Sisyphus

The Cancel Culture is amusing in an ironic sense. The canceler knows not what he does. And here I am not addressing the troll who gets blocked for name calling or profanity or sexual content. No one has a right to afflict others in that way. I’m thinking of the one that collects triggers like trading cards. He mentioned the governor’s ignominious conduct in blackface, canceled. She defended the governor’s ban on church services and restaurants while the casinos are running wild, canceled. We find ourselves in a world where there are fewer and fewer who believe that reasonable men of good conscious can disagree. Our institutions, even our Constitution, are under assault. Refuse to sit and be viciously slandered by a venomous, racist “anti-racist” whose entire philosophy revolves around perpetuating racism in every facet of life and you can pack up your things and hit the bricks. And Washington is eager to make it worse.

So let’s look at what happens when someone is canceled, to the canceler as well as the canceled. Taking the simplest case first, social media person one rises up to denounce Christians as responsible for every bad thing that happened in the last 2000 years and social media person two crushes that block widget to consign one to non-existence (in a totally solipsistic, post-modern, subjective, by which we mean false, way). I get it, I really do. We are not always tanned, rested, and ready to engage the endless stream of haters. But the possibility of finding common ground is lost. For the one issue the canceler surrenders any possibility of discovering an ally on other issues. Or even that rarest of treasure, a friend. Or even a savior.

Congressperson Ocasio-Cortez denounced Father Damien as a part of “white supremacist culture.” Ocasio-Cortez trades freely on her Catholicism, for example, here in an article she wrote for America, the Jesuit Review. Father Damien, a Catholic, came to a place where the lepers lay like rubbish in the streets, ignored and shunned by one and all, living the most debased existence while their disease progressed. As the Christians who came before him to establish the first hospitals and care for the ill at great personal risk, Father Damien conceived and led a ministry tending to these souls with selfless dedication and, on a nearly inevitable day at the age of 45, addressed his charges saying, “my fellow lepers.” White supremacist? Jesus sees all people One can fairly debate the merits of replacing a statue of Father Damien with a statue of Queen Lili’uokalani. Some might even argue that the spirit of Father Damien is an alien intrusion into the “sacred” halls of Congress. Saint Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Father Damien lived that creed to his own destruction, in service to the very lepers that everyone else walked past or banished to Molokai, a living witness to his Savior’s true and selfless love of neighbor. His detractors, not. Ocasio-Cortez later addressed the issue with Catholic News Agency, and then her staff tried to characterize her remarks in awkward fashion. By demeaning and canceling Father Damien, she has placed a stumbling block between herself and the image of Jesus revealed through Damien.

Jesus’ career is a long chain of cancellations. Herod the Great slew the Innocents of Bethlehem to assassinate this King of the Jews. Herod developed kidney issues and gangrenous genitals, dying an ugly, itchy, painful death soon after. The scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees sought mightily to cancel the rabbi that preached to large crowds in the Temple and scattered the moneychangers who paid the Temple priests to occupy the Porch of the Gentiles, the space reserved for gentiles to stand and hear the sermons and the Word of the Lord. Three of the brightest lights among the Pharisees would come to defect to this troublesome rabbi and claim a place in history and among the saints. The Sanhedrin, the high Jewish council of Jerusalem, plotted against Jesus, tried him, convicted him of blasphemy. Surely, convicting the Lord of being a blasphemer is a huge milestone in the chronicles of the Cancelers. A generation later Titus crushed Jerusalem and destroyed Herod’s Temple. Judas Iscariot plotted to cancel Jesus, whether to immanentize the revolution or hide his thieving or something else altogether is lost to history, but it is revealed in Luke 22:3 that Judas falls under the control of Satan after the Last Supper as he goes to put the conspiracy to arrest Jesus into motion. With Judas’ suicide, hanging himself from a tree, a most grievous and dishonorable fate in Jewish eyes, Judas has also canceled himself. Pontius Pilate comes across as indifferent at the trial, finding no fault, contriving an excuse to release either Jesus or Barabbas, but once that verdict comes down he shows our Lord the fullest cruelty available to Roman law. The scourging, the mocking, the procession, and, finally, the crucifixion. Pilate disappears into history soon after, and his beloved Rome will ultimately fall to this Jewish rabbi and see its great buildings picked apart to provide materials for other, lesser buildings. And then there is Satan, the accuser himself, the tempter in the desert, the possessor of demoniacs, and finally the possessor of the Lord’s own Apostle. His tireless work to effect this cancelation is fully realized at the cross. Satan has prevented Jesus’ Davidic reign on Earth and stands a colossus over the fallen world.

And then there was Sunday, and the canceler was canceled. The battle continues, but the war is over. He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Happy Sunday.