorist group, had been killed in an American military operation. This was, the President wanted to stress, Good News for all Americans. Amidst a swirl of images of American grief and unity after September 11th and the usual rhetoric about American exceptionalism, our President used the word “justice” several times. We can turn to those who lost loved ones, he declared, and say to them “Justice has been served.” The civilian and military leaders who worked so hard to bring about this “most significant achievement” can feel satisfaction in the results of their “pursuit of justice.” And of course, at the end, Obama intoned the familiar promise of America as one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.
The TV news stations flipped immediately after the speech to scenes from all over the country, where other college kids just like me were celebrating in the streets, cheering and waving American flags, spontaneously breaking into song. I felt a kind of wild joy in that moment, watching them, a strange release of relief. But then, almost as suddenly, my stomach twisted and I felt sick. It felt wrong to revel in the killing of another. And it did not feel like justice. None of this, we all knew, would end the mutual bloodletting, the terrible war. None of this would make the world a safer, more peaceful place.
Today we celebrate the feast day of the earliest Gospel-writer, Mark the Evangelist, bringer of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Our reading from Isaiah extolls the virtues of the one who brings good news to God’s people—news of safety and victory and the promise of peace. And we are, indeed, still in the season of Easter: a time for sinking into the Good News of the resurrection.
But then there’s this Psalm. I had the option of cutting it down to spare us the unsettling bits in the beginning but I knew that I couldn’t. It’s tempting, too, to simply read this Psalm--especially just the second half as we had the option to do--as if it is written from the perspective of an oppressed people, hoping for liberation from Empire, or for a new Messianic age under God’s sovereignty. And perhaps that is indeed what it meant to the communities that treasured and preserved this Psalm throughout the centuries. And yet. And yet, in the Psalm, it is the other nations that cry out for liberation from bondage and oppressive yokes, and it is the Lord that gleefully, derisively, keeps them crushed and possessed by the chosen king. In this time, in this moment, this Psalm, force me to confront the truth that many times in our individual and communal lives, our Good News is someone else’s Bad News.
...[The One] whose throne is in heaven is laughing; the Lord has them in derision…you shall crush them with an iron rod...
This Psalm may not sound to me like the God I want to worship, but it certainly sounds like human beings. And if I’m being honest, like me. See, there’s a word for this wild pleasure: schadenfreude. It’s used to capture that shameful sort of enjoyment one feels when something unfortunate happens to someone we can’t stand. Like when I see that the Yankees have lost miserably, or when I hear about how a certain corrupt politician’s dirty dealings are finally catching up to them in a deliciously humiliating way.
If envy is the pain we feel when someone gets something we think we deserve, then schadenfreude is the secret thrill we get in watching someone get what they had coming to them. It’s pretty easy to see how envy is destructive to community life. After all, it’s the only one of the seven deadly sins, and the only emotion, that makes it into the Ten Commandments. Schadenfreude, in its deceptive pleasure, can be just as insidious, in part because it looks and feels like justice, yet can blossom into pure evil. This week, I learned that some historians argue that the collective feeling of resentment toward the relative prosperity of the Jews during 1920’s Germany helped to fan the flames of German anti-Jewish propaganda leading up to the Second World War. Could that reordering of the rightful place between “us” and “them” have felt like justice?
In a world twisted by sin, victory always means defeat. Safety and peace means keeping someone out or keeping someone dead. In the words of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian villain, “Better never means better for everyone…It always means worse for some.” Your Good News is my bad news. In this limited view, justice can be nothing more than just deserts.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus brings Good News to all people, often crossing significant ethnic and cultural boundaries to do so. His Good News is sometimes hard news, like when he confronts the wealthy young man or condemns the hypocritical synagogue leaders. And Jesus encounters many who cannot accept the vision of the Kingdom of God he has to share. He warns of words falling on deaf ears again and again, even as he urges the disciples that the Good News must be proclaimed to all nations. And the Good News of God is this: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe.”
To be an Evangelist, to carry forward the true Good News, is to proclaim a way that demands repentance and change. It requires the recognition that God’s way is not our way. It means Good News that’s actually for all, even those who cannot accept it.
The Good News is that God’s justice is bigger than we can imagine, beyond what we can grasp. That is at once comforting, and terrifying. It means that as Christians, we are to strive for a more complex vision of justice than envy and schadenfreude tempt us with. One that does not leave behind the suffering of the oppressed, and yet does not trap us in pleasure-seeking revenge. Jesus’s prophecies are not of sunshine and rainbows, but a way forward through pain and suffering and the utter destruction of the societal ordering we know.
So how do we discern the difference between justice and schadenfreude?
Certainly not by what feels good. Now I have learned, or rather I’ve been learning for some time now, that shaming myself for my emotions is generally not a useful strategy. But I have also learned that honest self-examination in the light of the Gospel can bring about true transformation.
I’ve also been coming to terms with the fact that envy and schadenfreude are particularly difficult and important things to speak about in a seminary. People’s most extreme experiences of envy are often reserved for those closest to them, their friends, their colleagues, the people’s whose life paths are most similar to theirs. When vocation and identity become intertwined, someone else’s success can feel like a judgment on our own, just as someone else’s failure can feel like vindication.
Striving for a higher vision of justice means recognizing when I deceive myself into celebrating short-sighted pleasures without moving toward the pain of reconciliation. This task is inextricably connected to working every day to free myself from the casual habits of envy and schadenfreude, and the easy answers of do and do not deserve.
When I attempt to hold in my mind what God’s justice might one day look like, I can see its seeds beginning to be planted all around us. Like the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a new museum dedicated to the memory of the thousands of victims of white supremacy in the United States. In a New York Times article about the museum, Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the museum’s Equal Justice Initiative, explains that the destructive legacy of this racial terrorism has to be acknowledged and faced, but that it’s especially difficult to begin that work in what he calls “the most punitive society on the planet.” “I’m not interested in talking about America’s history because I want to punish America,” he says. “I want to liberate America.”
Those seeds, they look like repentance. They look like belief that Good News can eventually, in the end, be good news, liberation, and justice for all.
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| The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. |
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