Through the Eyes of the Soldier by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer
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“Seven Words”
By Sylvia Sands
The First Word:
The Soldier
I’m a soldier.
So I try not to listen when I hammer in the nails.
I try not to listen to what the condemned man may say.
Otherwise you lose your beauty sleep.
“Father forgive them;
they do not know what they are doing.”
I’ve heard curses and threats and brave defiance,
But never, never, as the hammer swung, concern for me.
At least that’s what it seemed
As I was shocked into meeting his eyes,
The hammer heavy and stilled in my hand
For one dreadful, ice-cold moment.
Through the blood and thorns and nails
His eyes met mine with tenderness.
Suddenly I wanted my mother and my wife
And my gentle daughter
To cradle my head in their laps
And hide me, hide me, from this man’s gaze.
And here I am, throwing dice,
With his words hammering,
Hammering in my head,
Hammering, hammering in my heart,
Like nails of love and forgiveness, and tenderness,
Piercing me, piercing me,
For all eternity.
Here we sit in the first of seven Christian houses of worship that we will visit on this Good Friday, 2014, in the City of Hartford, Connecticut. It may be hard for us to identify with a Roman soldier doing his duty on a hill outside the city limits of Jerusalem just shy of 2000 years ago. It is much easier to objectify him as part of the evil crowd that took part in torturing and killing our Lord.
Some of you, as we have here at Trinity, may have had the opportunity during this week to take part in a dramatic reading of the passion narrative from one of the Gospels. As a member of the congregation, part of that experience is to play the part of the “crowd” or the “chief priests” or “the disciples” in the narrative; along with that comes the opportunity to shout such lines as, “I do not know the man,” or, “We have no king but Caesar” or, the hardest of all, “Crucify him!” . . . Not easy words to repeat. And they are just words. Multiply that uneasy feeling by around, I don’t know, a million, and you begin to understand just perhaps ever so slightly what that soldier may have experienced as he met the gaze of the crucified Jesus.
We, like the soldier, become quite adept at filtering out or ignoring altogether aspects of life that make us uncomfortable – that cause us to lose our beauty rest: Political and social injustices in other parts of the world, economic and educational injustices here at home. This is perhaps preaching to the choir, but when people from the suburbs avoid coming to downtown Hartford, is it really because they are afraid of violence? Or is it perhaps, like the soldier, we are confronted with the reality of part of our community we would rather not experience -- the fruit of our own societal political decisions that keep some well protected and cared for while many are relegated to what is left over. It is more comfortable to avert their gaze and not be drawn in. It is more comfortable not to stare into Jesus’ eyes.
We can avoid to some extent the gaze of our human contemporaries, but as Christians, we can’t avoid the gaze of Jesus. And when we contemplate looking into the eyes of Jesus on this Good Friday, we realize how much like that solder we really are. We, like the soldier, are confronted, perhaps haunted, by the deep, unconditional love of Jesus for each and every one of us, and our own inadequacy to fully accept and own that love. We are reminded by our own consciences of just how far we fall short of God’s plan for us in living up to those values we profess in our baptism. And we are reminded that, with each failure, we, too, are like the soldier, a party to the breaking of the Body of Christ. And yet, he forgives us, and loves us still.
This afternoon I invite you to linger in the gaze of Jesus as we process among our Asylum Hill churches. And if that makes us a little uncomfortable, praise God, that is probably not a bad thing. Amen.