The Rev. Heidi Thorsen | March 24, 2024

Guilt-sighted

Sermon Preached: Sunday, March 24, 2024 at Trinity on the Green

Palm Sunday, Year B: Jeremiah 31:31-34 | Hebrews 5:5-10 | John 12:20-33 | Psalm 51:1-13

May I speak in the name of God, who is to us Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

The passion narrative that we just heard begins in a courtroom. Jesus has been apprehended by the chief priests and the scribes, who have been waiting for some time for an opportunity to arrest Jesus—and finally, they have succeeded. Jesus is brought before Jewish and Roman authorities, where he is questioned about claims that he is the son of God, and about whether he also claims to be the “King of the Jews.” Although never proven guilty Jesus is sentenced, nevertheless, to death on a cross.

This week I have been thinking about the courts that Jesus was tried in— and I have also been thinking of another courtroom as well. I’ve been thinking about the courtroom that tried another innocent man, Bobby Johnson, and found him guilty of the murder of Ken Fields in New Haven in 2006.

This is a story that some of you may remember from the time. Others of you, like me, may have heard about it more recently through the non-fiction book The Other Side of Prospect, by Nicholas Dawidoff.  In the book, Dawidoff begins by introducing the city itself as a character— this city of New Haven. It’s a city of sharp divides, where wealth and privilege thrive on one side of Prospect Street while poverty, unfulfilled promises of upward mobility, and violence dominate on the other. It’s a story about racial segregation. And it’s also a story about how a young man, Bobby Johnson, is pressured into confessing to a crime he did not commit and spent nine years in prison for it, before finally being exonerated in 2015. 

One of the questions that rests at the center of The Other Side of Prospect is this: how could an innocent person confess to a crime he did not commit? The book offers several contributing reasons: the maturity of the person on trial; their intelligence or experience. But the book especially highlights how the blame rests not on the person who confessed, but the people who drew out the confession. Dawidoff describes the grueling hours of interrogation; false promises of clemency; and numerous recordings of the narrative, used to cultivate a somewhat coherent confession. In the middle of this case the detectives learned information that almost certainly could have proven Bobby innocent. But having fixated already on Bobby and his coerced confession, they stuck to their course, a course that would have landed Bobby in prison for 38 years, if not for his exoneration 9 years later.

I’ve been sitting with this story all week, wondering how it relates to the journey of Holy Week that we now embark on. I’ve felt that God had something to say through this story– or perhaps, many things to say. I wondered: what do these trials have in common, the trial of Jesus, and the trial of Bobby Johnson? How can we see Jesus in the faces of those who are on trial today, both those who are found guilty and those who are found innocent? How can we live more faithfully, as people who worship in the middle of this complicated city? 

There are so many layers; so much to think and pray about. I want to make a quick plug that Trinity’s Book Group has chosen The Other Side of Prospect as one of their reads for this year, with the discussion coming up in May– so if you want to keep talking about these things, know that the conversation does not have to end here. You can be in touch with Jenny Briggs for more details about Trinity’s book group. I also want to note that someone in our Trinity community makes several appearances in the book, John Hoda, who served as a private investigator on the case with a clear eye for some of the things the detectives missed. Yet a another great reason to pick up this book, and read it

For now, I want to return to Holy Week, and I want to return to a theme that comes up again and again in the story of Bobby Johnson, and his coerced confession. I want to talk about guilt.

It seems to me that we as human beings can be obsessed, at times, with the idea of guilt. When something terrible happens, we want to know who did it. We want to know who to blame. As police officers, it was the detectives’ job to discover who was guilty in the case of the 2006 murder of Ken Fields. However, having developed one theory about who was guilty, the detectives fixated so much on this one suspect that they missed the bigger picture of the case. The detectives persisted in their belief that Bobby was guilty– perhaps as a defense mechanism to cover up some of their own wrongdoing in regards to this case. It’s also possible that the idea of Bobby’s guilt simply blinded them to any other possibility. The words that Jesus uttered, of his own accusers, comes to mind: Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.

We see a similar thing happening in the trial of Jesus of Nazareth. The desire to assign guilt became a powerful force, in and of itself, pushing Jesus farther and faster down the road to Calvary. In the Gospel of Mark the scripture says that “Many gave false testimony against [Jesus], and their testimony did not agree” (Mark 12:56). And yet, much like the detectives in Bobby’s case, conflicting testimonies became irrelevant. Fixated on Jesus’ guilt, the chief priests and scribes would do anything they could to sentence Jesus, including bringing him before the Roman governor for a conviction.

There’s something essentially human about this desire to assign guilt. When we find someone else to blame, we can distance ourselves from the harm that has been done. We can go back to seeing the world in clear-cut terms– good and bad, right and wrong– even though the world we live in is far more complicated than that. 

Christians have been assigning guilt for centuries, as a coping mechanism for living in a complicated world. It was not long after Jesus’ death that Christians began blaming the Jewish people for killing Jesus— a claim that is false, and fails to account for the historical context of the life of Jesus, himself a Jewish man. Unfortunately, these claims have had a lasting impact in spreading and enabling anti-semitism. Our liturgy is at times a living memory of that history. For example, today during communion we will hear the sung text known as the “reproaches.” At times this text has been read as a complaint against the Jewish people specifically. Our note in the bulletin rejects this shortsighted interpretation, and affirms that there is no space in our liturgy for anti-semitism. These words remain in our service today because they remind us to reflect on our own complicity in Jesus’ crucifixion: to think about the ways that we hurt Jesus, even today, by our selfishness and failure to love one another, as Christ loves us. But perhaps these words can also be a reminder, today, of how quick we are to put the blame on others. Perhaps they can be a reminder of how our endless tendency to put others on trial shortens our vision, and tempts us to lead with judgment rather than leading with the love of God.

Think of the last time you blamed someone else for doing something— even if they were truly at fault, think about that moment. Was there something else behind your desire to cast blame? Was it a vulnerability that you try to hide - from others, from yourself, and even from God? Or was there a part of you that held some degree of responsibility in the situation? Was there a way you could have been more loving; more forgiving?

I think it is important to remember that God does not put people on trial. Instead, it is us human beings who put others on trial, and we put God on trial too— both in Jesus’ time, and in the present day. We are the ones who are eager to assign guilt, oftentimes to others, and sometimes upon ourselves. We are the ones who are ready to point the finger and place the blame. Now I want to clarify that I do believe our justice system exists for an important reason; I believe humans need to have ways to be accountable to one another for the things we do, and the ways that we might harm one another. Nevertheless it’s important to examine our relationship to guilt. Is guilt the driving force in our lives– or is it care and concern for our neighbors? Is guilt the driving force in your faith– or is your faith grounded instead in the love of God?

Ultimately it wasn’t guilt that led Jesus to the cross - it was love. It was love that led Jesus through the streets of Jerusalem on a donkey. It was love that prompted him to gather his disciples around a table for one last meal. It was love that led Jesus to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane, and empowered him to say before God, “not my will, but yours be done.” I think that God is much less in the business of judging than we sometimes make God out to be. Remember those words from the Gospel of John that we heard two weeks ago, both the famous words and the important ones that come next: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:16-17).

As we reflect on the courtroom drama of this Palm Sunday, I invite you to remember God’s mercy and love. Let go of that oh-so-human obsession with guilt: let go of the guilt you might feel towards yourself; let go of the guilt you cast upon others. And remember instead how Jesus continually deferred passing judgment on others, saying instead “let the one who is without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7). Rather than looking at this Holy Week through the lens of guilt, I invite you to look at it through the lens of love. Let love expand your vision - so that we can truly appreciate the sacrifice that Jesus made in living and dying among us. Let love expand your vision– so that you can see this world not only as it is, but also as God has imagined it could be. Amen.

Works Cited

Dawidoff, Nicholas. The other side of prospect: A story of violence, injustice, and the American city. New York: W. W. Norton, 2022.