Summary: The Christian life is lived in a world obsessed with violence. In the name of Jesus, we do not retaliate nor mistreat others, even if we have been mistreated. We model our lives after Christ, who suffered because of human sins yet gave himself for the healing of human lives.
Antietam National Battlefield sits in the central hills of Maryland, surrounded by a rolling carpet of green farmland. Like most of our Civil War battlefields, it is well preserved and hauntingly quiet. Standing at the ridge by the visitor's center, a tourist can look toward the old German church, imagining McClellan's army coming up on Robert E. Lee's army. Some 23,000 people died in the one-day Battle of Antietam. September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest single day in United States history.
The massacre on that battlefield is hard to imagine. Even harder to understand is the outcome. What did the violence accomplish? Antietam did not end the war in 1862. The leaders of both sides did not recoil from the horror and say, "That's it. All of us have had enough. No more violence ever again." Oh no. The Civil War went on for two-and-a-half more years. Violence does not end all violence. Yet the violence of the cross has turned violence on its head.
Our text reminds us of Good Friday and the death of Jesus. Like the battle of Antietam, it was a brutal day. Whenever a serious Bible study explores the realities of an ancient crucifixion, most faces turn grim. We read about the crucifixion in texts like the Gospel of John, where the Jewish religious leaders asked the Roman soldiers to speed up the executions so they could get on with their Passover celebrations.1 Good Christian people turn pale when they hear of soldiers breaking the legs of the crucified men so they could suffocate sooner. The cross was a horrible way to die, brutal and violent.
It is quite a turn, then, when an early church leader takes a moral lesson from the cross. In today's text, Peter reminds the church that Jesus did not return abuse for the abuse he suffered. He did not retaliate. He did not strike back. Rather, he trusted himself to the God who judges every person." All the time, in the words of the African American spiritual, "He never said a mumbalin' word."
Peter wrote these words to a congregation of Christians who were suffering. They knew first-hand that those who follow Jesus are not promised an easy time in a world like this. They can be mistreated for doing the right thing, maligned for setting God's ways as their highest pursuit. This was especially true for the primary audience addressed by Peter. They were house servants, many of them domestic slaves.2 They were bound to serve earthly masters, but as Christians they had a higher Master. From Christ's example, they learned it is not our situation in life that determines our Christian behavior, but Jesus himself.
This is a difficult lesson to learn. Those who visit the battlefield can look toward Antietam Creek. The water ran thick red on that day in 1862. Sharpshooters stood on the ridges above, picking off scores of enemies trying to forge the stream. As we said, 23,000 men died in a single day.
As Christian people, we remember one death, the death of Jesus. The violent death of Jesus suggests we must refrain from perpetuating the violence. Jesus taught as much: "You are not," he said, "to love the neighbor and hate the enemy, speak to the friendly but not the unfriendly, be generous to the generous but withhold from the selfish. No, God acts out of God's own nature, never reacting, but sending sun and rain to both the just and unjust."3 God loves all, even if they do not deserve it.
Here is one of the many things that the New Testament says about the death of Jesus. "Christ also suffered for you," Peter declares. There is something profoundly liberating about that death. Drawing on the preaching of the early church Peter adds, "He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, having died to sins, we might live for righteousness." Then he reaches back into the Jewish scriptures to find a resonate affirmation from the prophet Isaiah, "By his bruises we are healed."4
When President Lincoln heard about the violence at Antietam, he began to perceive the Civil War differently. It was about more than states' rights and whether the states could do whatever they wanted. It was also about freeing those who were enslaved. Four days after the gunfire stopped in Antietam, Lincoln announced he would issue his Emancipation Proclamation as of January 1863. All slaves in rebellious states would be forever free.
How does this hold together? What amount of self-sacrifice is necessary to provide freedom for others? Not merely to exert control over the rebellious tribes but to create freedom -- and finally reconciliation? These are more than Civil War questions from over a century and a half ago. They are matters of the gospel, begun on a cross in 30 CE.
We say a lot of things about the cross. For instance, we say, "Jesus died for our sins," even though our sins continue. Or as another New Testament writer declares, "Christ has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us ... through the cross."5 Yet there is still great hostility in the air among a lot of people. In some corners, we could make the case that the Civil War may not be over yet, and it is still Blue against Gray.
As we reflect on the cross these days after Easter, we see how far God will go to bring violent people into peace. God will not compel warring people to stop their war. God will not squelch the battle by obliterating the fighters. But here is what God will do. With complete vulnerability, God-in-Christ will step onto the middle of the battlefield and take all the bullets -- all the anger, all the hostility -- into his own body. God takes all of it on the cross in order to take it all away.
But will we let it go? That is the human struggle, isn't it? We can see war in the eyes of the person who cuts us off on the highway, then glares at us as if it was our fault. Sorry, not this time. But we must let it go.
We see it on the sign outside the visitor's center at Antietam. In official lettering, the sign declares that guns and firearms are not welcome at a battlefield memorial. Just let the irony of that sink in. Then ask: why would anybody take guns and firearms to a battle that is already over?
Yet there is an alternative to violence. It is evident at the Antietam monument to Clara Barton, which many tourists miss. A 40-year-old clerk in Washington's patent office, she collected medical supplies and food to deliver to those in battle. Her father had taught her that Christians care for those in need. She persisted with army officials until she received permission in August 1862 to take humanitarian supplies to the front lines.
One month later, on the field of Antietam, Clara was present, and she got busy. She bandaged the wounded, fed the hungry, and showed compassion regardless of what side of the line anybody fought. Soldiers called her "the Angel of the Battlefield." A few years after that, she organized the American Red Cross.
Clara Barton went willingly to the battlefield to bind up wounds. She offered compassion to all soldiers regardless of whether they wore blue or gray. She is still remembered for her mercy at a level far beyond the soldiers or their generals. Through her deeds, she pointed to another way of living beyond the war. And to score the point: we would never have known about Clara Barton if she had not entered the war. Just like Jesus.
These are clues to the work accomplished on the cross. Today we remember how Jesus entered the battle between heaven and earth, putting himself squarely on the battlefield between the rebellious and the warlike. He took whatever was aimed at him yet never turned toward his accusers and abusers to defend himself or retaliate. He took away the poison and offered medicine in return.
In this, we learned the ethical lesson of the cross: to give ourselves away in service so that other people might be healed.