A sunny spring morning 1942 — a Sunday morning — on Eutérpestraat in Amsterdam, an area populated mostly by Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.
Marching down the center of the street, 36 people — 36 Jews — dressed in everyday hats and coats, head in the direction of the headquarters of the SD, the Nazi Security Police.
On their left, in front of the group, a German solider armed with what appears to be a machine gun.
But
there are others on Eutérpestraat this morning heading in the same direction: A
cluster of five people. And then, behind them, a well-dressed couple calmly
strolling to church. One or two turn their heads in the direction of their neighbors
in the middle of the street.
NYT
photo critic Errol Morris asks, “It all looks so neat and orderly. Do those people
on the sidewalk know what’s happening?”
Yes.
At least that’s what sociologist Diane Wolf suggests. In Beyond Anne Frank, she writes:
Holland
did quite well on the Nazi report card: Even Holocaust architect Adolph
Eichmann is reported to have said, “It was a pleasure to do business with
them.”
“A
pleasure to do business with them.” That’s what people who have an interest in
exterminating Jesus might say about the Pharisees. Is it so hard to imagine the
High Priest Caiaphas and his colleagues or Herod Antipas (who provided a Final
Solution to the John the Baptist problem) saying of Jesus’ most vocal critics, the
Pharisees, “It was a pleasure to do business with them”?
And
yet, who leaks news about a credible plot against Jesus as he heads from Galilee
to his date with destiny in Jerusalem? A group of Pharisees — Pharisees! — the
people we love to loathe. The “whitèd-sepulcher” Pharisees.
And
yet they have the moral edge over those people on the sidewalk on Eutérpestraat,
because at least these Pharisees — against all the odds we’ve come to expect — act. They warn Jesus: “Get away from here. Herod wants to kill you.”
That
moral edge. What is it? Courage. The virtue of courage. In the face of what
they perceive to be a gross injustice, these unlikeliest of whistleblowers have
the courage to speak up — at great personal risk — to save the life of a fellow
human being from Herod’s political killing machine.
But
what exactly is courage?
Courage
is the virtue we exercise when we’re in a jam — or see our neighbor in a jam —
and we have to make a gut-choice. Courage is doing what you have to do. Doing
what what we have to do.
It’s
like Jesus saying, as he takes in the Pharisees’ credible warning, “I must be
on my way. I have to be on my way, because it is impossible for a
prophet to be killed here, outside of Jerusalem.”
But
Jesus’ intent to move on beyond Herod’s grasp doesn’t diminish the Pharisees’ courage
in raising the alarm.
That’s
because courage is a cause-and-effect virtue. It’s a response to a threat. A
situation (a cause) triggers courage (the effect).
For
instance: Did any of the Pharisees wake up that morning and say, “You know, today
I’m going to be courageous”? I doubt it!
But
the Law for them looms large, and they get wind of a threat to a person the Law
defines as their neighbor. Result? They make a gut choice to push Jesus out of harm’s
way.
I
think, then, we should give these Pharisees credit as they stood on the sidewalk
watching Jesus headed for imminent extermination. I think we should give them
credit for jumping off the sidewalk and body-blocking Jesus: “Herod wants to
kill you. Run!”
So,
if these Pharisees — unlike those calm churchgoers on Amsterdam’s Eutérpestraat
— model for us the virtue of courage, what would they tell us about how we get
it? How do we learn to do what we have to do?
Preparedness.
We can’t do what we have to do if we don’t know who we are. We can’t do what we
have to do if we don’t have core values and deeply-held convictions. They’re
what courageous people access in threatening situations: in spontaneous emergencies
― when, say, a mother rushes into a burning building to save her children … and
in long-term threatening situations, like the real-and-present danger of authoritarianism
— Fascism — in this country.
¿An
example of acting on core values? Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff — a few years back, when he urged the Senate Armed Services
Committee to dismantle the homophobic policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” when repeal
looked like a pipe dream.
As
Admiral Mullen tweeted after his testimony: “Allowing [gay people] to serve openly
[in our Armed Forces] is the right thing to do.”
“The
right thing to do.” That is the vocabulary of courage. Like those
Pharisees … prepped to stand up ... to resist ... to do the right thing. And eager
to help each of us up our “courage” game this Lent by challenging us to answer
what may be life-or-death questions ... or basic questions of Christian backbone
and human decency. Questions like:
§
What work does each of us have to do — now — to prepare ourselves
to act with courage ― in a split-second, in an emergency ― when a neighbor’s safety
is clearly in jeopardy?
§
What work do we have to do — now — to prepare ourselves to act
with courage in less high-risk situations, like standing up to bullies or
ill-informed or just plain bigoted people who, in our presence or on social
media, make racist, sexist, or homophobic comments?
§
Who are people at risk God calls us to be in active, hands-on solidarity
with (let’s say, immigrants and pro-democracy resistors)?
§
Baseline: Do we know who we are? Do we know what we have to do?
What, for each of us, is the “right” thing that reflects the hard truth:
silence, appeasement, and denial are not options. They are not the mind of
Christ.
Yes,
hard questions. But as unlikely as it seems, our neighbors the Pharisees show
us how to exercise courage, because they made a choice to be personally
responsible for the life of their neighbor Jesus.
And
perhaps Jesus, as he goes on his way, might be heard to say, “Those Pharisees? You
know, it was a pleasure to do business with them!”
Amen.
