Russian Literature and the Cross
K31
Jer. 23:1-6
Canticle 16
Col. 1:11-20
Lk. 23:33-43
Russian Literature and the Cross
“He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son… for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created… and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1).
At the foot of the cross we face the greatest mystery of our existence. On the one hand we see a man convicted of political crimes, helplessly executed among criminals by the state. After the horrors of the twentieth century we all can believe this.
At the same time, I also believe that this man Jesus is the image of the invisible God. I believe that he is the firstborn of creation, the head of the church, the author of our salvation. I believe that all things were created for him and through him, that in him all things hold together. I know that he will rescue us from the power of darkness.
The cross is the point where suffering and omnipotence meet. It is hard to believe these two things, this man and this God, at the same time. Please do not think that I believe because I am less informed about the reasons why this should be impossible. My belief is not a sign that I am weaker or less intelligent than you. In fact, I cannot be separated from you. I come from the same place. I struggle with the same doubts. I have heard the same stories that you did as I grew up. Like the thief executed with Jesus and like you I have cried out to God, “Save us,” and I have felt denied.
I have been thinking about how my faith in Christ lies at the heart of my interest in Russian literature. I asked many of you about this. Some of you appreciate the way that Russian literature can encourage deep thinking even about disturbing things, that it leads to more human reflection than the journalism we usually read. Others love the commitment to social change that that they read in it. One of you went so far as to describe Russian literature as a non-narcotic, as the opposite of the hazy unreality on TV.
The Russian literature that I read faces the most difficult questions of what it means to be a modern person. What does the world tell you? What are you? Who are you created to be? At its most basic level the Christianity that I believe in addresses these three questions also. This morning I want to talk about these questions using examples from Russia.
1. What the world tells us. Leo Tolstoy’s story Ivan Ilych (1886) begins with an external, objective account of Ilych’s death. When his colleagues in the state court system hear the news, each of them privately speculates on how this event might advance their own career.
The next chapters seem like a resume. They describe the important details of Ilych’s life from his earliest childhood. He enjoys being a bachelor. He goes to law school, marries a beautiful woman. He works his way up with political savvy through the court system. He overextends himself (just as we do today in America). His house looks like the homes of other middle class people who are pretending to be richer than they really are. He worries about his financial situation. He fights constantly and bitterly with his wife. One senses an overwhelming isolation in his life. There seems to be nothing more to him than nagging worries and irritation with other people.
Ilych comes to realize this as he dies slowly from something that has gone wrong with his appendix or kidneys. In his heart Ilych keeps hearing a voice asking, “What do you want?” At first he answers, “To be well and not to suffer.” The voice replies, “As you lived before, well and pleasantly?” This presents him with a dilemma. On the one hand he knows he was not happy struggling to maintain his middle class lifestyle, but on the other hand he has no regrets about his life either. For a while he keeps repeating, “I did everything right.” I jumped through all the right hoops. I am a success.
Only hours before his death, Ilych stops dying and for the first time ever he starts living. He asks his family to forgive him and suddenly he feels free from fear. Tolstoy writes, “In place of death there was light.” Ilych says to himself, “What joy… Death is finished, it is no more.” This is what we say on Easter Sunday, the Feast of the Resurrection.
The world tells us that we can be happy with what we buy and our career promotions, with the power that these things give us over other people. Father Zossima in Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov (1879-1880) says that modern people interpret freedom as the “multiplication and rapid satisfaction of our desires.” He warns that these desires distort us and warp us so that we come to live only for our own envy. We lust after luxury instead of seeking joy in God’s love.
2. What we are. As twenty-first century Americans, this may be the most difficult part to understand. We do not know ourselves and this is dangerous. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn distinguished himself in combat against the Nazis in WW II. He made the worst mistake of his life when he criticized the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin (1879-1959) in letters to a close friend.
For this he was arrested, humiliated, beaten and tortured. In 1945 a secret committee sentenced him to serve for eight years in brutal Soviet labor camps. Solzhenitsyn witnessed Stalin’s efforts to kill and arrest all of those who had been exposed to conditions outside of the Soviet Union. This included the arrest of thousands of Russian POW’s and the arbitrary repression of ordinary citizens.
His almost two thousand-page book The Gulag Archipelago tells the stories of people in pain. Prisoners are stuffed into pipes, jammed into prison cells that are so crowded that their feet can’t touch the ground. They are transported in boxcars, starved and worked to death. He must refer to “latrine bucket” several hundred times and to at least a hundred different forms of torture. Hundreds of thousands of people are shot.
Solzhenitsyn has seen the worst evil imaginable. He has every reason to dismiss the guards and state security agents as inhuman. Instead he does something remarkable.
He recognizes that he himself could be guilty of the same crimes. “If only there were evil people,” he writes, “and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
This is a remarkable insight for us in a nation that most often describes evil as something that is foreign. It is important for us to remember as we prosecute war thousands of miles away from home. Solzhenitsyn has a message for a nation that holds more than six hundred foreign citizens (including a thirteen year old) in prolonged, indefinite detention without either charge or trial. People who represent you and me use torture as a means to suppress dissent.
Perhaps a sense that evil is external to us may help to understand why of the 8,750,000 people incarcerated around the globe, the US accounts for 22% of them. The number of people incarcerated per 100,000 is 105 in Canada, 150 in Mexico. Here 700 per 100,000 are in prison or jail (the incarceration rate for African American males is 4,848 per 100,000). The US leads the world in executing childhood offenders (and the mentally ill).
Who are we? We are part of evil or it is part of us. Solzhenitsyn writes, “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good [or natural].” “Ideology… gives evil its… justification.” “Cruelty is invariably accompanied by sentimentality.”
3. The world tells us that we will be happy with possessions and power. When we know ourselves best we recognize that evil is not outside of us. My last question is, “what are we created to be?” I won’t keep you in suspense, I believe that we are made to be with God, that we are loved by God and closest to ourselves when we share that love. From my earlier comments you might think that The Gulag Archipelago is chiefly a pessimistic book. It is not.
Solzhenitsyn writes that in these extreme situations owning things makes prisoners worry about their possessions being taken away. He describes men falling asleep with both arms around tattered suitcases. This leads to another terrible tragedy. The prisoner can choose to waste the very life that he is desperately trying to preserve. He can be blind to the blessing that comes from God. Solzhenitsyn writes, “Look around you – there are people around you. Maybe one day you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn’t make use of the opportunity to ask him questions.” Solzhenitsyn came to love these people. He discovered that Christ was in them.
And this is the remarkable thing. Maybe it is something that you already know. Love is stronger than pain. Christ is present where there is suffering.
Most of you know that I once was a chaplain at a children’s hospital. I saw so much suffering there, but it did not keep the parents away. Parents would sleep in uncomfortable chairs. They would miss weeks of work. If you asked the children, “why do your parents spend so much time here?” They would say, “My Mommy and Daddy don’t want me to be alone.”
God feels this way about you. God will not abandon us when we are frightened or in pain. Jesus promises that this is true and in my experience it is.
Here we are, facing the mystery of the cross. The power and glory of Jesus reach beyond our imagination, from the beginning of time to its end. His strength is not to grant us immunity to suffering because that is not what we really need. Instead Jesus rescues us from darkness by giving us himself.
Jesus is not another possession that you can buy but which will ultimately leave you unsatisfied. We understand him best when we recognize the evil that divides our own heart, and turn to the love that makes us whole. Amen.
Jer. 23:1-6
Canticle 16
Col. 1:11-20
Lk. 23:33-43
Russian Literature and the Cross
“He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son… for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created… and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1).
At the foot of the cross we face the greatest mystery of our existence. On the one hand we see a man convicted of political crimes, helplessly executed among criminals by the state. After the horrors of the twentieth century we all can believe this.
At the same time, I also believe that this man Jesus is the image of the invisible God. I believe that he is the firstborn of creation, the head of the church, the author of our salvation. I believe that all things were created for him and through him, that in him all things hold together. I know that he will rescue us from the power of darkness.
The cross is the point where suffering and omnipotence meet. It is hard to believe these two things, this man and this God, at the same time. Please do not think that I believe because I am less informed about the reasons why this should be impossible. My belief is not a sign that I am weaker or less intelligent than you. In fact, I cannot be separated from you. I come from the same place. I struggle with the same doubts. I have heard the same stories that you did as I grew up. Like the thief executed with Jesus and like you I have cried out to God, “Save us,” and I have felt denied.
I have been thinking about how my faith in Christ lies at the heart of my interest in Russian literature. I asked many of you about this. Some of you appreciate the way that Russian literature can encourage deep thinking even about disturbing things, that it leads to more human reflection than the journalism we usually read. Others love the commitment to social change that that they read in it. One of you went so far as to describe Russian literature as a non-narcotic, as the opposite of the hazy unreality on TV.
The Russian literature that I read faces the most difficult questions of what it means to be a modern person. What does the world tell you? What are you? Who are you created to be? At its most basic level the Christianity that I believe in addresses these three questions also. This morning I want to talk about these questions using examples from Russia.
1. What the world tells us. Leo Tolstoy’s story Ivan Ilych (1886) begins with an external, objective account of Ilych’s death. When his colleagues in the state court system hear the news, each of them privately speculates on how this event might advance their own career.
The next chapters seem like a resume. They describe the important details of Ilych’s life from his earliest childhood. He enjoys being a bachelor. He goes to law school, marries a beautiful woman. He works his way up with political savvy through the court system. He overextends himself (just as we do today in America). His house looks like the homes of other middle class people who are pretending to be richer than they really are. He worries about his financial situation. He fights constantly and bitterly with his wife. One senses an overwhelming isolation in his life. There seems to be nothing more to him than nagging worries and irritation with other people.
Ilych comes to realize this as he dies slowly from something that has gone wrong with his appendix or kidneys. In his heart Ilych keeps hearing a voice asking, “What do you want?” At first he answers, “To be well and not to suffer.” The voice replies, “As you lived before, well and pleasantly?” This presents him with a dilemma. On the one hand he knows he was not happy struggling to maintain his middle class lifestyle, but on the other hand he has no regrets about his life either. For a while he keeps repeating, “I did everything right.” I jumped through all the right hoops. I am a success.
Only hours before his death, Ilych stops dying and for the first time ever he starts living. He asks his family to forgive him and suddenly he feels free from fear. Tolstoy writes, “In place of death there was light.” Ilych says to himself, “What joy… Death is finished, it is no more.” This is what we say on Easter Sunday, the Feast of the Resurrection.
The world tells us that we can be happy with what we buy and our career promotions, with the power that these things give us over other people. Father Zossima in Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov (1879-1880) says that modern people interpret freedom as the “multiplication and rapid satisfaction of our desires.” He warns that these desires distort us and warp us so that we come to live only for our own envy. We lust after luxury instead of seeking joy in God’s love.
2. What we are. As twenty-first century Americans, this may be the most difficult part to understand. We do not know ourselves and this is dangerous. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn distinguished himself in combat against the Nazis in WW II. He made the worst mistake of his life when he criticized the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin (1879-1959) in letters to a close friend.
For this he was arrested, humiliated, beaten and tortured. In 1945 a secret committee sentenced him to serve for eight years in brutal Soviet labor camps. Solzhenitsyn witnessed Stalin’s efforts to kill and arrest all of those who had been exposed to conditions outside of the Soviet Union. This included the arrest of thousands of Russian POW’s and the arbitrary repression of ordinary citizens.
His almost two thousand-page book The Gulag Archipelago tells the stories of people in pain. Prisoners are stuffed into pipes, jammed into prison cells that are so crowded that their feet can’t touch the ground. They are transported in boxcars, starved and worked to death. He must refer to “latrine bucket” several hundred times and to at least a hundred different forms of torture. Hundreds of thousands of people are shot.
Solzhenitsyn has seen the worst evil imaginable. He has every reason to dismiss the guards and state security agents as inhuman. Instead he does something remarkable.
He recognizes that he himself could be guilty of the same crimes. “If only there were evil people,” he writes, “and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
This is a remarkable insight for us in a nation that most often describes evil as something that is foreign. It is important for us to remember as we prosecute war thousands of miles away from home. Solzhenitsyn has a message for a nation that holds more than six hundred foreign citizens (including a thirteen year old) in prolonged, indefinite detention without either charge or trial. People who represent you and me use torture as a means to suppress dissent.
Perhaps a sense that evil is external to us may help to understand why of the 8,750,000 people incarcerated around the globe, the US accounts for 22% of them. The number of people incarcerated per 100,000 is 105 in Canada, 150 in Mexico. Here 700 per 100,000 are in prison or jail (the incarceration rate for African American males is 4,848 per 100,000). The US leads the world in executing childhood offenders (and the mentally ill).
Who are we? We are part of evil or it is part of us. Solzhenitsyn writes, “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good [or natural].” “Ideology… gives evil its… justification.” “Cruelty is invariably accompanied by sentimentality.”
3. The world tells us that we will be happy with possessions and power. When we know ourselves best we recognize that evil is not outside of us. My last question is, “what are we created to be?” I won’t keep you in suspense, I believe that we are made to be with God, that we are loved by God and closest to ourselves when we share that love. From my earlier comments you might think that The Gulag Archipelago is chiefly a pessimistic book. It is not.
Solzhenitsyn writes that in these extreme situations owning things makes prisoners worry about their possessions being taken away. He describes men falling asleep with both arms around tattered suitcases. This leads to another terrible tragedy. The prisoner can choose to waste the very life that he is desperately trying to preserve. He can be blind to the blessing that comes from God. Solzhenitsyn writes, “Look around you – there are people around you. Maybe one day you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn’t make use of the opportunity to ask him questions.” Solzhenitsyn came to love these people. He discovered that Christ was in them.
And this is the remarkable thing. Maybe it is something that you already know. Love is stronger than pain. Christ is present where there is suffering.
Most of you know that I once was a chaplain at a children’s hospital. I saw so much suffering there, but it did not keep the parents away. Parents would sleep in uncomfortable chairs. They would miss weeks of work. If you asked the children, “why do your parents spend so much time here?” They would say, “My Mommy and Daddy don’t want me to be alone.”
God feels this way about you. God will not abandon us when we are frightened or in pain. Jesus promises that this is true and in my experience it is.
Here we are, facing the mystery of the cross. The power and glory of Jesus reach beyond our imagination, from the beginning of time to its end. His strength is not to grant us immunity to suffering because that is not what we really need. Instead Jesus rescues us from darkness by giving us himself.
Jesus is not another possession that you can buy but which will ultimately leave you unsatisfied. We understand him best when we recognize the evil that divides our own heart, and turn to the love that makes us whole. Amen.
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