In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Well, it’s a very important day, isn’t it? The day we move from having heat on in the church when I arrive to turning on air conditioning by the time of the little entrance. [Laughter] And even I was giving the counsel to turn on the air conditioning, I was thinking to myself, “Well, at least we weren’t blown up this morning with a bomb attack!” Don’t know what the future holds, but there are some Christians this morning for whom this was a very expensive procession.

We’ve heard a lot this morning about the cross in the gospel, didn’t we? “He who loves his life will lose it; he who loses his life for my sake and the Gospel’s will save it.” The grain of wheat, Jesus says this morning, falls to the ground and what happens? It dies, and by its death it brings forth much fruit. In short, there’s a great deal about the cross today.

I would like to share with you this morning three points about the cross, two negative and one positive. First of all, the danger—this is point one—the danger, the almost certain danger, of underestimating the power of darkness. Underestimating the power of darkness: it’s a particularly American trait, to underestimate the power of darkness. We get our illustrations from the Middle East. The Middle East has been a great teacher of humanity, and it continues to be. We certainly learned something about the power of darkness over the past few days, about the gassing of children, about the explosion to kill as many Christians as possible as they walked in their Palm Sunday procession. We tend very much to underestimate the power of darkness. The devil in our society has been reduced to some guy in red tights, leotards—a comic figure. We put his picture on hot sauce, don’t we? He’s serious. He’s infinitely wiser, more prudent, sagacious than we are. He’s a better strategist. Famous last words of a would-be Christian: “I can handle it.” There’s a bunch of tunes you can put that on. “I can handle it.”

What is the power of darkness? The power of darkness is that which takes a crowd who on Sunday was shouting, “Hosanna to the son of David,” same crowd six days later, “Crucify him!” Same crowd, just that little interlude of time. Jesus lost his ratings. I suspect that that crowd may have felt rather satisfied with themselves. “Hosanna to the son of David. The Messiah has arrived and we are to meet him.” They turned him into the Suffering Servant just a few days later. The power of darkness? Take the example of St. Peter. The change in Peter did not take six days; the change in Peter occurred within three hours. “I can do it.”

The reason we underestimate—one of the reasons we underestimate—the power of darkness is because we have an unwarranted optimism about human impulses. The person who taught us an optimism about human impulses was a fellow by the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the people in the parish several years ago said to me, “I’m going to design a t-shirt and everybody’s going to wear the t-shirt. It’s going to say: Blame Rousseau!” [Laughter] Well, Rousseau deserves the blame! Rousseau believed that man’s natural instincts were good. He believed in the noble savage. He believed that civilization, culture, political order corrupted people. If you took away the political order—in other words, if you went back to a state of an-archia, people would be just fine. This is the man who fathered five children out of wedlock, and the day after their birth, took them to an orphanage. So much for the nobility of human impulses!

Rousseau subverted the entire enterprise of education. Here was a man who never raised a child in his life, who wrote extensively about education! Back when I was a lot younger than I am now, a modern disciple of Rousseau was a fellow by the name of Dr. Benjamin Spock. And two or three generations of children were utterly ruined because women read Dr. Spock’s books on raising children. Dr. Spock could not raise radishes! So there’s the first danger, the danger of underestimating the power of darkness.

Second danger—I’m still in the negative mode—the failure to maintain vigilance. Now, vigilance has a military tone to it. There’s something military about vigilance. There’s no need to be vigilant unless there’s danger out there. This failure to maintain vigilance is a natural consequence of underestimating the power of darkness. If we believe that everything really is okay, if you really do believe that, then act on it: don’t lock your door tonight. If you really do believe that, don’t lock your door tonight. And take down all the fences that you put around your yard, because we’re told that fences divide people. Actually, I recall Robert Frost says they unite them, make good neighbors. [Laughter]

Now, in the Bible vigilance is so closely associated with prayer. “Watch and pray,” Jesus says. “Watch and pray”: he says that at the beginning of the agony in the garden to his apostles. “Watch and pray.” And “watch and pray” will be the theme of the Bridegroom Matins services which we start tonight and over the next couple of days. “Watch and pray.” So prayer is the chief expression of vigilance.

In addition to prayer, vigilance requires a practical, even a tactical, wisdom. Notice I’m bringing the military back in. When I speak of a practical, a tactical wisdom in connection with vigilance, I mean this: the ability to control a perimeter. The ability to control a perimeter. You see, if there are no boundaries, then you can’t control anything. And it has to do with the acceptance of the inevitability of limits. You can’t control everything. The Christian must learn to control a perimeter. There must be controllable limits in our lives. That’s why we have to be very cautious to anything that offers us infinite possibilities, such as the internet. I am convinced that the number of sins committed since the invention of an internet has gone up astronomically, sins that I almost never heard when I was a young priest in confession 50 years ago. I never heard or almost never heard certain sins. Internet? Infinite possibilities.

My beloved, we must have controllable limits in our lives. The military analogy is obvious even as is the military metaphor of vigilance. We have to have a perimeter around our lives that we can control.

I talked about vigilance and the control of a perimeter being really a military concept, isn’t it? You know what I’m talking about. Even on a base where there’s absolutely no chance—absolutely no chance of attack, you still put out sentries, just to teach people that frame of mind. You put out sentries. You see, a perimeter can be controlled if one is tactically wise.

I’ll take you on an obvious gambol, because I’m rereading certain books now. Robert Louis Stevenson, in the book Kidnapped, he has this scene where Alan Breck is teaching this practical wisdom to young David Balfour. They’re controlling this roundhouse—remember the siege of the roundhouse in Kidnapped. Two men controlled this roundhouse, but they controlled it. If they’d tried to control the whole ship, it’d be impossible. They put an area where they could control. That’s what the tactician must do: put an area that you can control. Your life must be limited and must be controlled. The sky is not the limit. If the sky is the limit, then somebody’s going to bomb you. There are borders.

When I think of Alan Breck and David Balfour in the siege of the roundhouse, I think of a parallel that’s almost identical. Remember the siege in Treasure Island where young Jim Hawkins with—who is it?—Dr. Trelawney? It’s been a while since I read Treasure Island, but that comes to mind. Remember there’s a siege? In fact, I just thought about it the other day, first time it occurred in my life, and here I am, 52 years old—52 years old? [Laughter] Here I am, I’ve been a priest 52 years, almost. I never noticed before that when David Balfour overhears the plot against the life of Alan Breck, the perfect parallel with young Jim Hawkins in the apple barrel: he hears the plot of Long John Silver. Am I right on that? However, that’s not part of it. Come back to the text.

This vigilance and critical wisdom is called for, beloved, because of the power of darkness. You see, we live in a pinpoint of light, and to the extent that we enlarge the dimensions of light, we create a bigger surface of darkness. It’s one of those ironical things. So in some sense, the more light there is, the more darkness. As soon as your area of light expands, you’ve increased the places where darkness can get in, and that’s just part of growing up.

Let’s return to St. Peter. Jesus told Peter, “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation,” and Peter did not do that; he fell asleep. Peter learned his lesson that night. He was later to write in his epistle, “Be sober; be watchful, for your adversary, the devil, goes about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, whom resist ye, strong in faith!” Peter learned that lesson in that one tragic night.

This vigilance should especially make us suspicious of enthusiasm. Be suspicious of enthusiasm! Enthusiasm is something that must definitely be brought under control, otherwise your soul simply becomes another Woodstock, and there’s that danger: your soul becomes another Woodstock. Be suspicious of enthusiasm. The people of Palm Sunday were not suspicious of their own enthusiasm, and they were deceived within just days.

Because we are summoned not simply to pray but to watch and pray, we stay on what the French called the qui vive, which we translate as “Who goes there?” Qui vive; who goes there? “Who goes there?” is an important question that says something about discernment, and discernment of spirits is an essential component of spiritual vigilance.

Point three—now I’m going to turn positive, talk about the cross. It is imperative, beloved, to recognize that the Gospel is a message of subversion. Everybody hear me on that? The Gospel is a message of subversion. Here is my metaphor. It’s the key in the lock. It’s an exercise in subversion, literally. “Subvert” means to turn upside-down: sub-vert, under-up. The cross is that key. When we insert a key into a lock, we subvert it, literally. We turn the mechanism upside-down.

A constant temptation in the Church, I believe throughout history, is to make the Gospel fit some form of symmetry. I’m always bothered when people come into a house and immediately rearrange the pictures to make them symmetrical. That’s simply a—what’s it? It’s a very, very unhealthy hang-up. They want all your lines like this. Very unhealthy hang-up. But there’s a need, for example, you see in all systematic theologies: you have a framework and everything must fit neatly within that framework. Even the Byzantine form of the cross seems to me an exercise in that. Notice that the Byzantine cross is symmetrical. It represents an artistic impulse to get everything in proportion. It is an artistic cross, the Byzantine cross. More than that, it’s an architectural cross. In fact, we’re told that it’s a divine revelation, that you must have a cruciform building. No, you don’t have to have a cruciform building! That has absolutely nothing to do with the cross! You see, the cross can be made symmetrical: yes, I understand that, and I suppose there’s some value that your walls be straight up and your ceilings straight across. There’s some value to that; I’m not against that.

But the historical cross used by the Romans was not symmetrical. The cross on which Jesus hangs is asymmetric. It is not in its essence a work of art. It is an instrument of subversion. The thing about the cross—and the only thing we ask of a key— Has anybody ever really seen a symmetric key? The whole secret of a key is that it be asymmetric. All we ask of a key is that it fit the lock! The whole problem with the various theories of atonement, as I see it, is that these theories of atonement presuppose some sort of symmetry.

It is quite obvious in the case of St. Anselm. He arranges the mechanism of the cross—my expression—the mechanism of the cross to fit a social, theoretical pattern. He made the cross something perfectly understandable to medieval thought, particularly the medieval knight. He made the cross perfectly understandable. You see, the cross, what took place on the cross, fits no human calculation. The cross is a unique thing. It has the quality of a key. It fits and turns the lock. It subverts the power of darkness.

Salvation was wrought upon the earth, beloved, by that one unique, singular, inevitable event. The cross of Jesus Christ bears absolutely nothing to man’s expectation of symmetry. The cross is as unique as Jehovah’s chosen people; I’m talking about the Jewish people. I’ve told you this story before. Just a few days before the Five Day War or Six Day War or whatever it was, I was traveling in Italy. I got on a train at night, coming back from Napoli to Rome. I’d been climbing up Mount Vesuvius and doing other dis-edifying things that day. I got onto the train. There was a man and a woman sitting there with two little children. I asked him— In Italian I asked him if these other seats were available in the compartment. And the man looked at me and said in flawless Italian, “Non parlo Italiano.” [Laughter] “I don’t speak Italian.” I say, “Che lingua parli? What language do you speak?” He says, “Inglese. Lei parla inglese?” I say, “Un po’. I speak a little English.” [Laughter]

And for several hours we had a long discussion about what it means to be a Jew, because it was completely unintelligible to him that there’s something unique about the Jews. “There’s nothing unique about us; we’re just like everybody else.” Sounds like some lines in Shakespeare, doesn’t it? “We’re like everybody else.” I say, “No, you’re not!” “Well, why not?” I said, “Because God, for reasons best known to himself, and it certainly doesn’t make any sense to me, picked you as his chosen people.” And you know what he says to me? “Why did he have to go and do something like that?” [Laughter] “It’s caused us nothing but trouble for centuries!” And then we had a long talk on that.

You see, that’s something unique; it fits no symmetry at all. That God should take a people, like the Jews, or as one poet said during our lifetime, “How odd of God / to choose the Jews.” That’s two rhymes. It’s odd by our standards, but the cross is odd by our standards. That God appointed a Jewish Galilean carpenter to save the world. That fits no symmetry at all. You cannot put that into a theory of religious history. The cross does not conform; that is to say, it does not con form to any presupposed pattern. It is a key. It fits and turns the lock. Only God can take the measure of man, and only God can take the measure of the human dilemma. Only God understands the power of darkness. We trust only God to bring us out of the darkness into the light. Amen.