Holy Thursday

Readings: Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-15

“You shall eat like those who are in flight.”
This is how God commanded the Israelites
to celebrate the Passover,
instituted to commemorate
their salvation from slavery in Egypt.
You shall eat like those who are in flight,
dressed in your traveling clothes,
shoes on your feet,
your walking stick in hand.
You shall eat like those who are in flight
because you must not tarry in the place of slavery,
the place of bondage,
the place of death.
You shall eat like those who are in flight
because the land of captivity is not your home,
because you are made for freedom and for life eternal
in the land of God’s promise,
because you are a people marked out and set apart
by the blood of the lamb that has been slain.

When Jesus came to eat the Passover with his disciples,
on the night he was handed over,
he, too, ate like one who was in flight.
But he was not fleeing from captivity,
but into the hands of his betrayers.
He was not fleeing from the place of death
but toward it.
For he was the lamb of sacrifice
whose blood would consecrate his followers,
marking them as his own.
He knew that his Passover—
his passage from death to life—
was not a flight from danger,
but a flight into danger,
into the decisive moment when death and life
would meet in combat,
so that death might be defeated
and life might spring forth from the tomb.

Yet in the midst of this headlong flight to Calvary,
this hastening toward the battlefield of cross and tomb,
Jesus pauses to wash his disciples’ feet.
He pauses for an act of humble service,
to attend to a simple material need.
At the turning point between his coming forth from God
and his return to God,
Jesus takes a towel
pours water into a basin,
and washes their dirty feet.

Yet this pause is not a suspension
of the drama of salvation;
it is the meaning of that drama.
It is the meaning
of Calvary and cross and tomb.
The disciples, as usual,
do not understand all this.
For them it is just one more odd
and vaguely embarrassing
thing that Jesus does.
But what Jesus is performing
before their uncomprehending eyes
is the very meaning of his flight toward the cross,
the very mystery of his existence.
It is for this that he came,
to be poured out in love
over the sad and sinful human race,
like the water flowing over his disciples’ filthy feet.
He eats his final meal like one who is in flight
yet takes the time to kneel and serve
the humblest of human needs.

We, too, must eat like those who are in flight.
We must eat, like the Israelites,
as those who are fleeing
the place of captivity,
the land of death.
We must eat, like Jesus,
as those who strain toward
their own decisive hour,
the moment when we, too,
will be called to bear witness
in the face of hatred
to the God of love,
to testify in the face of death
to the God of life.
The Eucharist is not a feast
that leaves us satisfied and indolent,
but food that makes us yearn
to be on our way,
out from the bondage of sin,
along the road of grace,
and into the land of glory.

And yet, even as we eat like those who are in flight,
we must, like Jesus, pause to wash feet.
For this is the meaning
of the drama of sin and grace and glory
that we live in these days:
“as I have done for you, you should also do.”
Even as we hasten to the land of promise
and the decisive hour
we must, like Jesus, kneel to serve our neighbor,
especially those who are most in need,
those stripped of their dignity as God’s image.
We pause in our flight to glory
so that we might not arrive there alone.
As the poet Charles Péguy wrote,
“We must arrive together before the good Lord.
What would he say
if we arrived before him,
came home to him,
without the others?”
We pause to wash feet
not as part of a comprehensive plan
to fix what is wrong with the world,
to create a utopia,
to be the world’s savior,
but as a parable of hope for the hopeless,
rooted in the saving work of Jesus
and his gracious presence through the Spirit.
Jean Vanier writes,
“We have to remind ourselves constantly
that we are not saviors.
We are simply a tiny sign,
among thousands of others,
that love is possible.”

We eat like those who are in flight,
like those who have shed the burdens
of the land of bondage:
burdens of self-interest and self-justification,
burdens of self-seeking and self-protection.
And freed, of those burdens,
we pause in our flight to glory
to wash feet,
to seek the lost,
the bind up the wounded,
to visit the captive,
to enact before the watching world
the mystery of divine love
that has been given to us in Jesus Christ.

Palm Sunday

Readings: Mark 11:1-10; Isaiah 50:4-7; Philippians 2:6-11; Mark 14:1-15:47

The story is familiar:
we hear it every Palm Sunday and Good Friday;
we might reflect on it in the stations of the cross
or the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary.
But for all its familiarity,
the story of Jesus’ death
remains shocking in its brutality,
disturbing in what it reveals
about our human capacity
to inflict pain on one another.
It begins slowly,
with Judas’s kiss of betrayal
and the arresting soldiers’ clubs and swords.
It gathers momentum
with lies carefully crafted to ensure Jesus’ death,
with spitting and fists,
Peter’s threefold denial
and Pilate’s injustice.
The cascade of cruelty becomes unstoppable
as Jesus is beaten and mocked and stripped
and nailed to a cross:
placed on shameful display.

To make it through the day,
I force myself to forget
what cruel beasts we humans are,
the ferocity with which we tear at each other,
our capacity to crush the weakest
and to destroy the human spirit.
I don’t want this to be true about us,
about me.
But year after year the passion of Jesus
confronts me with the truth of human cruelty,
a truth that is on display all around us,
if we will simply open our eyes to see it:
in prisons and slums,
on battlefields and city streets.
It is a truth that I must own as my truth:
I, too, have my share in that rage to destroy,
to inflict pain, to humiliate, to kill.
I, too, join Peter in his denial,
Pilate in his cowardice,
the crowd in its cries
of “crucify him,
crucify him.”
At home,
at work,
in the voting booth,
in the church pew,
I, too, let myself get caught up
in the careless cascade of cruelty
that courses through human history.

But even as it confronts us
with the cruelty of our species—
with our own cruelty—
the passion of Jesus
confronts us also with God’s love.
Golgotha, the place of the skull,
the place of supreme brutality,
is only a few short steps from the garden tomb
in which Joseph of Arimathea will lay the body of Jesus,
a few short steps from the place of hope,
from which new and unending life will spring.
A few short steps,
but a distance that can be spanned
only by the infinity of God’s love.
For love of us, Jesus hurls himself
into the cascade of human cruelty,
to bear our hatred and break its power,
to rise triumphant
from the tomb of brutality
and offer us a new life to live,
a new story to tell,
a new path to walk,
the path of God’s infinite love.
In the days ahead,
in this most holy of weeks,
let us walk together
on that new path
and let God’s love carry us
those few short steps
from cruelty into compassion,
from the cross into the new creation.

Lent 3

Readings: Exodus 20:1-17, 1 Corinthians 2:22-25; John 2:13-25

Paul says in our second reading
that Jews demand signs
and Greeks look for wisdom.
As a first-century Jew,
Paul saw the world divided up
pretty neatly into Jews and Greeks—
those who were heirs of God’s covenant
and those who were not.
Jews, heirs to God’s covenant,
looked for the saving power of God to appear,
restoring Israel to its former strength and prosperity.
Greeks, lovers of wisdom,
looked for knowledge
that could help them lead the good life,
one that would lead to happiness.

We today don’t typically
divide the world up between Jews and Greeks,
but it seems to me that it is still true
that people are looking basically
for two different things from religion:
some—those who demand “signs”—
seek manifestations of divine power,
hoping that they can tap into that divine power,
can use God’s power in their lives
to make those lives better;
others—those who look for “wisdom”—
seek a knowledge of how the world works
and, particularly, how one leads a good life
so as to attain happiness for oneself and others.
To put it slightly differently,
when it comes to religion,
some seek supernatural power
and some seek ethical insight,
some seek magic
and some seek morality.

The seeker of magic might feel drawn
to the setting of our Gospel reading:
the grand Temple built in Jerusalem by Solomon
and rebuilt by king Herod,
the dwelling place of the divine presence,
where God’s favor could be bought painlessly,
for the price of an ox or a sheep or a dove.
Within Israel itself,
this magical approach to religion
was criticized by the prophets,
who decried those who came to offer sacrifice
and neglected justice for the widow,
the orphan,
and the stranger.
Yet the magical mindset is powerful
and the temptation persists to turn God
into a cosmic vending machine
of painless prosperity.

The seeker of morality,
on the other hand,
might feel drawn
to the scene depicted in our first reading:
the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai.
Rather than painless prosperity,
moralists pursue a path of strenuous effort
to transform their world and themselves,
and construct God’s kingdom of justice and peace.
Ignoring the fact that God’s Law
is revealed to Israel amidst signs and wonders,
dark cloud and thunder,
to a people who stand in fear and trembling,
the seeker of moral wisdom
sees God’s agenda clearly laid out,
only awaiting our implementation,
looking to us to tend to the widow,
the orphan,
the stranger.
There is nothing magical,
or even particularly mysterious,
about it.

You can see these two approaches to religion
in the different ways
people approach the disciplines of Lent.
The seeker after magic sees it
as a time to win God’s favor,
through giving things up, or taking things on—
offering small sacrifices in hope of great blessings.
The seeker after morality approaches Lent
as a time for moral improvement
through giving up bad habits
and seeking more strenuously
to make ourselves and our world better.

But Paul seems to suggest
that being a Christian
is about neither magical power
nor moral wisdom
but about Jesus Christ crucified,
a stumbling block of weakness
to those who seek divine power
and a foolish waste
to those who seek clear moral guidance.
The magical mindset is repulsed by the notion
that God offers, not painless prosperity now,
but new life that is found only
on the far side of the agony of the cross.
The moralist scoffs at the foolishly wasted life
of one who could have done so much good in the world
if only he had acted more prudently, more wisely.
People seek either magic or morality,
but Jesus offers us neither.

Or, rather, he offers us both,
but in a form we can only recognize
if we embrace the logic of cross and resurrection:
“Destroy this temple
and in three days I will raise it up.”
As Paul tells us,
the weakness of the cross is the power of God;
the foolishness of the cross is the wisdom of God.
The sacrifice that defies all cost-benefit analysis,
the giving of our lives to a cause
whose outcome we cannot control,
the pouring out of our very selves
into the abyss of divine love,
this is true power and wisdom,
this is the true meaning of Lent
and of the entire Christian life.

People are not wrong when they seek in faith
for supernatural power and ethical wisdom,
for magic and morality.
But the message that we as Christians
are called to bear to the world,
is a message of magical weakness
and moral foolishness,
the message of the Temple
destroyed by human hands
but rebuilt by God,
the message of Jesus Christ
crucified and risen for us
and for our salvation.
Let us seek signs.
Let us seek wisdom.
But let us never seek them anywhere
save in the cross of Jesus,
the sure foundation of our hope.