Friday, April 14, 2017

Jesus restores us to life – John 17:1-18:42

Good Friday; Holy Infant.

John’s Passion is full of people making exchanges, swapping something heart-breakingly brilliant, fragile in its tenderness for something dull, insubstantial and ridiculous. Friends, sin is dull, insubstantial and ridiculous. And Jesus dreams more daring dreams than that for us.


Take Judas. He comes at night, with lamps and torches.  He had walked out on the Light of the World incarnate, to live in darkness.  He’d exchanged the Light of Salvation for lamps and torches, meager hope to illumine a cold, dark world.  Jesus had longed and had acted to set his heart aflame with burning zeal and fiery love, and he couldn’t take it.  It was too much, too daring: to entrust one’s heart to a love that would love unto death, a love the darkness could not overcome, but could not comprehend either.  So he trades it in, for lamps and torches, barely enough to put the darkness at bay long enough to stumble to the garden of betrayal.

Peter, at least Peter would be loyal!  But he seeks to make an exchange too, a subtler one, and maybe even more dangerous because of that.  He would have his Lord shirk the cup the Father has poured him, refuse obedience to being His loving Son, turn away from Love, resorting to violence in place of loving self-gift, refuse to be the Lamb to be slain for us.  And his choices make choices, as so often choices do.  He finds himself confronted in the courtyard by a relative of his victim.  Jesus can’t be justly convicted of anything, but Peter can.  So, he evades.  He lies.  He exchanges the truth for a lie.  He exchanges a relationship of Love with Truth incarnate for violence, cowardice, temporary safety and a lie.

The crowd make their exchange too, making their request for Barabbas in place of Christ: an insurgent in place of true liberation.  Pilate cares more about being a Friend of Caesar, a political honor he’d connived his way to, than the one who “calls us friends.”  Does he have an idea who this is, when he insists that Jesus’ titulus be inscribed “King of the Jews”?  If so, he, and the crowd he lets himself be beholden to, replace the king who could save them with Tiberias Caesar.  A despot.  A despot who in the short term promises temporary safety, but won’t be able to do much about that a few years later when he’s murdered by his heir Caligula.  They trade flimsy short-term safety for Eternal Life as beloved friends of the King of Kings.

And how about us?  What exchanges do we make?  And how do we let Jesus bring us back from them?  Because he is acting to do that. We’re here because we don’t want to make exchanges.  We want our world illumined by Christ, not replacement torches and lamps.  We want to embrace the Father’s Love and Truth that Christ is, but we do what we don’t want to do, and find lies tempting our lips.  We want to pray “Thy Kingdom Come!” and mean it with all our hearts, but we still find it within ourselves to hold back, to not want Jesus to reign in our hearts, to rule us. 

At his last supper, Jesus told us where he was going, to heaven to prepare a place for us. For the last thousand years, our Jewish sisters and brothers have been singing a song at Passover, Dayeinu, “that would have been enough for us,” that piles up grace upon grace God has bestowed on us, each of which is world-changingly enough. To go to heaven, to prepare a place for us, to not just show us the Way, but be the Way, Dayeinu, that would have been enough for us, but we keep turning away, trading that Way for something that seems easier. So, on the cross Jesus acts.

He speaks to Mary and the Beloved Disciple. They must have felt so alone at the foot of that cross, however physically close they were to each other, or to Christ.  So, from the cross, he forges communion.  He bids them behold each other, and behold each other as kin.  And they receive one another.  The Word of God came into the world, but his own did not receive Him.  Now, the world has changed.  Now, these two receive each other.  And we’re called to too.  We’re called to behold each other, behold each other as kin.  Because that’s what Church is.  We’re given to each other to be the sacrament of Christ’s presence in the world. Dayeinu, that would have been enough for us.



But it’s hard, because we still have it within ourselves to hold back.  We are still plagued by fear, isolation, enmity, sin, turned in on ourselves.  So, Christ keeps acting to draw us out of that and into communion, and in his very death he hands over the Spirit.  It is completed.  We are filled with Christ’s own Spirit, his breath, that he gave up that we might learn to breathe anew, closer to us than we are to ourselves.  Dayeinu, that would have been enough for us.

And from his side flows water to cleanse us, water poured out in baptism, water that gives us life.
And with the water, blood.  Blood poured out for us.  Blood present to us every time the sacrifice on Golgotha is re-presented to us in the sacrifice of the Mass.  He is not distant from us!  This act of love becomes a banquet to which we are invited every day of the year; every day but this day.  This day, when our Lord offers himself, body, blood, soul and divinity, in the reserved sacrament, the fruits of yesterday’s Mass, the Mass of his Last Supper, when he got down on his knees, washed our feet and bids us rise.


And it works.  Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus come out of the darkness of secret discipleship and act courageously for Christ.  It works!  What is Christ working in us?  Come back tomorrow or Sunday to celebrate even more, but the good news needn’t wait till then.  The good news is what wonders he’s wrought from the cross; how, in his death, he restores us to the fragile brilliance of love-filled life. That’s why my community, the Congregation of Holy Cross, takes as our motto: Ave crux, spes unica!  Hail the Cross, our only hope.

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