Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion

 

A Passion for Humanity

Today we begin Holy Week. We see the Passion from Jesus' entry into Jerusalem to rolling the stone to seal the tomb. On Monday we rewind to six days before Passover, followed Tuesday and Wednesday with the Passover meal and Jesus' subsequent betrayal by Judas. Holy Thursday is Jesus washing his disciple's feet and telling them "If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet." Good Friday, we, once again, meditate on The Cross. So today and Friday, we speak of the Lord's passion, of God's love of His creation.

Passion.  The word evokes reckless adventure, impulsive romance, gestures too big to fulfill, and the brief but intense relationship of Romeo and Juliet.  This word places Jesus in the tradition of the foolish Romantics—an itinerant preacher from the margins schooled by his radical cousin (John the Baptist) and led to make one final, dramatic gesture to get his message out: die as a martyr.  But Jesus’ death was unlike the death of many of the martyred faithful to come.  His death wasn't for a cause, but a relationship.  God fell hopelessly in love with humanity and inserted Himself to be with His own creation to deliver this message of healing, love, and forgiveness.  God’s power isn't the power of Zeus with lightening-bolts from the heavens, but God’s message is now simply “Return; I love you”.

Throughout Holy Scripture, God has struggled and seemingly failed many times, just as His people have.  It has been an on-and-off-again cosmic love story between the Creator and His creation since humanity was first created and was given a choice not to love God.  This dance between Creator and created culminated in His great and defining act of love: self-sacrifice on the cross.

Today’s gospel reading recounts this journey to the cross with Jesus as God leading the way, experiencing the pain and abandonment of His creation, the physical pain of a gruesome, ignominious death, giving into the abyss of his own un-created end-all for love.  But in this remarkable journey, he found a few responding with courage: Simon of Cyrene shared some in your suffering, the women who gathered at the foot of the cross and stayed there long after the men had scattered for fear of being arrested, the felon who believed because he, of all people, responded to the suffering of an innocent man, and finally the Roman centurion who saw in this suffering man God’s love.  This is pretty intense stuff

Rather than struggling to believe, many struggle to disbelieve because God’s affirmation of his creation, of saying “yes” to the cross, is the ultimate folly for a world seeking safety over communion.  God as Jesus, crucified, dead, and buried.  Stay tuned.

Fifth Sunday of Lent

The Way of the Heart

Jeremiah is a prophet for God's people in exile.  They broke the covenant of the Law established in the exodus from Egypt.  In short, they had lost that intimacy of God taking them "by the hand to lead them forth from Egypt".  As famous as Jeremiah is for his prophetic message of doom, it is today's reading from the prophet which reveals God's desire for a new covenant, one that will no longer be subject to the difficulties of written text as the sole foundation of a relationship with His people.  Now God announces to Jeremiah "I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts . . . . No longer will they have a need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the Lord."  God's placement of this law "within" prefigures the presence of the Holy Spirit which is the dynamic, existential element of our faith that makes us a people first and foremost on a journey of the heart rather than the head.  As arduous and demanding as the exiles of Egypt and Babylon were, and the subsequent exodus back into the Promised Land, the Christ Event reveals through the journey to the cross as the greatest exodus of them all.


William Sloan Coffin, a pastor for years at the Riverside Church in New York, expressed this notion so well when he wrote "The longest, most arduous trip in the world is often the journey from the head to the heart.  Until that round trip is completed, we remain at war with ourselves.  And, of course, those at war with themselves are apt to make casualties of others, including friends and loved ones".


The authority of the priests, Temple, and God's precepts written in stone was not enough to sustain a relationship with God.  The revelation of Jeremiah's proclamation of a new overture of intimacy did not do away with priests, Temple, and the written Law; but what was added was a sense of God that transcended text, Temple, and priests.

Christ's presence as the non-Levitical high priest becomes that complement to the Law and Prophets.  For Christ proclaimed he did not come to abolish the Law and Prophets, but to fulfill them (Matt. 5:17).  The high priestly function of the Christ, in the letter to the Hebrews, is to suggest that Christ's sacrifice was himself in an act of pure love.  This sense of God's atonement, developed so well by Abelard in the 11th Century, expresses Christ's mission to win hearts by an example of reconciling love.  This pivotal shift from a primarily substitutionary atonement (God sacrificed Christ to atone for humanity's sins) to exemplary ("Come and follow me") moves us from simply another Temple sacrifice, albeit grand in scale, to a personal journey that involves sacrifice for all true followers of Jesus as the Christ.


The followers of Christ before the term "Christian" was coined, as people of "the way".  Early on, there was a sense that being a disciple was more than a function of intellectual assent, that being a follower of Christ involved a process, the give-and-take of a relationship with oneself, God, and a community of like-minded pilgrims.  Fulfillment of the Law now is fulfilled in its entirety in our relationship with God made possible by Christ's outpouring of God's love on the cross.  Stony hearts can read and follow directions, but hearts of flesh and blood seek communion.  Our Lenten journey is especially focused on the cross because it reveals so well the humanity of God in Christ, the spectacular overture of our God to win our hearts.

Fourth Sunday in Lent

 Seeing is Believing: Living a Transparent Life

                 In today’s gospel reading from John, we have the rather remarkable statement comparing from Jesus “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” suggesting that like Moses’ raised staff, simply by looking at the crucified Jesus, we will be saved; a very compelling theory of atonement that is often overlooked. It reminds me of the devotional response to the elevation of the host after consecration taken from the Apostle Thomas at realizing the body before him was Christ: “My Lord and my God”. 

              Sometimes witnessing a great act of faith can lead us to faith itself; that is why reading Scripture and biographies of holy men and women are equally powerful to strengthen faith, and for some, lead them to the Faith for the first time. Great works like Augustine’s Confessions, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain, and other stories of faith are a rich source of illumination and sustenance. Devotions such as Adoration, prayer before icons, or simply being fully present in a beautifully designed sacred space can lead one to a deeper communion with God.

               However, not only the works of others can shine the light of faith into the world, but we ourselves can live in the light of faith when we allow others to witness our failures and also the faith that sustains us in the hope of living in a perfect relationship with God while we are yet sinners; living transparently before God and the world allows the world to witness our humanity in our failings and our relationship with the Divine in the grace we have received. We can live in God’s presence as sinners because through Christ we have been redeemed.

               Perhaps this week we can more fully appreciate our gift of sight as a great source of faith, not only in what we see but live fully in the light so that others may witness not only our crucifixions but also our resurrections. As John says in today’s gospel, “But whoever lives the truth comes to the light,  so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.”