It is easy enough, upon reading Mark 15:16-20, to conclude that the Roman soldiers in the story are straight from central casting. We can all summon an image from a movie or TV show — big, burly, mean-looking types adorned with a cloak, shoulder pads of armor, spears and shields.
We can assume that they were just doing their duty that day – harassing and tormenting Christ – as with any enemy of the empire but also much worse. This was, after all, the man who claimed he was the son of God. Better to overdo the usual humiliation with this one, lest anyone but Caesar ever be called king again.
This happened after Pilate handed Jesus over to the crowds … and after the crowds pronounced his sentence, “Crucify him!” … and then flogged him … and handed him over to be crucified. And the mocking was the least of it. They spat on him, struck him with a stick and forcefully pressed into his forehead a crown made of thorns to pierce the skin and draw blood.
Yes, it’s easy to write off the Roman soldiers as the oppressors of that day — and they were. Maybe that’s a little too easy. The thing about Lent is that we are called to not leave it there. We are called to examine the story more deeply — as part of our own self-examination.
We might ask: what is it in people that seeks to oppress others? To hold them down? Keep them in their place lest the hierarchies we are so used to be upset? What is it, perhaps, in us? Any of us?
Resmaa Menakem has some ideas on that subject. He is an author and licensed social worker who wrote a recent New York Times best-seller titled My Grandmother’s Hands. In it, he focuses on how all of us may hold some kind of trauma in our bodies. And if left untreated, that trauma is going to find its way out, possibly in very harmful ways.
Our society harbors an epidemic of unhealed trauma. It is passed down from generation to generation to generation. This kind of traumatic retention can flow through our culture as well as our individual DNA. Yes, you heard right — what Menakem calls these “soul wounds” can take a genetic form that can be inherited down through the generations. This new field of scientific inquiry has a name, epigenetics
In My Grandmother’s Hands, Menakem explores how this generational trauma can shape us — Black and White in America. He explores how the pain inflicted on those who were enslaved became so deeply rooted in DNA that, for some, the trauma for Black people today in America is just as real as it was for their enslaved ancestors 400 years ago or their grandparents in the days of Jim Crow or today’s children in the era of George Floyd and other cases of violence against Black people. Menakam says it’s all passed down.
But he doesn’t stop there. He is equally empathetic to others of us. White folks today, he writes, may have soul wounds in our DNA ingrained in us from past generations who did the oppressing, the enslaving — and all that came with that most brutal form of dehumanization.
Now I know, I know: it seems as if we have wandered far of course from that chaotic scene in the courtyard of the Roman governor’s palace where the crowd and the soldiers were mocking, whipping and spitting on Jesus. But stick with me.
Before we move too breezily through this third act of the drama of Holy Week, before we count it as just a small part of the story of all “they” did to Jesus, we might stop and look at ourselves. That is what Lent calls for, isn’t it?
I inherited the hobby of genealogy from my late father — and the gift of all the deep family digging he and his mother did. Our family’s story, you might say, isn’t that unlike many families who come from European descent.
Somewhere around 1740, William Cleghorn, my 7th great grandfather, immigrated to America from Scotland. He was another lowland Scot, a blacksmith who lived on the land of the powerful Hamilton family. He was one of many Scots who fled the religious and other oppression of the British, as far as we know.
Yet it wasn’t long after he arrived in America, got married and settled some land in what is now Rutherford County, North Carolina, that he himself became the oppressor. His final will and testament include the names of a handful of those he enslaved as he passed them on as “property” in what has been called America’s original sin.
And there is more: His descendants later were among the first White folk to interact with the native Cherokee people of northwest Georgia. We know how that worked out as the Cherokee were swept westward and their land was taken.
That’s the family story that I carry in my body. It’s the one I am to wrestle with. Lent is a time for that wrestling.
The question we might ask of the Roman soldiers in today’s Scripture, the question the Scripture asks, the question we can ask of ourselves is: What is it inside the human spirit that insists on this cycle of brutality? What is it in our society’s systems and structures that retain oppression of others — beyond us as individuals?
And that leads to some other questions: Where do we see Roman soldiers today? Who are the oppressors and who are the oppressed? And, as with our look at this third act in our series of sermons, where are we?
Perhaps, if we ask those questions prayerfully, humbly, on our knees and deep within our hearts, we will find our way back to the other character in the story — Jesus Christ.
Each season of Lent we spend 40 days working our way up to the cross. We spend Holy Week, Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday kneeling at the foot of the cross. That’s a good place to ask: How, O Lord, might we be scarred red deep down? What are our soul wounds? How do they shape who we are and what we do? And how might we find help, strength and wisdom in God to do the needed work of repentance, repair and, in time, even reconciliation with those we have harmed?
The spiritual writer and leader Parker Palmer asked: “Who were we before the world changed us?”
In these weeks, we might add: How, with God’s help and mercy, do we get back there?
