CAST IN HIGH RELIEF
[A sermon preached before the clergy and people of Christ Church at the Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday by the Very Rev’d William H. Petersen, PhD, DD.]
THE COLLECT
Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
THE READINGS
Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12 Psalm 22 Hebrews 10:16 - 25
The Passion according to John 18:1 - 19:42
FOCUS TEXT
[Note: the follow hymn text was not sung during the liturgy of the day, but as it provides a concluding focus for the sermon, it was reproduced in the service leaflet and is provided here for prior reading.]
How Shallow Former Shadows Seem
How shallow former shadows seem beside this great reverse,
as darkness swallows up the light of all the universe.
Creation shivers at the knock, the temple rends its veil.
A pallid stillness stifles time and nature's motions fail.
This is no midday fantasy, no flight of fevered brain.
With vengeance awful, grim, and real, chaos is come again.
The hands that formed us from the soil are nailed upon the cross.
The Word that gave us life and breath expires in utter loss.
Yet deep within this darkness lives a Love so fierce and free,
that arcs all voids and – risk supreme – embraces agony.
Its perfect testament is etched in iron, blood, and wood.
With awe we glimpse its true import and dare to call it good.
Words: Carl P. Daw, Jr CMD ; Music: Thomas Tallis (+1585) Third Mode Melody
(arr. by Ralph Vaughn Williams).
THE SERMON
+ Come, Holy Spirit, and fill the hearts of your faithful people; kindle in us the fire of your love; send forth your breath and we shall be created and you shall renew the face of the earth. Amen.
As we gather this noon for the solemn liturgy, we are immediately struck by the utter starkness of the day. We have silently left our place of common prayer from Maundy Thursday with the foreshadowing words of the twenty-second Psalm reverberating in our minds, “Be not far from me, for trouble is near and there is none to help...” (22:11); ”they divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing...?” (22:17) And now, in silence still, we return to our liturgy of the Triduum, of “the three sad days,” only to continue where we left off, “they pierce my hands and my feet...” (22:16); “My God, my God,, why have you forsaken me and are so far from my cry...?” (22:1)
We return, I say, but now in the light we confront the starkness of the dread day and see with our own eyes what was done in the shadows of the night before: all colorful vesture is removed, both choir and clergy are clothed in utter black; what little ornamentation remains in our place of prayer is muted or obscured; the altar, normally the focus of our worship, like the day itself, is reduced to bare necessity. We are set for mourning and grief. And yet, even in the face of this starkness and bare necessity, or, perhaps, because of it, everything is cast in high relief. We are invited to see clearly both the complexities and the result, both the issues and the issue, of this day.
Seen in such high relief, the first thing to note about this day of bare necessity and utter starkness is the fact that it is the one day of the year in which we do not celebrate the Eucharist. Rather, from the bread and wine consecrated at the beginning of our Triduum liturgy last night, we receive today with fear and trembling the sacrament of what is done for us this day. We hear as we encounter this food “so awful and so sweet,” words indeed familiar, but today bearing fateful freight, “This is my body, given for you...this is my blood shed for you.” Yet on those stark words of bare necessity is founded all our hope, heard now with high relief!
But the complexities of this day will not easily disappear, nor the issues be obscured by this result, this issue. Indeed, the complexities of this day are themselves diverse. First, there are all the issues that group themselves around the interpretation of the event itself in its own time. And, secondly, upon those initial complexities come myriad layers of interpretation of Good Friday through the ages between the time of Jesus’ passion and crucifixion and our encounter of this abundant inheritance in our own time.
Even in the times closest to the event commemorated on this day, there is a kind of alternating current of interpretation. In the Synoptic Gospels, that is, in the Markan, Matthean, and Lukan accounts the keynote is one of tragedy. The week that began with an entry into Jerusalem marked by resounding “Hosannas,” now ends with a crucifixion of horror. In the Johannine Gospel, which invariably forms the passion account for Good Friday, the timetable is somewhat different. Here the evangelist makes sure that we understand Jesus to have been crucified at the very moment when the lambs are being slaughtered for the Passover. And we are given to understand thereby that the moment of his death on the cross is a moment not of tragedy but of triumph, “And, I, when I am lifted up will draw everyone to me.” (John 12:32) The last word from the cross in this Gospel is not a cry of distress, but a winning shout of victory, “It is finished!” (John 19:30)
As to the layers of interpretation in subsequent centuries, we will find them either, on the one hand, trying to hold the tension between the tragedy and triumph of this day together, or, on the other hand, allowing one or the other of these foci exclusively to provide the basis for our reflection. For the first centuries of the Christian movement it is the triumph of the day that stands out. Compounding that emphasis is the relative absence of the personal dimension in meditation on the crucifixion, but, rather, the addition of a second emphasis to the triumph, namely, its universal or cosmic implications.
This is best exemplified, for instance, in the hymn we will sing at the conclusion of our veneration of the cross in today’s liturgy. Sung to the flowing plainsong tune Pange lingua, Venantius Honorius Fortunatus’ 6th century poem announces the triumphal theme in its first line: “Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle, of the mighty conflict sing; tell the triumph of the victim...” It goes on to recount how blood and water poured forth from the wounded Savior’s side, opening the way to see a vast and cosmic effect: “earth and stars and sky and ocean by that flood from stain are freed.” (Hymnal 1982, # 166).
Such a hymn also provides a clue for us in setting the mode for our observance of this day of bare necessity. For it is in the poet’s theology rather than in the logicians’s discourses, however learned or systematic, that we shall find a truer path. For poetic interpretation better holds together not only the tension of issues, but, more basically in us, poetry holds together our affect and our intellect, our thought and feeling in the face of the starkness of this day.
Even so exacting a theologian and careful a scholar as Peter Abelard found this the approach for the liturgy of Good Friday, for it was his hymn “Alone thou goest forth to die” (H82, 164) which sequenced us to the Passion Gospel today. Even so, by the high middle ages we may witness through Abelard’s poem a shift of focus from the cosmic aspects of the crucifixion to a more personal appropriation of the atonement: “our sins, not thine, thou bearest Lord, make us thy sorrow feel, till through our pity and our shame, love answers love’s appeal.” In other words, kneeling before the cross on this day we see the extent to which God will go for us and we are left with a decision, “Amid all the vagaries of our human condition, can we do less than to love God in return?” Love answers love’s appeal.
From the medieval through the 16th century reformations, the mood remains much the same except, perhaps, that its expression is more communal and not so focused on the individual as we sing together in the great chorale “O Sacred Head sore wounded” (H82, 169): “Ah, keep my heart thus moved to stand thy cross beneath, to mourn thee, well-beloved, yet thank thee for thy death.” Here, too, is an early indication of the road into the piety of subsequent centuries, a way, it must be said in regard to Good Friday, that came to a fork and by sheer quantity of emphasis took the path of feeling in favor of thought, of affect over intellect.
For the fullest appropriation of the personal and pietistic, yet also with a kind of applied logic, we find a pointed application to ourselves of those Reproaches that follow our Veneration of the Cross, as we sing: “Ah, Holy Jesus, how hast thou offended...? Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee? Alas my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee. ’Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee: I crucified thee!” (H82, 158) Surely this is sufficient ground for today’s confession of sin before receiving the absolution of communion!
Yet, penultimately, in our all-too-brief excursion thorough the layers of interpretation from the event of the crucifixion itself until today, there is yet one more seam to follow. In the balance between triumph and tragedy, amidst the tension between the cosmic and the personal, from the late 18th century Evangelicals, there emerges a focus on the cross as, indeed, a sign of triumph, but with an undeniably individual aspect as well. Such may be seen in the 19th century hymn “In the cross of Christ I glory” (H82, #442) and that focus plays out the interpretation in this personal way: “When the woes of life o’er-take me, hopes deceive and fears annoy, never shall the cross forsake me: lo, it glows with peace and joy.”
So, finally, where does this pilgrimage through all the layers of interpretation centered on Good Friday leave us? Is there any remedy to the alternatives of cosmic triumph or tragedy, on the one had, and, on the other hand, individualistic gratitude or grief? Are we left on this day to remain in one of these modes or another as simply observers of a pious tableau? It is precisely here with these “So what?” questions that we may profit from a contemporary contribution to the multiple layers of often contrasting or conflicting interpretations of the issues of this day.
Carl Daw’s poem, usually set to Tallis’ Third Mode Melody, magnificently arranged by Ralph Vaughn Williams, may show the way toward resolution. It is obviously a meditation on the meaning of the Cross and, as such, has the advantage of keeping a comprehensive biblical perspective before us that enables holding a creative tension between the cosmic and personal elements. The poem faces the stark reality of a pre-creation chaos that has come again and “swallows up the light of all the universe” At the median point of the poem, however, we witness to the objective event, “The Word that gave us life and breath expires in utter loss.”
Here the power of evil, the effect of sin is experienced to the hilt: its destructiveness, its dissolution, its disintegration...death itself! The very fabric of the universe is torn asunder and the creation-denying nothingness of the void is disclosed. But here at this crucial juncture the gospel is proclaimed and in the blink of a moment revealed to us: “Yet deep within this darkness lives a Love so fierce and free that arcs all voids...” What a magnificent phrase! “...that arcs all voids...” At once it shows sin starkly for what it is and with the strobe-light image of an electric arc casts everything into high relief! In a flash we are brought into the picture and begin to see in the tension of the issues why it is we call this day Good Friday. In the context of human history God chooses the “risk supreme” for us and for our salvation.
This then is the beginning of the healing of all wounds, of the mending of all trespass, the bridging of all chasms, indeed, the arcing of all voids. Tragedy and triumph are kept together; the cosmic and personal and everything in between are held together. Here on this day cast in high relief and in consideration of that “everything in between” we may begin to see that we are not merely passive observers in modes variously of gratitude or grief. Now we may fairly grasp why the central focus of our comprehensive prayer on this day is for the whole human family. For today we are invited into God’s mission in the world.
And the pattern and the power of that mission are disclosed in Jesus the Christ, the “arc” that lights the way, the energy that gives life itself. Here it is that we may pray with new depth of understanding the prayer for mission set for Fridays in the Daily Office (BCP, p. 101). It is a contemporary prayer composed by Charles Henry Brent, sometime bishop of this diocese and a frequent preacher in this very pulpit. Brent’s prayer, like Daw’s poem, makes all the connections and casts not only this day, but our mission into high relief:
Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace. So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.
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Christ Church, Rochester, New York
May 13, 2012
Easter 6
At our Rochester / Monroe District meeting last Thursday, we were asked to divide into small groups and discuss our Diocesan vision sharing the joy of Christ: where do you find joy in the church? In your own parish? In your life as a Christian? We pulled our chairs out of neat rows into clusters. After introducing ourselves to one another, the four of us in my group hovered over the print out about joy, and fell into a deathly silence. In the silence (which I was determined not to be the first to break) I heard someone in the group next to us say, "Joy is different from happiness." Someone said something about joy not being quantifiable, then someone said something else that made them burst into laughter. I wanted to be in that group. My group was a turtle fast receding into its shell, so I thought about saying something like: "Hmm, do you notice we hesitate at this question about joy?" But then I thought about my spiritual director and how she encourages me to let go and let silence. At long last, one of the women in our group said that a parishioner in the other woman's church was a joyful person, and so a conversation formed around how a person can be an embodiment of joy. Back in the large group, the small groups had a chance to share. One group had talked about how, indeed, joy is not the same as happiness. It can contain sorrow. Another group had talked about how joy is something that, even though it spreads, you can't make it happen for others. My group listened but did not present back to the large group: in our group, even though we hit on how people can embody joy, our conversation - somehow - went to Lyme disease.
My guess is joy is not easy for everyone to talk about because we really do think it means happiness and most of us are not inherently happy, at least in the way our culture leads us to believe we should be happy, and THAT makes us feel that we are in some way askew. I don't know when it began with Americans, but for some time now we've been stumbling around- great hordes of us - beleaguered and made neurotic by the question we've been made to ask: "Am I content? Am I happy? Wait..is something in me.. discontent? What's happening?" Christian joy does not represent an inalienable right of the individual to pursue happiness. Christian joy does not look like Aristotle's philosophy of happiness which, combined with harmony, is the goal of life for the individual. Jesus didn't set any goals for himself. Had you asked him his personal goal for fulfillment, it would not have been personal and the fulfillment would have been dubious: "I have a baptism to be baptized with, and what stress I am under until it is completed."
The fruits of the spirit are declared to be love, joy, and peace. BUT, the whole of the Christian life as described in the Bible has little to do with happiness. There is, however, a lot about joy and sorrow, about life coming from death and joy coming from sorrow. Unless a grain falls to the earth and die it cannot bear fruit.. if anyone would be my disciple he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me... I am crucified with Christ, says the author of Galatians, yet I live, but not I, but Christ lives in me [Gal 2:20] The mystery of the fruits of the spirit - joy, peace, and love - is how they are distinct, yet, like the Trinity itself, entwined. One flows into the other. Abide in my love, I am telling you this not simply as a commandment, but as a promise: abide in my love and you will know joy. The deeper mystery of the fruits of the spirit, or perhaps, the odder mystery, is that they are not only entwined with one another but with sorrow and death. They are mirrors of the very God who is the container of life and death, who is one with all of his creation, who dances and mourns simultaneously.
When we tap into the life of the spirit, we see that we are also dancing and mourning simultaneously, that our own sorrow is not, as we thought, void of all joy. I remember a conversation about how music makes us cry. A young girl at a violin recital said: "The way she played made me cry and I couldn't tell if I was happy or sad, and I liked that. That's my favorite kind of cry - where it's mixed." In the life of the spirit, sorrow and joy spill over into each other and wisen each other up. We are all of us heirs of God's cosmos, eternally dying and eternally being made new. I remember watching the last of the sun slant through the stained glass windows of the hospital chapel at Beth Israel in NYC, and seeing the faces of the dying aglow in that light, the light of what may well have been their last Eucharist in that hospital and on this earth. You should have been there. It wouldn't necessarily have made you happy to glance around at the IV drips and to know that they could only sustain for so long. But the fullness of Eucharistic joy was there: born out in the raspy, whispering voices:"Holy, holy, holy, Lord, God of power and might." Born out in the kind of peace that is passed in frail hands and arms that tremor. And let me tell you, this was the peace that passes all understanding.
We get a glimpse today of this Gospel capacity to have joy, peace, love, AND sorrowing and dying swimming around in us at the same time, until our cups flow over. Listen to the flow in today's Gospel: abide in my love..so that my joy may be in you..no one has greater love than this, to lay one's life down for one's friends..I appointed you to go and bear fruit that will last. Do you see? All in one breath: love, joy, dying, bearing fruit. That's the flow. That's our make-up. Someone in the other group had it right: joy is not happiness. It's more complicated. And it's more relational.
Jesus' goal was not to love other people, nor was it to get crucified. He simply lived in the flow of the divine make-up which we've all inherited: love, joy, death, new fruit. Jesus did not talk "goals," but he spoke of commandment. And he laid it out in such a way, in his words and in his life (and death) as to show us that this kind of commandment is a rule of life because it keeps you alive, even when you are dying. If you keep my commandments you will abide in my love. Jesus said this knowing the reverse is true, because the one flows into the other: if you abide in my love you will keep my commandments. And this is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you. And then he talked about laying your life down for someone else and joy in the same breath.
It's easier to talk about limes disease. It requires more of us to talk about that kind of joy that mixes with sorrow in your tears at a concerto, or joy that bubbles up in a Eucharistic feast for the dying. Or joy that comes from losing your life in order to gain it."In some ways, I've never forgiven him for taking that bullet," a mother said of her 22 yeard old son, who ran out into the street trying to save - and did save - a nine year old girl from the gun fire of a supposed gang. "But I can be angry at him and proud at the same time," she says, standing by a mural of her son, memorializing him in the neighborhood park."I wanted to raise him right. I guess I did. I didn't know he loved Jesus this much! You look over them when they're babies and you want the best for them and you want to be the best for them. I didn't know this would come of us," she said, "that this is who we would be." She was standing by a mural in the park, a mural that memorialized him and in which he was painted, radiant and holding a little girl in his arms. I believe she was talking about a kind of death and a resurrection that she shared with her son: "that this is who we would be. " She was referring to her new identity as a martyr's mother, and her new life that came of that. She didn't look happy - how could she have been happy? But she was reborn. She was interviewed on the evening news. The way she spoke into the camera, you got the feeling she was steadying herself for something greater to happen - something more, not tragedy, but something truly great.
O God, you have prepared for those you love you such good things as surpass our understanding, we pray in today's collect. Pour into our hearts such love toward you that we, loving you in all things, may obtain your promises which exceed all that we can desire, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who LIVES, and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.
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Christ Church, Rochester, New York
April 1st, 2012
Palm Sunday
One of the most wrenching experiences I have had as a priest was a conversation with a woman whose teen-aged son was dying a slow death. He had been in the passenger seat when his friend took a left turn into the path of an oncoming truck. “Whatever you say to me,” she warned, “don’t you dare tell me that this is part of God’s plan. Don’t even tell me his suffering will be washed over in Heaven, because we are not in heaven right now – he is not in heaven – we are in agony. He is in agony. Don’t tell me that God is in charge and we will be ok – he is not ok.” She did not speak of her child’s suffering in the singular, but always included the plural first: “we are not in heaven, he is not in heave. We are in agony, he is in agony.” At some point in the conversation, she removed her cross necklace, and said “Here you take this,” and, even though I was sitting with her, she got up and went over to my desk, opened her fist and slammed it down. “Here. I don’t know what to do with this anymore. I am not going to stand at his death bed and wear this while God takes him away from me.” She stood over it for a moment and said something to the effect of: “And don’t tell me God knows what it’s like to lose a child. His story is not my story.” And then she left.
In The Brothers K, Ivan challenges his priestly brother Alyosha, on the question of the suffering, especially the suffering of children. He recalls to his brother the story of a general who set his hunting dogs on a boy of eight – had them tear him apart in front of his mother, and rebukes Alyosha for the God he worships, the God whose promise of heaven desecrates the reality of human suffering in the present, and argues that the promise of universal harmony robs us of the more real sanctity of a suffering child. “Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming!” he says, “ I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child..”
How do we answer Ivan? What do we say to the teen ager’s mother who, in fact, never wanted her cross back? (Her husband, in fact, came for it one day). What should they have said to Mary, other than “a sword will pierce your own soul, also?” Or to Jesus, for that matter, who seems only to have asked that, in the end, they stay awake with him (which they didn’t). In all of his ministry, Jesus never seemed to address the problem of suffering, or death (and they are not always the same). At least, not theologically, or in any kind of teaching. He alleviated suffering where he could, he prayed with people, he showed immense compassion, and then suffered and died like everyone else. Well, maybe. He suffered more than some have, and less than some have: there are, sadly, worse ways to go than crucifixion. Well, maybe. I suppose for God incarnate to feel forsaken by God might be something we can’t fathom. That’s the thing about the passion. It is God’s death as well as Jesus’. We know about human suffering, but what really do we know about God’s? It is easier because he’s God? Or worse, more intense, because he’s God?
Today, we being the death march. Jesus’ death march. God’s death march. Much has been said about Palm Sunday and its absurd, even comic nature: Zechariah has given us a king on an ass. Theologians and even the painter Rounault have given us Christ the Clown. Paul has given us a God whose wisdom is foolishness, whose Christ is a stumbling block that renders all who follow him fools for Christ. On this day, there will be references in churches across the country to April Fool’s Day, and how theologically appropriate it is that we fools for Christ shout hosanna as well follow our peasant king riding an ass. And it is appropriate. But let us get lost in neither the poetic absurdity nor the theological novelty of this day and all its images, and remember that Jesus entered into Jerusalem weeping on that donkey. Real tears, real, -here-on-this-earth-human tears: much like the tears Dostoevsky and literary greats have described, much like the tears of the woman who slammed her cross on my desk and the tears of the father who came back for it. In the end, they buried their son with her cross in his hand. I didn’t know how to interpret that gesture, and didn’t know how to ask. Did they, in the end, suspect that God’s story WAS their story? Because this is God’s death march, because God is all in all, we walk alongside so many others in the dark march of holy week. It is not Easter. We dare not say a word about resurrection. It is not that we need to join Ivan in renouncing the higher harmony of the Easter Kingdom, but in this hour and in the week to come, we are to walk in solidarity with the ones who are tortured, the ones who are dying, the ones whose tears are yet to be redeemed in God’s heaven. We are to look upon our king’s own tear streaked face as he rides toward us and let our hosannas give way to silence and solidarity, for we must accept that the tears of God, then as now, are incomprehensible to us.
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The Great Vigil of Easter
April 7, 2012
Only two days ago, we gathered at the table of the last supper. Jesus was a cup of promise spilling over to his loved ones gathered. Love one another as I have loved you, the hour of glory is near. I am with you always. You don’t know what I’m doing now, but later you’ll understand. And he washed their feet, but then he said something troubling: “not all of you are clean.” He was speaking about Judas. It is troubling to think that perhaps Jesus’ reassurances were not intended for the whole family, as it were and, if not, can the rest of us truly be reassured? Tonight, we celebrate the banquet of the resurrection, but not everyone is here. What has become of Judas? I’m worried to think that Judas is not with us tonight, especially since he missed the last supper. By the time Jesus had started to reassure everyone, he’d already gone off to betray Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. Why does life always seem to demand that one’s loss is another’s gain? I am talking about Judas’ loss. Judas is the loss – Judas is LOST – and our salvation history seems to have hinged on his being so. We are to believe that the loss of Judas – the lost soul of Judas – was ordained, was in the plan. Jesus, in on the plan, has told them “One of you will betray me. It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” Jesus then gives him the bread and gives him the command: “Do quickly what you have to do.” Judas receives the bread, receives the plan, and goes immediately out into the night.
But the rebel in me wants Judas to be honored, not so much for his betrayal, but for his obedience to his role. Who would want to play his act in salvation history? Every year that we read the passion I always have a special fondness for the agreeable parishioner who says “yes” to reading his part. Judas himself could play his part for only so long: he eventually had to hang himself. He fulfilled the ancient prophecy, “the one who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me,” and then left the world with no ally. No ally - neither human, divine, or demonic. I am not ready to celebrate the banquet of the resurrection as fully as I might. Judas is our brother. His loss is our loss.
It is not original or unusual to sympathize with Judas, or at least to worry about him. Sympathy for Judas is driven by theological questions of human freedom and divine determinism: to what extent are we free to choose for or against God if God already has in mind whether we are for or against him? Sympathy for Judas is driven by questions of human sin and divine forgiveness: had Judas, as Peter, lived on after his betrayal, would he, too, have been forgiven? Will he be forgiven in death? Sympathy for Judas is driven by questions of the nature of good and evil: since remorse led Judas to the hanging tree, was he, in fact, evil? Or does killing the Son of God constitute evil of a different category? Or, if Judas’ crime was part of the divine plan, did God take on the guilt himself? Or if not, did God somehow take on Judas’ salvation in a way we may never know? I think of a line from a Bob Dylan song: “In many a dark hour, I’ve been thinking about this / that Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss / but I can’t think for you, you’ll have to decide – whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side.”
Naturally, we all – even in the Episcopal church – will answer (and even ask) these questions differently, these questions stirred up by Judas and his story, which is also God’s story. Not surprisingly, the bible and its writers take different points of view on these eternal themes, too. What is not up for debate for the writers of the Old and New Testaments, and what is not up to debate for Jesus, is God’s goal to lift everyone of us out of our deepest human wreckage. The wreckage that’s been wrought on us and that which we’ve wrought on ourselves and others. For we hear today this prophecy as well: He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. And if this is so, then passed away will be dinner tables where our loved ones have been absent, where those of us remaining mourn their loss, as surely as Judas was mourned when the truth came out. At the heart of our sympathy for Judas, deeper than our questions about him, is our sympathy for those like him we may have known or loved. Surely we will look to the new heaven and the new earth and see, on the horizon, the lost souls we have mourned running towards us. I will forever remember something Martin Bell, an Episcopal Priest, said to a group of us on retreat years ago. He talked about how difficult it would be to share in the heavenly banquet if he had to look downward toward hell at a former friend who, in his words, had made some bad choices… a friend who would never share in the meal. He put his question to us: could we ever be happy at that banquet if those we love are absent? That is why I worry about Judas.
What is not in question is God’s own desire for the return of all lost souls, God’s design of a new heaven and earth where it will be all but impossible for anyone invited to the feast to be missing; where God will again pour from the cup of promise and fulfillment: “See, I am making all things new. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.” Perhaps, then, we shall see the figure of Judas, the mark of the rope being washed clean from his neck as he drinks steadily from the cup which he abandoned at the last supper. We cannot help but to hope to see Judas and embrace him, for in that hope is our hope for all whom we love who have alienated themselves from God. Our hope for all who have been so utterly swallowed by guilt as to desire their own death. Our hope that, in the new heaven and earth, it will be nigh impossible to refuse God’s mercy, or to turn away from his love feast with a dark heart. Our hope to sup with Judas at the first supper in the new life is our hope that, whether we are forgiving or being forgiven, we, like the this tired, old heaven and earth, will be made new. According to an old medieval legend, the apostles assembled together in heaven to celebrate the last supper. There was one place vacant, until Judas came in through the door and Christ rose and kissed Judas and said, “We have waited for thee.” Now THAT is why we celebrate the banquet of the resurrection. Because Christ rose and kissed Judas. Because Christ rises tonight from this bright and festive table to kiss the rest of us. Christ is risen, alleluia!
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Christ Church, Rochester, New York
Maundy Thursday, April 5th, 2012
Jesus’ washing his disciples feet is the prelude to the deeper sacrifice which, to this day, causes us struggle: his sacrifice of his body which, over the intense course of the next three days, we are commanded to remember and to ritualize. I don’t know that any Christian can be fully at ease with the actuality of the crucifixion, aren’t we less at ease with his command that we see his dying body as our food? As if the mere fact of being religious in an age of science and technology is not enough, we Christians have the Eucharist to contend with. Who can adequately explain this act of worship and be reasonable at the same time? We are moved - even awed to tears - by Davinci's or Blake's rendering of "The Last Supper" on canvass, but then there is Freud. Who among us can come with equal awe to this table remembering Freud’s claim that Christianity retains elements of cannibalism in its religious psyche? Are we ourselves convinced that the image of eating God should be at the center of our ritual? Because it is.
Jesus wouldn’t have expected anyone to be convinced. John the Evangelist reports: “When many of his disciples heard it, they said: ‘this teaching is difficult.’” What they meant was not that his words were obscure, but rather that they were offensive. So Jesus tried to get them to wrap their heads around it as a metaphor, as spiritual reality, assuring them that his actual body and blood would, in the end, ascend to heaven. He tried to dissuade them from being literalistic, but they were so caught off guard by the image of eating his body and blood that they could no longer listen. Some were likely offended at the thought of eating a type of sacrifice reserved only for God: according to religious law at the time, fat, bloody flesh, and blood were reserved for sacrifices to God. We really can’t imagine how outlandish Jesus’ offer of his own body and blood must have sounded in his own day: how does this man imagine his own body as holy and proper sacrifice to God? And, if he’s religious, WHY sacrifice flesh for people instead of God? Human beings sacrifice to God, not the other way around!
Equally offensive is this man’s claim that God resides in his body –that he himself is the “bread of Heaven.” He is pushing everything too far – and Jesus was, and it got him executed. But he was telling the truth. We wouldn’t show up for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter if we didn’t, on some level and to different degrees, believe him. Despite our frustrations at not being able to understand or explain Jesus’ bodily sacrifice, despite the deep awkwardness of it all , despite the fact that we are not fully comfortable with this sacrifice, we cannot turn from it.
We show up because this bread does not leave you hungry when you open your hands to it, this bread reminds us of a body that, like our own bodies, knew birth and hunger and dying. It is a spiritual bread, but it feeds us also in the memory of the human body whose slaughter was called our salvation and we don’t know why. We can’t explain why this bread is our salvation, and really, Jesus didn’t spend his ministry trying to explain it either. There are different theologies with different names that attempt to explain why Jesus had to die, but Jesus himself – that is, God incarnate– was our bread of Heaven in life and in death, because God came to feed us and, more importantly, show us how to feed one another. Greater even that the commandment to remember his sacrifice is the commandment to remember one another: I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. It is in remembrance of this commandment we name this day Commandment Thursday. Maundy Thursday.
And yet. He did command us to remember this meal, to remember his dying, and that is why we come to this table, soon to be stripped. We might engage in the task of theology as we ponder the necessity, the meaning, of his bodily sacrifice. But when Jesus asks that we remember his death, there is no need for theology. We come to the table of the last supper because he asked us to. For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, St. Paul wrote, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." He wanted us to remember. Maybe Jesus, already breathing of the glory to come, wanted to gather us in before he died, so we wouldn’t despair at the foot of his cross. Maybe he wanted to reassure us that his death – that all death – would never be in vain: this cup is the new covenant, he said. Maybe Jesus, already breathing the night air of Gethsemane, was simply afraid we would forget him. The genius of Davinci’s canvass and Freud’s psychology aside – along with we might call the genius of our own theological constructs - we come to this table because Jesus asked us to.
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Christ Church, Rochester, New York
March 25th, 2012
5th Sunday in Lent
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Given the recent events and turn of events, we can assume these Greeks are curious, if not urgent, to see Jesus for themselves. Undoubtedly they have heard that Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead. Maybe even from the eye witnesses themselves – so many had been there to see it: “Jesus asked them to roll the stone away. The man was dead, no doubt, they rolled the stone away and you could smell the body. Jesus cried out like this, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ and he came out, still bound and wrapped, came walking out of the cave. The man, Jesus, said ‘unbind him and let him go. We were there. We saw it.’”
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” I like the old translation: “Sir we would see Jesus.” By the time these rich words are spoken, there is a warrant for Jesus’ arrest. The religious leadership is anxious. I quote: “this man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” Caiaphas the high priest has called for Jesus’ death, so Jesus has gone into hiding in the near wilderness of Ephraim with only his disciples. After a time, he returns to Lazarus, to Bethany, to the home of Mary and Martha, and the Greeks who ask to see Jesus have more than likely heard that he ate dinner with them, for a great crowd had followed him to see what might happen next. But apparently, he only ate dinner. By now, the religious leadership has plotted Lazarus’ death as well since, and I quote, “It was account of him that many of them were deserting and were believing in Jesus.” It’s hard not to read the Bible and ask ‘what if’ questions: what if a crowd had not followed Jesus when he came out of hiding? What if they had not waited around outside while Jesus ate with Mary, Martha and Lazarus? Would Jesus have lived if the crowds hadn’t followed him so? Or lived a little longer?
Sir, we would see Jesus. Even though they were Greek, they were surely stirred by the collective anxiety and anticipation, by the spirit of those gathered along the streets of Jerusalem to greet their king, as well as those who stood waiting for him with blood thirst. However they felt about Jesus, the one question the crowd had in common – at least, those who knew of the warrant for his arrest - was whether Jesus would risk appearing at the Festival of the Passover. “They were looking for Jesus and were asking one another as they stood in the temple, ‘what do you think? Surely he will not come to the festival, will he?’” The Greeks who approached Philip would have been impressed, had they known, that it never would have occurred to Jesus NOT to come to the Passover Festival. That Jesus was, above all else, faithful to the same religious establishment that demanded his death.
Sir, we would see Jesus. The very breath of this request would mingle in the same air in which palm branches had been waved, in which dust had been kicked up by the colt he rode. They have asked to meet Jesus shortly after his entrance into Jerusalem on a donkey, maybe even minutes after. For the great crowd “that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm and went out to meet him, shouting, Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord –the King of Israel.” They were Greeks –they watched Jesus enter the city as absurdly as he did having no reference, as the Jews would have, to Zechariah: “Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt.”
My colleague points out that they are a bit like the magi – are they not? Arriving from some foreign place, knowing little about the man they seek except that they are compelled to seek him. I wish we knew more about them. How many were there? Why did any Greeks at all come to Jerusalem for the Passover? What had they heard about Jesus? What did they want? But no sooner do they show up in John’s story than they disappear from it. It is not even clear if they had the chance to meet him at all.
Sir, we would see Jesus. At its core, the request reveals a hunger for truth, for understanding, for solace, I would dare say for God himself. At its core, this request is a quest, whether we follow a star, hear tell of miracles, or follow a hunch. These Greeks who know little to nothing about Jesus know that they want to see him. They don’t say why, they may not know why. Perhaps he will confirm some hunch for them. Perhaps these foreigners operate on the hunch that, if they can only meet him, it will be as though they had known him all along. Perhaps, given the way they speak, this man they are determined to see will, for no logical reason, be recognizable to them. At its core, their request is a quest. It is our quest – a quest to know, as if for the first time, what we have known all along: that this man who is bound for death is also bound also for somewhere else. Somewhere – if only we could see it – we would remember it at once. It is the place before creation and cross, and it is carried in his very body. To be near the raiser of the dead is something of a holy terror, some of us react with blood thirsty desire to put him to death, to put to death all quest and all mystery and keep things practical. Some of us will want to follow and be near him, because to be in the presence of his very body is to be near the very same mystery that is woven into the fabric of our own being. In the end, we’re made up of the same mystery that brought him into being - he said as much. In some ways, to meet him for the first time is, to put it in cliché, to recognize that you’ve known him all along. I prefer the lines from TS Elliot’s “Little Gidding” – I think them as I ponder the Greeks who wished to see Jesus, and any of us who have asked the same and undertaken some like quest to find our God:
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
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Christ Church, Rochester, New York
March 11, 2012
Third Sunday of Lent
Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy..six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh is a Sabbath to the Lord your God…for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, but rested on the seventh day, therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.
In “The Song of the Seed,” Macrina Wiederkehr writes of her own Sabbath: As the stars again become visible tonight, I am reminded of a feast of leisure from my childhood days, I remember, on summer evenings, sitting on a quilt outside with Mama waiting for the stars to come out. Looking back at that moment with my adult eyes, I realize that God is someone who has taken the time to sit on a quilt with me waiting for beauty. She is a Mother of Presence. I need only invite her into my moments of leisure. Her presence will empower my presence. As I tried to bring a deeper quality of presence to all my works this day, I found God moving through the day with me, like a Mother, opening my eyes to beauty. Quietly, joyfully, gratefully, without complaining, I welcomed all the beauty that crossed my path.”
Ancient rabbis taught that, more important than Israel keeping and guarding the Shabbat, was the real truth that Shabbat kept and guarded Israel. In the words of Gunther Plaut,the mood of Shabbat “is both serene and joyous. It is time for recollecting God’s goodness and acknowledging his sovereignty; it provides for social balm, intellectual expansion, and a shutting out of the day’s cares.” In the same spirit of a Midrash that says, “The Sabbath is given to you, but you are not servants of the Sabbath,” Jesus himself says, “The Sabbath was made for Man, and not man for the Sabbath.”
Early Christians observed the biblical Sabbath, but when the Ebionite Christians waned (those with close links with Judaism), the observance was gradually shifted to Sunday, and called “The Lord’s Day” (Rev 1:10) in memory of the resurrection. When Sunday was made the official day of Christian worship in 321 C.E., it carried neither the demand for rest or nor the invitation to joy. Later, in medieval Catholicism and British-American Puritanism, Sabbath rest became a major part of Sunday observance. But sadly, especially among the Puritans, the restrictions placed on Sabbath observance were not balanced by the innate joy of the Biblical Shabbat. It became a sort of pleasureless day.
How does this happen? How does this happen that the human spirit, in the presence of a gift from God – in the presence of God himself - should turn away in self negation? As though God’s chief interest - the gift he most wants - is our self denial? Spiritual discipline has become all too easily associated with acts of self abandonment that tend to distance us from the God who wants to keep us close. It is all too easy to slip into Lent with an ambitious self-denial that negates our openness to beauty, to rest, to stillness, to quiet happiness – or sadness, or ANYTHING - in God.
What if we allowed Lent to be a kind of Sabbath - a time and place in which time and place are lost in Sabbath intimacy with God? A Midrash says: “Shabbat complained at creation that everyone had been created with a mate, except Shabbat, and so God said: ‘I will give you Israel as your mate.” We are Israel, and Shabbat is an open window whose curtains are dancing as the Spirit of God rushing in to greet us. Dare we give ourselves over to this kind of intimacy with God? To this kind of Sabbath?
What of, for example, we sat in the dark wilderness of Lent on a quilt – much like the ones the baptism quilters of Christ Church make – if we sat on a patchwork quilt – looking up into the desert sky waiting for the stars to appear, one by one? Until they all came out, and our faces were aglow under their vastness? Might Jesus have not taken solace in those same stars, especially throughout his 40 desert nights? Dare we believe this is what God asks of us?
Today is the Sabbath. We have arrived at the third Sabbath of Lent. We’ve come to Lent, to the Sabbath, to church, to one another. I close with a prayer from “Four in the Morning,” by Sy Safransky, as Sabbath prayer for us this Sunday in church:
We’ve come here to remind ourselves of what life seems intent on making us forget. Those truths that run through our hands like sand. We’ve come to retrace the changing shoreline of our love, and rebuild what the busy days will wash again. We’ve come, for a few days, to cut a deal with eternity: to talk without looking at the clock; to cheat boredom and jealousy and worry with the intensity of being together; to go beyond where the waves break in our hearts, to where it’s calm instead of fearful, and bring that feeling back with us – if the sea, murmuring and mocking, will let us.
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March 4, 2011
Second Sunday in Lent
There are theologians of note who believe Jesus died a disappointed man, some saying Jesus had to have believed his Father would actually deliver him from execution. But Mark’s Gospel makes that hard to believe. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Mark’s Jesus seems to have a sober awareness of his destiny to suffer and die. The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes. Mark is noted for being a “Good Friday” Gospel in the sense that the cross us central to understanding Jesus and the nature of discipleship – Mark, according to John Hayes, “does not want his church to use Easter to escape Lent and Good Friday.” That God’s messiah should be a suffering messiah is not new to Mark. The very question of suffering is at the core of human experience in general. But for the religious, the mystery of suffering is acute. Judaism and Christianity alike find the problem of suffering especially acute because of our elevated view of God as ethical.
Biblical attempts to get at the mystery of suffering are varied. St. Paul felt that we cause suffering and evil despite our best intentions. “I find then, a law, that when I would do good, evil is present in me.” The author of Job suggests that isolation and suffering are the mark of God’s chosenness, even favoritism. Israel’s prophets believed suffering was punishment for sin, but Jesus most certainly did not endorse this view of suffering. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents?” they ask Jesus of a man born blind. NEITHER, said the son of man, who said of his own condition that he himself was sent to undergo great suffering. On the one hand, this represents a very daring biblical response to suffering: that there are in this world – our messiah included - a rare few and chosen individuals who voluntarily suffer, even die, on behalf the innocent and guilty alike. This had led to the development of what is called “atonement theology:” the view that we could not be fully forgiven without someone – without Jesus – to come and die for us, and that is why God sent Jesus. Incarnational theology, however, focuses on God incarnate in human being, especially in Mark’s very human Jesus. In this theology, God does not send his son apart from himself to die, so much as God incarnate himself in Jesus. God incarnates himself in humanity, suffering with us and through us. In this way, the question of suffering is not merely a human question, but a divine one as well. Suffering is rooted in divine mystery.
One of the greatest paradoxes of suffering is that, despite its universality, yet we are alienated from one another in its throes. The image of Jesus alone in the garden of Gesthamne before he dies, his friends unable to stay awake with him, is so gripping because those of us who have known the profundity of deep suffering know that, even if those disciples could have stayed awake, they could not have taken his pain away. The cruel irony of suffering is the same irony of death – though it is the great leveler of all humanity – though its power extends from the greatest to the least –yet its mark on the soul is the stab of existential alienation. We know, in some what Jesus feels when he says “the birds of the air have nests and the foxes have holes, but the son of man has nowhere to rest his head.”
In the end, I believe it is God’s immanence more than his transcendence that compels us to Jesus. There is some exquisite yet indefinable power that is inherent in suffering, especially the suffering of the pure of heart. Especially in the suffering of Jesus. To imagine Jesus struggling under the weight of a cross is not so much an image of helplessness but of divine intimacy with us. In the Christ of Lent, we are invited to join our suffering in his. Mark’s Jesus cannot answer the problem of suffering or take it away as we would have him to, but: he can enter this world as God alongside us, asking us to carry our suffering – our crosses alongside him and his own. Humanity had crosses to bear long before Jesus came into the world with his own – it is because of the crosses we carry that God came into the world. The mystery of suffering is that, though the Son of Man cannot take our crosses away – cannot even take his own away - he can reach across the abyss of our alienation in his own exile, so that no matter how alone we may feel, we are not alone. The invitation to take up our crosses and follow HIM with his own cross is the intimacy of an all loving, all suffering God.
What if we heard this invitation to take up our crosses as just that: not an impossible command for the rare few, but n invitation, even a vulnerable plea from God that we join him in his own death march as he will for us; an invitation to fathom that God needs us, that the very suffering of the Christ is the answer to our own suffering. Our suffering is holy to God, is sanctified, to God and to us, because he is incarnate in it. I think of the line from our hymn: “ When through the deep waters I call thee to go, the rivers of woe shall not thee overflow. For I will be with thee thy troubles to bless, and sanctify to thee they deepest distress.” The suffering of the son of man, like our own, is rooted in divine mystery. Though our suffering and the suffering of the son of man is not overcome in ways we might choose, yet the divine mystery of suffering – God’s and our own – is that God takes it into himself and makes of it a Holy Eucharist, a meal for the innocent and the guilty, and even in the bloodshed of Good Friday, we call it a feast of thanksgiving.
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