Sunday, October 21, 2018

Jesus pierces suffering – Mark 10:35-45, Heb 4:14-16

Twenty-ninth Sunday in OT, Year B; Holy Infant parish.


Someone recently sent me a short video about a chef called Mark Brand. Mark is a person who was at one point in his life without housing. He talks in the video about how sometimes that meant rotating between friends’ couches; sometimes that meant sleeping rough. He talks very honestly about how sometimes his life did involve making bad decision concerning alcohol and other drugs, and other times when he was able to choose sobriety for sustained periods, but had to deal with people who assumed he wasn’t. Things changed for Mark. He now owns a couple of restaurants. He has a permanent roof over his head, he employs people.


Like a lot of restauranteurs, he’s doing OK for himself, but he’s not exactly flush with cash. He’s no Gordon Ramsey or Wolfgang Puck. As things started to go better in his life, he asked himself how he could give back to those still unhoused. And he realized that he wasn’t in a position to give away enough food to make much of a dent in his city’s hunger problem. And I get what Mother Theresa said, “What do you do if you can’t feed 100 people? Feed one.” But, there are other ways of responding to not being able to feed 100 people too. Mark had known first hand that there were people who had seemed eager to help him, but that he wasn’t able to convince that he was choosing sobriety that day, that he really needed to money for food. He knew how many people who are unhoused struggle to convince people, people of good will of that. So, in one of his restaurants, a sandwich shop really, he started selling tokens. These tokens could be exchanged for a sandwich, and cost just a little less than a sandwich. He encouraged people to buy these, and give them to people they met who needed a sandwich. And it worked. People with hungry stomachs got fed, people who were concerned what they’re money would be spent on got reassured, and conversations started happening between people who might not have spoken. Even the people who did give change rarely stopped and talked, and now they had to, to explain where to cash in the token. Mark helped build a world where it’s a little easier to be good, where human dignity started to matter a little more. And he did that not through possessing great wealth, but through his experience of the weakness and temptation of being unhoused.

God has all the riches in the world with which to help us, but still, in Christ, chooses to share completely in the human experience of weakness and temptation. That’s what the reading we heard from Hebrews affirmed to us. Hebrews affirms that at the same time, Christ was tested just as we are and that he has passed through the veil (like the priest on Yom Kippur) and is in the heavenly sanctuary, where he prays for us.

Every test, every temptation we know: temptation to despair, to lose hope, to judge, to turn in on ourselves, to squander our gifts… Christ knew every temptation. In Gethsemane, he even cries out, “Father, take this cup from me,” before following that prayer with “yet not my will, but yours be done.” Satan’s temptations in the desert were nothing compared Gethsemane, compared with realizing that he’d have to offer the human life he’d taken up out of love for humanity, humanity that either want to kill him or was about to desert him. I like to imagine Jesus taking a breath between those prayers. “Father, take this cup from me.” Breathe in. It’s your breath in our lungs, Lord. “Not my will but yours.”

And that’s how Christ pierces through human suffering, pierces through the veil. If you’ve seen me without my vestments on, you’ll have seen the cross and anchors pendant I always wear. This is the symbol of my religious family, the Congregation of Holy Cross, which our constitutions call us to wear daily. (You’ll also see it on the little brochures about us in the atrium). This image is taken from a part of the letter to the Hebrews that we didn’t read today, just the next chapter, where hope is described as anchor, and anchor that reaches behind the veil. An anchor gives you security. But, an anchor that avoids stormy water would be a pretty lousy anchor. Christ on the cross pierces through the fullness of storm, the fullness of human suffering, weakness and temptation, and reaches the rock of security, reaches beyond the veil. And he bids us cling to him, cling to that cross. Because that’s how we’re secured, and that’s what love looks like, the cross that dares to be present to human suffering.


James and John don’t really get that. They want to be close to Jesus, but Jesus in his glory, and they think that being close to him means winning some competition, being closer than anyone else. They’ll even promise to do daring things to get there, drink that cup and be baptized with that baptism. And, inspired by the resurrection, moved by the Spirit, they actually did. James will be one of the church’s earliest martyrs, not long after Stephen. But first they’ll run, they’ll abandon Jesus on the cross. They don’t want to cling to him if that means clinging to the cross. They don’t want to cling to him if that means loving with the freedom and availability that characterizes the kingdom, that looks like the cross. Because being close to Jesus seems to take second place for them to being closer than Peter and the rest of the other 9.

Jesus calls them to something more. He calls them to love like him, and to do that even though love opens double gates on suffering. Because when cling to him, he’ll take us through, he’ll take us to the rock that secures us, to the heavenly court beyond the veil.

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