EASTER DAY, April 8, 2012 Ss. Peter & Paul, 10:00 a.m. High Mass
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“O who shall roll away the stone,” The faithful women said; “The heavy stone that seals the tomb, And shuts from us our dead?”
But looking up, at dawn, they saw The great stone rolled away, And from the empty tomb a light More dazzling than the day.
Look up, O doubting soul, look up! Eyes fixed upon the earth Can never see the life that finds In death its glorious birth.
Look up! and ever looking up, Thine eyes shall clearly see The tombs of earth filled with the light Of immortality.
(Marion Franklin Ham, No. 84 in Hymnal 1940) +++++
The time is after the Sabbath has ended. A Jewish day begins at sundown, a more theological time, rather than chronological. But this time appears not as we would usually reckon it—it begins with the dawning of a new day, a new week that signifies the beginning of a new day in human history.
Women come to a tomb to be morticians, really, to anoint the dead and mutilated body of their friend and relative, to do that lovingly and carefully. Now they see an obstacle they thought would prevent their doing this task. But we’re told in Mark’s stark gospel of the resurrection that these women “look up.” That is what Jesus did in taking bread in the feeding of a multitude. [Mk. 6:41] That is what he did again in preparation for healing the deaf man. [Mk. 7:34]
So, we are assembled here this Easter morning, long after dawn, and one thing we might do together now is heed the invitation to consider rolling a stone away. Some of us have travelled to this moment from a procession of palms a week ago, and have been with Jesus, as much as we could be, through depths of betrayal and suffering—now we have come to the astonishing joy of an Easter moment. Some others of us may have come directly from the parade to the party. Some of us are seekers, wanderers, or have been dragged here to this rare moment, without expectation that we could be made any different by this journey. The stone at Jesus’ borrowed tomb: tracing that stone and its meaning is one way to bring all of us in the same point of understanding.
The women at the tomb are concerned about who will shift what is impossible for them to manage. The stone is an obstacle to their hope. They are focused on what has happened—it is a shared past of hope and love and loss. They are coming to pay respect to what they remember and the stone is the barrier in this act of care that symbolizes their grief and loss. They hope to pay homage through their care of what is dead.
The authorities see the immovable stone as a seal on their power, insuring their position. They have handled a dangerous situation and the stone cements their mark for the present moment. The collusion of Roman and religious authorities supports a lie that remains in place: Pax Romana; social political, economic privileges for a ruling elite. Jesus was a threat to their cozy arrangements. Their power is an uneasy lodging in the present. Empire always believes itself permanent while fearing every questioning or alternative reality to their story. The stone is their statement that all challengers to their rule face being squashed like a fly, swatted down.
What of Jesus? What is the stone for Jesus who is at the center of the story? Those who have seen the Palm Sunday procession see Jesus where God and humanity are met in perfect harmony. Jesus on a donkey, symbol of a new reign and alternate reality.
The week unravels and he dies utterly alone, betrayed and abandoned. “Disowned by humanity and deserted by divinity.” Sam Wells, a theologian, says that this is what the stone meant for Jesus. But the stone is also a symbol of God’s good creation. The stone for Jesus speaks of a future revealing. A symbol of contradiction—of separation, a symbol of what has been from the beginning of time, something that can show a greater force than gravity in the story of resurrection. Jesus’ stone will come to mean that nothing can separate us form the love of God. It is an opening future for us.
What about your stone? What do you see in the stone? A remembered experience, a present, fearful reality, a future beyond our strength or imagining? Are you paralyzed in aching loss, in fear, crushed under the weight of cynicism, suffering, sadness? What is standing, heavy, unshakeable, immovable for you? What is between you and life, between you and love, between you and healing, between you and God? Who will roll this stone away? Are we full of compromises, lies which promise secure control? Can we have the courage, faith, imagination to see it can really be different? “It is the will of God that we should love,” says J. Philip Newell.
There just may be a heavenquake, more than an earthquake at Easter. Habitual grief, false control, rolled away with a whisper of wonder. Our past and present have rolled with that stone, and our future is open in a way we could not imagine.
It is amazing and perhaps more than a little terrifying.
Like this quiet servant of us all,
Easter divides time
Easter hallows space
Easter brings life and light.
Blessed Easter to all God’s creation ...
May you fare well!
(William B. Spofford)
Most of the ideas herein are from Sam Wells, in Journal for Preachers, courtesy of my colleague Linda Stewart- Kalen, Minister of Colonial Heights Presbyterian Church, Portland, and a stalwart member of my weekly lectionary study group. The Newell quotation came from Eileen Parfrey, another member of the group. The opening poem is, as noted, from Hymnal 1940 by an author who was a Unitarian minister. And the concluding poem is by Bishop Bill Spofford, honored and venerable colleague, friend and teacher, from his book on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem and experiencing Easter Day there. By +Phil Ayers
archived musings and preachments
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Not here!
Great Vigil 2012
Exodus 14: 10-31; Baruch 3: 9-15; Zephaniah 3: 14-20; Romans 6: 3-11; Mark 16: 1-8
The cops pulled their car over when they found a guy peering all over the ground under a street lamp.
They asked him what he was doing. The guy answered, “I’m looking for my wallet.”
“Do you think you lost it here?”
“No, I think I dropped it three blocks away.”
“Then why are you looking there?”
“The light’s better over here.’
OK, it’s an old joke. I thought of it because it’s an Easter joke, because it’s about looking in the wrong place just because it’s easier.
Here at Saints Peter and Paul we gather and celebrate Easter pretty much the same as we’ve celebrated for years. The Great Vigil liturgy is majestic and beautiful. The hymns are familiar. We’ve even been feasting for years. Easter tends to have an air of tradition and old custom. We go to church with Mom or grandma. We go back to the old church where we were raised. Our eyes, our ears, even our noses tell us that here it is Easter—organ music and candle wax and incense and lilies and even some faint mustiness all say it is another Easter and we are in church and the year has finally turned to Spring.
All that is rich and very comforting. On an average day I am very much in favor of comfort in an uncomfortable world. But here’s the joke—are we looking in the right place? Is it in our comfort and in the familiar that we find the Easter Gospel? Is that where we find the risen Jesus?
Or has Jesus left the building?
The Bible says so. The readings do not tell about coming back to the familiar. Instead they speak of walking off to someplace we do not know.
Moses and the Hebrews are right besides the sea, about to be butchered by the Egyptian army. The people shout at Moses that they were better off as slaves. At least they were alive, at least they knew who was in charge, at least they knew they would eat. But a different kind of God is at work, a God who chooses freedom and newness over order and predictability. The chariots are too much for the people to handle themselves. So God intervenes, but the people need to move. “Tell the Israelites to go forward!” They move from what they knew, where they knew who they were and how life was, through the waters to a new place. They do not know this new place, they do not even know what kind of people they themselves will be once they are there. They do not know what will happen once they arrive. I like The Simpsons version of the Exodus where Milhous as Aaron says to Lisa, who is Moses, “So everything is going to be OK, right? Smooth sailing for the Jews from now on!” Lisa laughs uncomfortably and says, “Hey look, is that manna over there?”
There must be death if there is to be new life. Christ put to death the old way of life, our old fearful and comfort-oriented and predictable way of life in his own death. Jesus was killed by people who did not want him to upset the orderly business of empire and temple, of politics and religion. “Don’t you know that when you were baptized into Christ, you were baptized into his death?” asks Paul. We were buried with him, along with our old life and the life that the world tells us to value. To be a baptized people is to live this deep reality of death and resurrection every day. To live a Baptized life, an Easter life, we must be ready to ask ourselves, “What needs to die in order for me to live a new life?”
That strange, new life is what Mark’s Easter story speaks of.
The women who went to the tomb knew what to expect. Death they could handle. Death, even violent death, was easy to come by in 1st Century Palestine and there were predictable things to do in response—bathe and anoint the body, gather the mourners, observe the rites. But the good and the customary and the proper things to do were not on the agenda that day! The women knew they could not roll away the stone, just like the Israelites knew they could not defeat the Egyptian chariots. But the stone was rolled away for them. The tomb was empty. Jesus had left the building. And that strange young man said that Jesus was not there, that he has “gone before you” to Galilee.
Easter is the message that Jesus is not here where we left him. Easter is not the story of a beloved man who has been resuscitated and been found, but a story of absence. Jesus is not where we have been accustomed to see him. He has gone on ahead. He is in our future. Some scholars say that the “young man” in the tomb is not an angel, but he is a baptized young man wrapped in a baptismal robe, representing the new community. The new community knows that Jesus has gone on before us.
Thomas Merton, in one of his last works entitled “He Is Risen”, said that the practice of our faith-tradition “can be valid only on one condition: that we are willing to move on, to follow him to where we are not yet, to seek him where he goes before us—‘to Galilee.’”
Recently a member of the congregation initiated a conversation—just what is meant when Christian people say that something—a thought, an action—is “in Christ.” On Easter, I suggest that here is something of what is meant by “in Christ”:
Something is “in Christ” if it proclaims the Easter truth—that the dynamic God of history leads us through death and the devolving, despairing fatalism of the world to new and unexpected life. Something is “in Christ” if it points to a reality greater than anything that can be encompassed by words, that through the conditional and incomplete limits of what is seen and heard there is deep, life-giving energy and dynamism bringing forth new life from hopelessness and the predictable and from death itself. When we enter this reality, when we are radically open to the pattern of death and resurrection, we experience that this energy is in fact Love Itself.
Someone is “in Christ” if they do not understand the meaning of their life in terms of success or failure, in terms of achievement and possession, but in terms of a constant, dynamic process of death and resurrection to new and unpredictable life in company with Christ. The story is never over, the ending has never been given away, the plot is never predictable. Within the life of a baptized person there is a constant roil and tumble of divine dynamism, leading always from death to life. The temptation is to duck, cover, and roll when we feel the divine flames on our skin. We are not meant to duck and cover and roll. We are meant to burn.
A church-community is in Christ if it sees the dynamic action of the risen Christ in its own dying and rising. A church-community in Christ never wants to return to its past no matter how glorious and comforting and safe some may think that to be. Jesus has already left the building. A church in love with its past is the same as disciples who would have refused to leave the cave where the dead Jesus was laid. Perhaps some did just that, and that is why the Gospel stories all insist “He is not here.” A church that is in Christ knows that in its own dying and rising, even when things seem dead-end and without apparent hope, the dynamic of Christ’s own dying and rising is at work. A church in Christ does not seek to control the dying. A church in Christ gets up and moves ahead to where the risen Christ awaits us—“in Galilee”, in the new place where strangers and outsiders will become friends.
Today, when we re-affirm our Baptismal Covenant, let’s keep in mind just what we are committing ourselves to. Do we truly wish to be “in Christ”?
Here’s a poem about being “in Christ” although the poet never uses those words…
Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!
James Broughton “Easter Exsultet”
With thanks to the Rev. Susan Church
Exodus 14: 10-31; Baruch 3: 9-15; Zephaniah 3: 14-20; Romans 6: 3-11; Mark 16: 1-8
The cops pulled their car over when they found a guy peering all over the ground under a street lamp.
They asked him what he was doing. The guy answered, “I’m looking for my wallet.”
“Do you think you lost it here?”
“No, I think I dropped it three blocks away.”
“Then why are you looking there?”
“The light’s better over here.’
OK, it’s an old joke. I thought of it because it’s an Easter joke, because it’s about looking in the wrong place just because it’s easier.
Here at Saints Peter and Paul we gather and celebrate Easter pretty much the same as we’ve celebrated for years. The Great Vigil liturgy is majestic and beautiful. The hymns are familiar. We’ve even been feasting for years. Easter tends to have an air of tradition and old custom. We go to church with Mom or grandma. We go back to the old church where we were raised. Our eyes, our ears, even our noses tell us that here it is Easter—organ music and candle wax and incense and lilies and even some faint mustiness all say it is another Easter and we are in church and the year has finally turned to Spring.
All that is rich and very comforting. On an average day I am very much in favor of comfort in an uncomfortable world. But here’s the joke—are we looking in the right place? Is it in our comfort and in the familiar that we find the Easter Gospel? Is that where we find the risen Jesus?
Or has Jesus left the building?
The Bible says so. The readings do not tell about coming back to the familiar. Instead they speak of walking off to someplace we do not know.
Moses and the Hebrews are right besides the sea, about to be butchered by the Egyptian army. The people shout at Moses that they were better off as slaves. At least they were alive, at least they knew who was in charge, at least they knew they would eat. But a different kind of God is at work, a God who chooses freedom and newness over order and predictability. The chariots are too much for the people to handle themselves. So God intervenes, but the people need to move. “Tell the Israelites to go forward!” They move from what they knew, where they knew who they were and how life was, through the waters to a new place. They do not know this new place, they do not even know what kind of people they themselves will be once they are there. They do not know what will happen once they arrive. I like The Simpsons version of the Exodus where Milhous as Aaron says to Lisa, who is Moses, “So everything is going to be OK, right? Smooth sailing for the Jews from now on!” Lisa laughs uncomfortably and says, “Hey look, is that manna over there?”
There must be death if there is to be new life. Christ put to death the old way of life, our old fearful and comfort-oriented and predictable way of life in his own death. Jesus was killed by people who did not want him to upset the orderly business of empire and temple, of politics and religion. “Don’t you know that when you were baptized into Christ, you were baptized into his death?” asks Paul. We were buried with him, along with our old life and the life that the world tells us to value. To be a baptized people is to live this deep reality of death and resurrection every day. To live a Baptized life, an Easter life, we must be ready to ask ourselves, “What needs to die in order for me to live a new life?”
That strange, new life is what Mark’s Easter story speaks of.
The women who went to the tomb knew what to expect. Death they could handle. Death, even violent death, was easy to come by in 1st Century Palestine and there were predictable things to do in response—bathe and anoint the body, gather the mourners, observe the rites. But the good and the customary and the proper things to do were not on the agenda that day! The women knew they could not roll away the stone, just like the Israelites knew they could not defeat the Egyptian chariots. But the stone was rolled away for them. The tomb was empty. Jesus had left the building. And that strange young man said that Jesus was not there, that he has “gone before you” to Galilee.
Easter is the message that Jesus is not here where we left him. Easter is not the story of a beloved man who has been resuscitated and been found, but a story of absence. Jesus is not where we have been accustomed to see him. He has gone on ahead. He is in our future. Some scholars say that the “young man” in the tomb is not an angel, but he is a baptized young man wrapped in a baptismal robe, representing the new community. The new community knows that Jesus has gone on before us.
Thomas Merton, in one of his last works entitled “He Is Risen”, said that the practice of our faith-tradition “can be valid only on one condition: that we are willing to move on, to follow him to where we are not yet, to seek him where he goes before us—‘to Galilee.’”
Recently a member of the congregation initiated a conversation—just what is meant when Christian people say that something—a thought, an action—is “in Christ.” On Easter, I suggest that here is something of what is meant by “in Christ”:
Something is “in Christ” if it proclaims the Easter truth—that the dynamic God of history leads us through death and the devolving, despairing fatalism of the world to new and unexpected life. Something is “in Christ” if it points to a reality greater than anything that can be encompassed by words, that through the conditional and incomplete limits of what is seen and heard there is deep, life-giving energy and dynamism bringing forth new life from hopelessness and the predictable and from death itself. When we enter this reality, when we are radically open to the pattern of death and resurrection, we experience that this energy is in fact Love Itself.
Someone is “in Christ” if they do not understand the meaning of their life in terms of success or failure, in terms of achievement and possession, but in terms of a constant, dynamic process of death and resurrection to new and unpredictable life in company with Christ. The story is never over, the ending has never been given away, the plot is never predictable. Within the life of a baptized person there is a constant roil and tumble of divine dynamism, leading always from death to life. The temptation is to duck, cover, and roll when we feel the divine flames on our skin. We are not meant to duck and cover and roll. We are meant to burn.
A church-community is in Christ if it sees the dynamic action of the risen Christ in its own dying and rising. A church-community in Christ never wants to return to its past no matter how glorious and comforting and safe some may think that to be. Jesus has already left the building. A church in love with its past is the same as disciples who would have refused to leave the cave where the dead Jesus was laid. Perhaps some did just that, and that is why the Gospel stories all insist “He is not here.” A church that is in Christ knows that in its own dying and rising, even when things seem dead-end and without apparent hope, the dynamic of Christ’s own dying and rising is at work. A church in Christ does not seek to control the dying. A church in Christ gets up and moves ahead to where the risen Christ awaits us—“in Galilee”, in the new place where strangers and outsiders will become friends.
Today, when we re-affirm our Baptismal Covenant, let’s keep in mind just what we are committing ourselves to. Do we truly wish to be “in Christ”?
Here’s a poem about being “in Christ” although the poet never uses those words…
Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!
James Broughton “Easter Exsultet”
With thanks to the Rev. Susan Church
Saturday, April 7, 2012
"All this you did for me..."--Good Friday
GOOD FRIDAY April 6, 2012 Ss. Peter & Paul, 12:00 noon
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There is much that we do not know about Jesus. The gospels are hardly helpful in reconstructing a full life of the historical Jesus. There are conflicts regarding the date and place of birth. We know nothing of his early, formative years. Various gospels place him in various places in Judaea. Few external sources, only Josephus, give us a record of him and his work.
There is only one fact about Jesus that is undisputed, historically certain, without doubt. He was crucified. In his early thirties, after a brief career around Galilee, the Romans arrested him, tried him, then nailed him to a cross to die. Jesus was crucified.
In June of 1968, a skeleton was found in northeastern Jerusalem, the skeleton of a young man who had been crucified. Why, out of all the thousands to suffer crucifixion, was this the only body found? Probably, says John Dominic Crossan, because it was rare that a corpse was buried after crucifixion. It was more typical to leave the body hanging there as food for birds and wild dogs—the final insult among a people for whom burial of the body was important. And leaving crucified bodies served as an example to passersby that they could not mess with Rome.
The Syrian governor, Publius Quinctilius Varus, had to quell three major peasant uprisings in Judaea after the death of Herod the Great, four years after the beginning of our era. When he arrived at Jerusalem, according to Josephus, he crucified two thousand rebels. Here is an account of another mass crucifixion:
Many of the peaceable citizens were arrested and brought before Florus, who had them first scourged and then crucified. The total number of that days’ victims, including women and children, for even infancy received no quarter, amounted to about three thousand six hundred.
Four years later, in the early summer of 70 AD, Titus’ army encircled Jerusalem.
When caught, they were ... scourged and subjected to torture of every description, before being killed, and then crucified opposite the walls ... five hundred or sometimes more being captured daily. ... The soldiers out of rage and hatred amused themselves by nailing their prisoners in different postures on their crosses; and so great was their number, that space could not be found for the crosses. (J.D. Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography)
Thousands were crucified during Jesus’ day, particularly Jews; it is staggering. In our day, the number is into the millions. Remember the Holocaust, Rwanda in 1994, South Africa during apartheid, Kosovo, and present-day Sudan.
Yet it is a Christian claim, not only that Jesus was crucified, but that he was crucified for us. Crucifixion itself is tragedy enough. But crucified for me? As St. Paul says, “Why, you might be willing to die for a good person, but he shows his love for us in that, at the right time, Jesus died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6). US!
An Archbishop of Paris stood in the pulpit of Notre Dame Cathedral. He was there to preach the sermon, and his whole sermon was built around a story. Thirty years before, he said, three young students had come into this cathedral. They were rough, rude, cynical men who thought all religion was a racket.
Two of them dared a third to go into the confessional and make a bogus confession to the priest. But to win the bet, he did. He tried to fool the old priest, but the priest knew that what he was saying was a lie.
The old priest listened to the fake confession, sensed the arrogance in the man’s attitude, and said, “Very well, my son. Every confession requires a penance, and this will be yours. I ask you to go into the chapel, stand before the crucifix look into the face of the crucified Christ and say, ‘all this you did for me, and I don’t give a damn.’”
The young man swaggered out of the confessional to his friends to claim the bet, but they insisted that before they paid him he would have to finish the performance by completing penance. He went into the chapel, looked into the face of Christ, and began, “All this you did for me, and I ...” “All this you did for me, and I ...” He couldn’t say it. He never finished the sentence. It began for him a painful experience that changed his life and finally brought him into the priesthood.
The Archbishop telling the story leaned over the pulpit and said, “That young man is standing before you today, preaching.”
It takes a hard heart to be unmoved by this.
As the mystery-writer and theologian Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote: “[Christ] was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own ... by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.”
All the Scriptures agree, whatever else there is to be said about Jesus: he was crucified, one of the millions of Jewish martyrs. He was crucified.
This day, remember: he was crucified by us, because of us, for us. For us. And we continue the journey as Fr. William Tully, Rector of St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, reminded his parish: “Holy Week gives you something the world cannot give you. Yes, we know the story. We can talk it—maybe we can even recite it. But walking it gives us something we can get nowhere else.”
Gracious God, on this holiest of days, we marvel at your love for us. You did not forsake us, even in the worst of our sin. Forgive us and work with us, even in our unspeakable evil. Restore us to yourself. For us, there is no other way except the way of your total, complete, infinitely forbearing love.
Adapted from homily given at Ascension Parish on Good Friday, April 2, 1999 and again at Ss. Peter & Paul, April 10, 2009; ideas from William Willimon in Pulpit Resource, Vol. 27, No. 2. Quotation from D.L. Sayers online from Ekklesia and from W. Tully via Geranium Farm and Barbara Crafton. By Phil Ayers+
+++++
There is much that we do not know about Jesus. The gospels are hardly helpful in reconstructing a full life of the historical Jesus. There are conflicts regarding the date and place of birth. We know nothing of his early, formative years. Various gospels place him in various places in Judaea. Few external sources, only Josephus, give us a record of him and his work.
There is only one fact about Jesus that is undisputed, historically certain, without doubt. He was crucified. In his early thirties, after a brief career around Galilee, the Romans arrested him, tried him, then nailed him to a cross to die. Jesus was crucified.
In June of 1968, a skeleton was found in northeastern Jerusalem, the skeleton of a young man who had been crucified. Why, out of all the thousands to suffer crucifixion, was this the only body found? Probably, says John Dominic Crossan, because it was rare that a corpse was buried after crucifixion. It was more typical to leave the body hanging there as food for birds and wild dogs—the final insult among a people for whom burial of the body was important. And leaving crucified bodies served as an example to passersby that they could not mess with Rome.
The Syrian governor, Publius Quinctilius Varus, had to quell three major peasant uprisings in Judaea after the death of Herod the Great, four years after the beginning of our era. When he arrived at Jerusalem, according to Josephus, he crucified two thousand rebels. Here is an account of another mass crucifixion:
Many of the peaceable citizens were arrested and brought before Florus, who had them first scourged and then crucified. The total number of that days’ victims, including women and children, for even infancy received no quarter, amounted to about three thousand six hundred.
Four years later, in the early summer of 70 AD, Titus’ army encircled Jerusalem.
When caught, they were ... scourged and subjected to torture of every description, before being killed, and then crucified opposite the walls ... five hundred or sometimes more being captured daily. ... The soldiers out of rage and hatred amused themselves by nailing their prisoners in different postures on their crosses; and so great was their number, that space could not be found for the crosses. (J.D. Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography)
Thousands were crucified during Jesus’ day, particularly Jews; it is staggering. In our day, the number is into the millions. Remember the Holocaust, Rwanda in 1994, South Africa during apartheid, Kosovo, and present-day Sudan.
Yet it is a Christian claim, not only that Jesus was crucified, but that he was crucified for us. Crucifixion itself is tragedy enough. But crucified for me? As St. Paul says, “Why, you might be willing to die for a good person, but he shows his love for us in that, at the right time, Jesus died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6). US!
An Archbishop of Paris stood in the pulpit of Notre Dame Cathedral. He was there to preach the sermon, and his whole sermon was built around a story. Thirty years before, he said, three young students had come into this cathedral. They were rough, rude, cynical men who thought all religion was a racket.
Two of them dared a third to go into the confessional and make a bogus confession to the priest. But to win the bet, he did. He tried to fool the old priest, but the priest knew that what he was saying was a lie.
The old priest listened to the fake confession, sensed the arrogance in the man’s attitude, and said, “Very well, my son. Every confession requires a penance, and this will be yours. I ask you to go into the chapel, stand before the crucifix look into the face of the crucified Christ and say, ‘all this you did for me, and I don’t give a damn.’”
The young man swaggered out of the confessional to his friends to claim the bet, but they insisted that before they paid him he would have to finish the performance by completing penance. He went into the chapel, looked into the face of Christ, and began, “All this you did for me, and I ...” “All this you did for me, and I ...” He couldn’t say it. He never finished the sentence. It began for him a painful experience that changed his life and finally brought him into the priesthood.
The Archbishop telling the story leaned over the pulpit and said, “That young man is standing before you today, preaching.”
It takes a hard heart to be unmoved by this.
As the mystery-writer and theologian Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote: “[Christ] was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own ... by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.”
All the Scriptures agree, whatever else there is to be said about Jesus: he was crucified, one of the millions of Jewish martyrs. He was crucified.
This day, remember: he was crucified by us, because of us, for us. For us. And we continue the journey as Fr. William Tully, Rector of St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, reminded his parish: “Holy Week gives you something the world cannot give you. Yes, we know the story. We can talk it—maybe we can even recite it. But walking it gives us something we can get nowhere else.”
Gracious God, on this holiest of days, we marvel at your love for us. You did not forsake us, even in the worst of our sin. Forgive us and work with us, even in our unspeakable evil. Restore us to yourself. For us, there is no other way except the way of your total, complete, infinitely forbearing love.
Adapted from homily given at Ascension Parish on Good Friday, April 2, 1999 and again at Ss. Peter & Paul, April 10, 2009; ideas from William Willimon in Pulpit Resource, Vol. 27, No. 2. Quotation from D.L. Sayers online from Ekklesia and from W. Tully via Geranium Farm and Barbara Crafton. By Phil Ayers+
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