Tag Archives: Holy Week

Bearing Witness to the Cross: A Sermon for Good Friday, 2025

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Good Friday

April 18, 2025

Good Friday is an emotional, complicated day. We are drawn into the story of Christ’s suffering, his torture and execution, and we are invited to enter into that story, to approach and experience it through hymns and devotions that have developed over the centuries. Some of those devotions can threaten to overwhelm us; some may repel us. But each of us in our own way is touched, moved, affected by it all.

We gather at a time when many of us are feeling other emotions: anger, fear, despair, as we watch events unfold around us, see the acts of domination and oppression that run roughshod over civic, legal, and moral norms. We may want to leave that cacophony outside on the streets but it invades our thoughts, troubles our hearts, and disrupts our sleep.

We feel impotence alongside all of our other emotions—impotence in the face of yet another mass shooting, impotence in the face of unjust deportations, the dismantling of the institutions that are supposed to protect all of us, and especially the most vulnerable, impotence as we watch the attacks on free speech, higher education, and all the rest, and the reluctance of those with power and influence to stand up against the onslaught.

Then we enter this service and encounter additional challenges. Our liturgy, and especially the gospel reading for today confronts us with one of the profound challenges for Christian faith in the contemporary world. The deep, persistent, ugly anti-Judaism of the Gospel of John is on full display in the passion narrative—the relentless repetition of “The Jews” in the gospel’s depiction of those who were opposed to Jesus and sought his death has had lasting consequences throughout history, in the Antisemitism that has persisted and led to ongoing acts of violence including the Holocaust. 

We are also all too aware of the weaponization of Antisemitism to quash dissent and free speech. At the same time, even on this most holy day of the Christian year, we are conscious of all the ways in which Christian imagery and faith have contributed to the marginalization and oppression of others. The power of Christian nationalism and white supremacy looms over the cross and all that we do here today.

Our liturgy today attempts to mitigate some of that damage. We are using an alternative liturgy approved by General Convention last year that attempts to undo some of the anti-Judaism of the language in the authorized Book of Common Prayer. The gospel we heard is an adaptation of John, rewording it to complicate the opponents of Jesus in the gospel—not just “the Jews” now but Jewish leaders, or parties within first century Judaism. It’s a start but perhaps seems either too little too late, or a futile attempt to stem the tide of Antisemitism and weaponized Antisemitism that threaten to overwhelm us all.

Given all that, given where we are today as we observe Good Friday, how might we find solace and strength in our liturgy to help make sense of our world, our lives, and inspire the courage to persist in our efforts to be faithful Christians? One possible answer to that question may lie in the example of Pilate. Known historically as a ruthless, even bloodthirsty tyrant, in the Gospels he is depicted as an unwilling and unwitting accomplice. John suggests Pilate knows Jesus is innocent of the charges levelled against him but seems impotent to resist the machinations and insistence of Jesus’ opponents. In the gospel of Matthew, we’re given the image of Pilate washing his hands and declaring his innocence of Jesus’ blood in front of the card, an image that has entered popular consciousness. This image of the feckless, spineless politician is one that seems to resonate today as too many of our leaders stand by haplessly as lawlessness and evil thrive.

While naming the Pilates among may offer us some consolation and schadenfreude, there are other ways of connecting the story we heard with the lives we are living today. As Jesus’ followers, we are called to follow him. In John’s telling, unlike the synoptic gospel accounts where Jesus is abandoned by his disciples on his last journey, the disciples accompany Jesus along the way. Peter still betrays Jesus but we’re told that the beloved disciple—I’ll leave them unnamed as in the gospel, is able to go with Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest. 

At the cross, the Beloved Disciple and Jesus’ mother Mary stand by watching and bearing witness, and other disciples, secret ones, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are responsible for Jesus’ burial. Being present, bearing witness, these are important responsibilities. It may be that not all of us can take action, and the actions we can take may seem futile. But we can pay attention, bear witness, remember so that the voices of the vulnerable and suffering are amplified. In the gospel of Luke, we’re told that the women—the disciples—who followed Jesus from Galilee and ministered to him along the way, stood far off from the cross and watched and remembered.

To remember, to bear witness, to be present. As we contemplate the events of Good Friday, we see a deep and powerful paradox. On the one hand, we see the power of the Roman Empire bringing itself to bear on a lonely, humble teacher from Galilee who dared to challenge its power and might. On the other hand, we see Christ giving of himself for our lives and the life of the world. We see Christ, loving the world so much that he gives of himself, gives his life for us and in that giving shows us the power of love. 

We see Christ suffering and in his suffering we know he stands and suffers with all those today who are suffering—immigrants who have been deported for no reason, victims languishing in camps and prisons. He is present in the rubble of Gaza and Ukraine, on the streets of our cities. He is with us in our own lives, in our fears and despair. As we ponder the events of Good Friday today may we find in Christ, in the cross, love’s power to strengthen us to be present in a suffering world and to bear witness to the oppression and violence that surround us, and to minister to those in need. May we find in the cross the love we need to carry on.

Being loved, and loving, to the end: A Homily for Maundy Thursday, 2025

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April 17, 2025

A memory has been running through my mind these last few days as I’ve thought about Maundy Thursday. I grew up Mennonite, which was then, and likely remains a profoundly non-liturgical tradition. When I was a member, we celebrated communion only twice a year but our observance of communion always included footwashing. It was a ritual central to Mennonite identity in that era; so central in fact that one of the Mennonite colleges had as its logo an image of a basin and towel. The idea of service to others, Jesus’ commandment to imitate his actions, and to love others as he loved his disciples, were core values among Mennonites during the 50s and 60s. 

But what I’ve been thinking about is not the act of footwashing itself, as practiced among the Mennonites of my childhood. Rather, I’ve been remembering other aspects of the ritual, specifically the fact that our footwashing was accompanied by hymns. I recall my dad, who was a musician and often led music in the church, leading out in hymns as we watched each other’s feet,–although they were sung from memory and without accompaniment by musical instrument. Truth be told, while I vividly remember singing, I cannot for the life of me remember the specific hymns we sang.

Perhaps the reason I’ve been reminded of that memory is because it is the one thing that our service tonight shares with the traditions of my childhood, even though our singing during footwashing had been planned in advance and will be accompanied by the organ, thankfully.

 Footwashing is an intimate, deeply moving, powerful ritual and for us on Maundy Thursday, it is only one of several such powerful moments in our liturgy. I remember also the first Episcopal Maundy Thursday service I attended, and the wave of emotion that overcame me as I watched for the first time in my life the Stripping of the Altar. It evokes in so many ways the stripping of a body, of Christ’s body, for burial, and as I cleanse the altar later this evening, in near darkness, my gestures will  mimic the scourging that Jesus suffered at the hands of his persecutors and executioners.

Our watching is accompanied by growing apprehension as the ritual acts remind us of the events that follow. Some of them we will remember viscerally as our bodies move through traces of Gethsemane, Golgotha, and the tomb. As we move, our emotions build—the grief and despair, the guilt and shame. Our daily lives seem to be suspended, interrupted, as our attention focuses on the drama of Christ’s passion. But even as we know what tomorrow brings—Good Friday and crucifixion, let us linger for another moment or two, here on Maundy Thursday and with the Last Supper.

“Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” This brief sentence, the beginning of our gospel reading tonight, is an introduction not just to the events that follow immediately—the last supper and footwashing, but to everything else that we commemorate in the coming days, Christ’s arrest and trial, his execution and death, and yes, his resurrection. All of that, all of what will happen, what we dread will happen, is an expression of Christ’s love for his disciples and for us. But while we may want to move on to the bigger parts of the story; it all begins here. Friends gathered around a table, and a humble, intimate act of footwashing.

We see Peter’s response—his revulsion and unwillingness to allow Jesus to serve him in this way, to kneel before him. Less obvious from the text we heard, the footwashing takes place before Judas’ departure. So Jesus knelt down before the one who would betray him as he knelt before the other disciples. Perhaps that’s the most radical, least imaginable moment in the whole story. 

It’s a shocking act—in the first century as in the twenty-first. Peter’s response to it might be the same as ours, to imagine our teacher, our leader, the Son of God, kneeling down girding himself with a towel, and washing our feet. It makes us uncomfortable to do it ourselves, unaccustomed as we are to such acts of intimate service. Yet all around us people do such things—take intimate care of their loved ones who are unable to care for themselves. And many others do it for people they don’t love—because it’s their job, often ill-paid, thankless. 

But Jesus joins them in their labor and toil, washing the dust and dirt from the feet of his friends—an intimate, revolutionary act that presages everything else to come, and demonstrates, wordlessly, what it means to love his own to the end. It’s a concrete demonstration of his self-giving love; the emptying himself of his identity to become the lowest of servants, performing menial tasks, unworthy of a king, let alone of a God.

In our world, where power and dominance are demonstrated in acts large and small, forcing submission, demanding obedience, where bullying is the norm, for Jesus to fall to his knees in humility and service, upends our assumptions and shatters our expectations.

But more than that, Jesus invites us to join him on our knees, in service and love to others. This act of humble service combined with the meal at which it takes place, is the constitutive act of a new beloved community brought together in shared commitment to following Jesus. Forged by love, shaped by love, the community gathered at table together, shares in Christ’s body and blood, becomes Christ’s body, knit together by love. 

In these days of turmoil and suffering, as we watch our nation and world collapse, and we lose our moorings in the rubble and chaos of institutions and ideals, the acts we remember tonight, the rituals tonight bind us together with Christ in that new community. And what we do here may serve as example and witness to our neighbors and to the world—evidence of a faith in a Christ who comes as one to love and serve in humility, not to dominate and oppress. 

Poetry for Holy Saturday: “Great and Holy Saturday” by Madeleine L’Engle

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Death and damnation began with my body still my own,
began when I was ousted from my place,
and many creatures still were left unnamed.
Gone are some, now, extinct, and nameless,
as though they had never been.
In hell I feel their anxious breath, see their accusing eyes.
My guilt is heavier than was the weight of flesh.

I bear the waste of time spent in recriminations
(“You should not have…” “But you told me…” “Nay, it was you who…”).
And yet I knew my wife, and this was good.
But all good turned to guilt. Our first-born
killed his brother. Only Seth gave us no grief.
I grew old, and was afraid; afraid to die, even knowing
that death had come, and been endured, when we
were forced to leave our home, the one and only home a human man
has ever known. The rest is exile.
Death, when it came, was no more than a dim
continuation of the exile. I was hardly less a shadow
than I had been on earth, and centuries
passed no more slowly than a single day.

I was not prepared to be enfleshed again,
reconciled, if not contented, with my shadow self.
I had seen the birth of children with all its blood and pain
and had no wish ever to be born again.

The sound, when it came, was louder than thunder,
louder than the falling of a mountain,
louder than the tidal wave crashing down the city walls,
stone splitting, falling, smashing.
The light was brutal against my shaded eyes,
blinding me with brilliance. I was thousands 
of years unaccustomed to the glory.
Then came the wrench of bone where bone had long been dust.
The shocking rise of dry bones, the burning fleshing,
the surge of blood through artery and vein
was pain as I had never known that pain could be.
My anguished scream was silenced as my hand was held
in a grip of such authority I could not even try to pull away.
The crossed gates were trampled by his powerful feet
and I was wrenched through the chasm
as through the eye of the hurricane.
And then—O God—he crushed me
in his fierce embrace. Flesh entered flesh;
bone, bone. Thus did I die, at last.
Thus was I born. 
Two Adams became one.
And in the glory Adam was.
Nay, Adam is.

Love is its meaning: A Sermon for Good Friday, 2023

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Calvary, Golgotha, the cross. Holy Week has been building toward this moment. The arc of salvation history has bended toward this day. The cross is the center point of history. For medieval Christians it was also the center point of the universe.

Though we know that the cross is not the center of the universe as pre-modern people may have imagined, the cross remains the center point of our religious world and our spiritual lives. And so we come to contemplate on this day, the events so long ago, we say familiar words and familiar prayers, we sing familiar hymns, and we ponder the mystery of a God who became human like us, and becoming human, took on human suffering and pain in all of its extremity. And we wonder, why?

The power of the story lies not only in the words on the page, or the words as read aloud, but in all the images that are evoked in our minds as we hear them. The cinematic adaptations we have seen again and again since our childhoods; the countless images of crucifixion upon which we have gazed, whether in reproductions in books, or in art museums or in churches like our own. Our hymns are also full of such imagery, powerful, emotional. And there are the ways all of these images reverberate across our culture: crosses worn on pendants, crosses on tattoos, crosses burned on lawns. 

The violence of John’s version of the passion jumps out from the page. There is the violence of language—mocking and scorning; the violence of humiliation, flogging and the crown of thorns. There is the violence of the crucifixion itself—execution by torture as it’s been called. The state violence of this form of capital punishment; displayed publicly for all to see and to understand as warning; the constant presence on the outskirts of cities throughout the Roman Empire of these instruments of execution on display and the bodies of victims as well. 

The text conveys other violence, the virulent anti-Judaism that is woven throughout John’s gospel, but especially here where the gospel writer does everything in his power to divert attention and blame away from Rome and onto the Jewish community. So violent, so anti-Jewish, in fact, that many scholars and theologians advocate abandoning John’s passion gospel on this day. The history of anti-semitism and its resurgence in recent years; its presence in contemporary political and cultural discourse leads me to consider alternatives for future years.

Even if we can ignore or set aside the text’s anti-Judaism, the other violence of the text continues to work on us. We may internalize it, transforming it to guilt and shame, or project it onto a vengeful God who demands blood sacrifice. 

But there are other ways of reading this story, other themes that we might emphasize:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten son…

Or the verse we heard in last’s night gospel reading: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” 

Ponder that statement. “He loved them to the end.” It is the same word that lies behind Jesus’ last words on the cross in John’s gospel: “It is finished.” It has been completed. Was that the end to which he loved them, to that final point, to his death? It is the end to which he loves us and the world, a love which brought him to this point, a love that reaches out to us and to the world from his arms outstretched on the cross. 

For all the violence and hatred in the text, there is also, and above all, love. In Jesus’ last conversation with his disciples, he says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. The cross is about suffering, yes, but we should never lose sight of what stands behind that suffering, God’s love for us, Christ’s love for us. It is love that brought Christ to us in the incarnation, love that he showed his disciples and those to whom he ministered, and love he shows most profoundly on the cross. 

The violence may repel us. The bloody depictions throughout Christian history may make us avert our gaze, to turn away, to turn inward, but even if we do, we should not let that violence and suffering obscure God’s love.

I’m reminded of the great medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich, who lived in turbulent times, including the Black Plague, who herself suffered illness unto death, and on her deathbed had a vision of the crucified Christ on which she reflected for some thirty years. The vision and her interpretations were replete with graphic descriptions of Christ’s body on the cross. She writes:

And from the time that it was revealed, I desired many times to know in what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years and after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, and it was said: What do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love.”

         Love was his meaning. Love is the meaning of the cross. My prayer for us all today is that we experience that meaning in all of its profundity and power, that love suffuses us, fills us, and draws us closer to Christ. May love be our meaning.

Weeping at the foot of the cross: A Homily for Good Friday, 2022

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April 15, 2022

I have a keen sense of the powerful emotions that are roiling through me today. Good Friday is always a day full of emotions—of grief and sadness, shame. As we listen to John’s passion gospel with its extreme anti-Judaism, we may be reminded of all the ways that text, and Christian devotion and theology surrounding the crucifixion, have fueled anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in the church and in wider culture. The weight of that history always burdens me on this day, as I seek to lead a community of Christians into reflection on Christ’s suffering and death.

But this year there are other emotions—the reality that we gather in this place on this day for the first time since 2019. We carry with us the trauma of those years: pandemic leaving millions dead and millions more permanently affected; an insurrection that used and continues to use the imagery of Good Friday, the cross and Jesus Christ in the service of autocracy, white nationalism and white supremacy; and now a war in Ukraine that has killed thousands, forced millions from their homes. It too is perpetrated in part on behalf of so-called Christian values.

With all of these emotions and thoughts running through our heads, it is difficult to find the space, the silence to reflect on the meaning of this day. Perhaps that’s as it should be. Our pain, grief, fear, anger, and trauma have brought us to this place, to the foot of the cross, and to Christ’s arms, outstretched in love.

It may seem somewhat surprising that the gospels have little to say about the emotions of those who were closest to Jesus, as they watched the events of his last days unfold. There are hints of what they might have been feeling; certainly fear, perhaps bewilderment as they tried to make sense of what was happening, the dashing of their hopes for a restored Israel and divine intervention against the Roman Empire. Luke mentions the disciples’ grief on at least one occasion, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Luke writes that Peter, James, and John fell asleep “because of grief” while Jesus prayed.

There’s a passage that struck me this year during the reading of Luke’s passion narrative this past Sunday. Luke is describing Jesus’ walk to Calvary and in 23:27 writes that:

 A great number of the people followed him, and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him. Then Jesus turned to them and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.

It’s one of those details that may be familiar and well-known, it is one of the stations in the traditional stations of the cross, for example. But it’s a detail that can take on new significance or meaning in a different context.

Weeping women. I’ve also been reflecting on the traditional medieval hymn, the stabat mater. A baroque setting of that hymn by Pergolesi is featured in the concerts performed by Madison Bach Musicians this week, tonight, here at Grace. The Stabat Mater reflects on the emotions of Mary, Jesus’ mother as she witnesses the crucifixion of her son. 

It’s a bit curious that John gives a prominent role to Jesus’ mother at the crucifixion because she’s mentioned only one other time in the gospel, at the very first miracle of Jesus, the turning of water into wine at the Wedding at Cana. Surprisingly, Jesus addresses her in the same way both times, calling her “Woman.” In fact, nowhere in the gospel of John is she mentioned by name.

Only John writes that Mary and the Beloved Disciple were at the foot of the cross during the crucifixion. In the synoptic gospels, the disciples abandon Jesus after his arrest and we’re told by Mark that the women disciples who had followed Jesus from Galilee looked on the crucifixion from afar.

John’s version has become the dominant version in the Christian tradition. Countless visual images, paintings especially, show Mary and the Beloved Disciple at the foot of the cross. In medieval churches, carved statues of the crucified Christ flanked by Mary and John were often prominently displayed atop the rood screen. And the Stabat Mater, helped to focus devotional attention on Mary’s grief and suffering as she watched her son die and asks that we share in that grief and suffering:

O thou Mother! fount of love!
Touch my spirit from above,
Make my heart with thine accord:

Make me feel as thou hast felt;
Make my soul to glow and melt
With the love of Christ my Lord.

Such sentiments may seem somewhat alien to us in the twenty-first century, but it is the case that much of what we do on this day, our prayers and hymns try to connect Christ’s suffering with our own and are meant to elicit even deeper emotions from us than we might have been feeling otherwise.

But perhaps instead of intensifying our emotions it might be better for us simply to name them: to name our fear, grief, despair. As we do that, we might also name the emotions that Mary and Jesus’ other disciples were feeling, and the emotions that so many humans across the globe are feeling. We may be particularly affected by them on this day as we contemplate Christ’s suffering and death and we may find it difficult to acknowledge, to process all of them.

The scene of Christ crucified, his mother and the beloved disciple at his side, is not just about his suffering and ours. It is, above all, about love, the love that brought him among us, the love that brought him to this place of execution, the love that draws the whole world to himself. It is a love that was not just present then and there, but is present with us, among us, in our suffering, as he suffers beside us and with us.

It is also a love that binds us to him and to each other. From the cross, Jesus said to his Mother, “Woman, here is your son” and to the Beloved Disciple, he said, “Here is your mother.” At the cross, Jesus was creating new relationships, new community among his followers. Even as his body was being broken, he was knitting together a new body, the body of Christ.

That may be the most important and profound message for us on this Good Friday, when we have felt the pain of isolation and separation so intensely for so long, when we have struggled to gather as the body of Christ, the community of the faithful. We are bound together by Christ’s love. His outstretched arms embrace us and invite us to embrace each other. May the cross be a place where we experience Christ’s all-embracing love and may it empower us to embrace the world with that same love.

Jesus weeps for Jerusalem and for: A Homily for Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday

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The Gospel is Luke 19:41-48.

 

So many of us are weeping right now. We weep for lost jobs and income, for relationships that are strained because of social distancing and isolation. We weep for missing the usual rhythms of the spring—March Madness, high school and college seniors going through the rituals that lead to graduation. We weep for a world we sense we may have lost, for those who are suffering and have died. We weep because we cannot observe Holy Week in all the familiar and powerful ways and because the joy of Easter will be tempered by empty churches, no gatherings of friends and family.

Our gospel reading, from the gospel of Luke, is one of those vignettes from the last week of Jesus’ life that we rarely notice, or might not even know. It’s a story told only by Luke and it’s place immediately after the Triumphal Entry—or perhaps “Entry” is not the right word for it. Because in Luke’s telling, the scene we recall on Palm Sunday takes place outside the city, on the path down from the Mt of Olives. It’s after that that Jesus stops, looks over the city and begins to weep.

Jesus weeps for its coming destruction. We can imagine Luke, writing perhaps a generation after Jerusalem’s destruction, still mourning the temple’s destruction and the exile of many of the city’s inhabitants, we can imagine Luke wishing there had been some way to avoid that violence and tragedy, and having Jesus weep in advance for all of the carnage and loss.

We saw Jesus weeping in last week’s gospel as well—the story of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus wept at the death of his friend and as he experienced his own deep grief and the deep grief of Mary and Martha, Lazarus’ sisters. Perhaps he was also weeping for what he might have done and didn’t. Had he come earlier, as Martha reminded him, Lazarus would likely not have died.

Holy Week is a powerful, emotionally wracking week in the lives of Christians who follow the daily rituals. There’s the high of the Palm Sunday procession followed immediately and abruptly, with the reading of the Passion Narrative. We enter into Jesus’ final days. We accompany him to the temple as he teaches and debates with other religious leaders. And finally we come to Maundy Thursday—the Last Supper, his betrayal, and arrest, his trial and crucifixion, his death and burial.

Our church’s rituals help us enter into these events. We aren’t simply imitating them or remembering them, through our liturgy, we become participants in the great mystery of our faith, Jesus’ death and resurrection.

But those events and those rituals will take on new, very likely different meaning this year, as we experience them not as a community gathered physically, but very often on our own, as individuals or as families. Perhaps many of us will not even take time to notice them, or to participate as we might in other years.

Perhaps for you, as I am sensing it will be for me, the emotional weight of being separated from the gathered body of Christ will be simply too great for me to attempt any pale imitation of the great liturgies of our church—especially the Great Vigil of Easter.

Like Jesus, and perhaps like many of you, I am weeping this week, weeping for Jerusalem, for the church, for the world. I am weeping for the world we have lost and the great suffering that is taking place. I am weeping because I will not be able to enter into the liturgies of Holy Week in the way I have done in previous years, that I will not be present with other Christians as we wash each others’ feet, remember Christ’s death on Good Friday, and celebrate his resurrection with the Lighting of the New Fire, the exsultet, and everything else that makes the Great Vigil of Easter the highpoint of the liturgical year.

I am weeping, but I am not alone, for Jesus weeps, too. He weeps for all of us, for our church, and for the world. He weeps for the dead and the dying, the lonely and the fearful, and for all those who are putting their lives on the line to save the lives of others.

This is our Holy Week this year, this is the way of the cross we are walking. But even as we walk with heavy hearts and feet trembling with fear, we are walking this way with Jesus—and the cross is not the end of the story, nor is the tomb the final act. Christ is raised from the dead. His victory over death is a victory over all the forces of death and evil that we face. We may be alone, but he is with us, fighting for us, and through his death and resurrection, he has already claimed victory. Thanks be to God.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Judas, Peter” by Luci Shaw: Poetry for Wednesday in Holy Week

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“Judas, Peter”

because we are all
betrayers, taking
silver and eating
body and blood and asking
(guilty) is it I and hearing
him say yes
it would be simple for us all
to rush out
and hang ourselves
but if we find grace
to cry and wait
after the voice of morning
has crowed in our ears
clearly enough
to break our hearts
he will be there
to ask us each again
do you love me?

Lachrymae Amantis: Poetry for Tuesday in Holy Week by Geoffrey Hill

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“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:32, from the Gospel reading for Tuesday in Holy Week)

Lachrimae Amantis

GEOFFREY HILL

What is there in my heart that you should sue
so fiercely for its love? What kind of care
brings you as though a stranger to my door
through the long night and in the icy dew

seeking the heart that will not harbour you,
that keeps itself religiously secure?
At this dark solstice filled with frost and fire
your passion’s ancient wounds must bleed anew.

So many nights the angel of my house
has fed such urgent comfort through a dream,
whispered “your lord is coming, he is close”

that I have drowsed half-faithful for a time
bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse:
“tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.”

Walking, Riding, Dying: A Homily for Palm/Passion Sunday, 2019

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How many miles had Jesus walked on his long journey to Jerusalem? Way back in chapter 9, Luke tells us “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” But even before that, he had been walking throughout Galilee. He had walked and along the way he had healed and taught. Now, finally, as he approaches Jerusalem, he instructs his disciples to fetch a donkey so he could ride on it for a bit.

He may have been tired. He may have been full of anxiety and fear about what would happen in Jerusalem, but he didn’t ask for a donkey so that the final leg of his journey would be less taxing. He wanted to ride on a donkey to make a point—to stage a demonstration. It’s a clear reference to Zechariah 9:9: Continue reading →

Drawing all people to himself: A Sermon for Good Friday, 2018

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It is finished. We have heard again the familiar, haunting story of Jesus’ passion as recorded by the gospel of John. We have heard of Jesus’ betrayal and arrest, his trial, and his execution. We have watched as Joseph and Nicodemus took his body down from the cross and buried it in a tomb. We have listened as the world fell silent, our hearts broken.

It is finished. Those are the last words Jesus speaks in John’s gospel. Last night, at our Maundy Thursday service, our gospel reading began with the words, “And having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” The words translated here as “finished” and there as “end” derive from the same Greek word “telos.” So we could just as easily, just as accurately translate Jesus’ words from the cross, “It is complete.”

It is finished. With these words we see not only the end of Jesus’ life, the finality of his suffering and death, we may also begin to meditate on its meaning and purpose. That which he had come to us, to earth, to do, is brought to fruition.

But this story of suffering and death, as familiar as it is, confronts us with questions. Even as human suffering, the evil people do to each other every day, the horrific suffering our world has seen, and continues to see—all this confronts us, challenges our faith, even our very humanity. We want it to make sense. We want the suffering of the world to make sense, to have meaning. We want the suffering of Christ to make sense, to have meaning. And too often, the answers we give, or the answers that are given us, ring hollow, empty, leaving us in despair.

This year, as I have sat with scripture in Lent and Holy Week, while the lectionary has focused our attention on Mark, I have also been deeply moved by the Gospel of John. Reading both of those gospels, as familiar as they are, has brought me deeper into the mystery that we ponder today. I have, as I said last night, and to use one of those words so beloved in John, I have been abiding in John’s gospel, abiding with Jesus and with John.

And words, verses, have been in my mind and on my heart throughout Lent and now Holy Week, verses like one we heard last night from chapter 13, “and having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” And from chapter 3, as Jesus (or the gospel writer) reflects on his encounter with Nicodemus, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

But the verse that has burrowed into my heart and soul this year is one we heard on the 5th Sunday in Lent, and again on Tuesday in Holy Week, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

In the cross, in his crucifixion, in that symbol of Roman empire, its power, ruthlessness, and oppression, in the cross, that stumbling to Jews and folly to Gentiles, in the cross, Jesus is drawing all people to himself.

In the cross, we see the love of God, drawing us, grabbing us and not letting go. In the cross, we see God’s love offered for us, offered to us, offered to God. In the cross, on the cross, we said God, utterly vulnerable, utterly powerless. Yet even then, we see God’s love, drawing us to Godself. On the cross we see the vulnerable, invincible, irresistible power of God’s love.

Today, our hearts are broken. They are broken by the anguish we feel as we hear again the story of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, trial, and death. Our hearts are broken by all the ways we have acted like those around Jesus, betraying and denying him, abandoning him. Our hearts are broken by all the ways Jesus continues to suffer among us, with those who are caught up in the criminal justice system, the homeless and the hungry, immigrants who fear for their lives and livelihoods, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community who are marginalized and prevented from leading lives that flourish and reach their full potential.

Our hearts are broken as we hear about families torn apart, children separated from their mothers by ICE, the scourge of gun violence that includes mass shootings, senseless suicides, and accidental deaths. Our hearts break as we hear about the opioid epidemic that rages in communities beset by hopelessness and despair.

In all that suffering, we should also see the suffering of Christ.

In the cross, we see the full power of the Roman Empire brought to bear on a rabbi on the edge of empire who dared to teach an alternative the domination, oppression, and violence of Rome, who preached peace, and cast a vision of a new reality coming into being where the first would be last and the last first, where tax collectors, sinners, and the outcast would have a place, would be welcomed and embraced. For his challenge to the religious establishment and Roman power, Jesus was crushed by Roman power.

If that were the end of the story, we wouldn’t be here. If that were the end of the story, Jesus’ death would have no more meaning, make no more sense than any other death, –the death of someone from capital punishment, or teen-aged victims of mass shootings, or an African-American man killed by law enforcement officers in Sacramento, or Ferguson, or Madison, or any other of millions of deaths, victims of wars or violence, or deaths of homeless people, or victims of disease or natural disaster.

But the cross is not meaningless. When Jesus said, “It is finished” he was saying that the work he had come to earth for, the life he had lived had been accomplished. We know that the resurrection is God’s vindication of Jesus’ life and death, that the resurrection gives meaning to Jesus’ death, but in the cross we something else, Christ’s love outpoured for us, to us. And more, in Jesus, we see the love of God come to us, come for us. So that it all becomes one current, one flow—God’s gift to us of love in Christ, Christ’s gift to God and to us, himself and his love.

We can’t understand that love, we can’t comprehend it. We can’t explain it. But it is love we can know, love that is ours to become and to be, ours to share. We experience that love of Christ, as we are embraced by his arms outstretched on the hard wood of the cross; as we are drawn by him, drawn to him. As he is lifted up, he draws us to him, lifts us up to him, he bears our sorrows and our sins. In his love, in his gift, we see the possibility of new life and a world remade in, by, and for, love.

May our knowledge of this love, our experience of his love, remake us in his image and help us become and be that love in the world.