Recently I’ve been thinking about life in light of the Passion of Christ which we commemorate at this time each year.
I’ve been wondering, what can we do for him after all he’s done for us?
There’s an answer to that question in St. Paul’s instructions, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men … .” (Colossians 3:23) Do whatever you do as though you were doing it for him. Paul doesn’t say so but the context – he’s talking to slaves about the sort of service they render to their Masters – implies that this applies to any task no matter how mundane or, even injust, it might be perceived, and makes no allowance for the fact that it may be work for a person you’d rather not be working for. So, the instructions, to be more specific, are “Do whatever you do, for whomever you do it, as though you are doing it for the Lord … .”
When we approach life with this attitude a lot of things change. Most of all, our view of ourselves changes. Regardless of the situation we are servants, employees of the resurrected Jesus, Lord of the Universe; Agents of the Kingdom of Christ in the among the Kingdoms of this world. In my dictionary that defines Diplomat; more precisely Ambassador. The choices I make; the attitude with which I approach even the most mundane assignments; my conduct among my colleagues and superiors; the quality of what I do are all transformed by this dignifying definition of my role in the world. My life is now recognized as having timeless, lasting importance. I live a though I were highly influential; a purposeful personal presence God has deliberately created.
This transformation in my perception of why I do what I do and whom I serve has far-reaching results.
1. It Dignifies Every Moment.
Every moment is dignified by our awareness that it has been given to us by the Supreme Sovereign for his purposes.
The long version of the “Serenity Prayer” pleads for a Spirit that, “enjoys one moment at a time.” At first this seems impossible. How do you enjoy a moment when it’s passed before you’ve even had a chance to ask, let alone answer, “are we havin’ fun yet.” Moments are, by their very nature, transient things. They’re gone before you know they’re here. The Teacher, whose view of life is expressed in Ecclesiastes, describes how someone may have learned the art of “enjoying one moment at a time.” “Then I realized,” the Teacher writes, “that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him—for this is his lot. Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work—this is a gift of God. He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart.” (Ecclesiastes 5: 18 – 20) The last sentence, “He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart,” captures the quality of someone who is “enjoying one moment at a time.” He’s enjoying a particular moment because he’s “occupied with gladness of heart.” We have a sort of “chicken or egg” matter here. Which comes first the “moment” or the “enjoying” of it? The Teacher’s answer, is that the “enjoying” comes first. There’s no need to even consider the moment. And such a person doesn’t. “He seldom reflects on the days of his life.” He’s not forever analyzing every moment to see if he’s “enjoying” it. There’s no need to wonder whether we’ve enjoyed it. Every moment has been enjoyable because it has been drawn up into the overarching all enhancing joy of being someone God has trusted with life.
2. It Dignifies the Task
Of course this disposition dignifies the task whatever that task may be. The Ecclesiastes Man “finds satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun … .”
The Community we live in chooses what they call a “Showcase Home” every year. This is a home that is not only exquisite in its own right. It’s a stage for the latest in “distinctive” interior and exterior design innovations. Last year the home selected as the “Showcase” was on one of my running routes. I ran by it at least once a week for several months. At first I didn’t know what was being done to this already magnificent, palatial residence. Every imaginable trade was represented in the flurry of work being done around it. Painters were there every day for weeks. A playground apparatus fit for a neighborhood park was built in the side yard. Full grown trees were trucked in and planted. Stately trees already there were exquisitely trimmed. Shrubbery and flowers were planted. A large rather utilitarian looking natural gas valve was replaced with a brightly polished bronze device that would pass for a work of modern art in any museum. Sidewalks were built. A temporary, fully grown, potted hedge was planted around a neighboring house. Finely designed, polished ground lighting fixtures were installed along the face of this hedge. These craftsmen were doing their best work. Of course it could be argued that they knew it would be put on display and for people with the money to pay for such skilled craftsmanship. It was, as they say, good marketing. But this was the “Showcase” house. There had to be a bit of pride in simply being part of such a project.
Dorothy Sayers, one of the first women to be granted a degree from Oxford university; well known in English literary circles for her detective novels and stories, as well as her later religious plays and books including scholarly translations of Dante’s “Inferno” and “Purgatorio,” has written about the Task. “I ask that (work) should be looked upon – not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well, a thing that is well worth doing.”
3. It Dignifies the People We Serve and Serve With
Perhaps the best way to make this point is to ask a couple of questions.
If you were given the choice would you want to work with the person for whom every task is a labor of love to his or her Lord? If you needed someone to do something for you would you hire this sort of person? Would it make any difference if you knew that such people believe that they’re doing something for their Lord every time they serve you?
Jesus said, “Whenever you do something for someone in need you are doing it for me.” (Matthew 25: 40)
Incidentally, Jesus said that, at the end of time, he will say to such people, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” (Matthew 25:34)
Kind of dignifying all around wouldn’t you say …
Godspeed in it …
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Friday, April 14, 2006
LifeLog - 04.14.06
It’s “GOOD FRIDAY!”
Have you ever wondered why Christians call the day their rescuer was brutally slaughtered, as if he were the worst of all evil ones, a GOOD day? I’m sure a lot has been said and written about that. To me it is a vivid reminder of how completely paradoxical our “WAY” really is. The tragedies of this day are its triumphs.
We sing about it. I heard the song, “Above All,” for the first time, driving a borrowed car from Toronto, Canada, along the North shore of Lake Ontario, East to Kingston. The CD in the car’s stereo was a recording of one of Michael W. Smith’s concerts.. I was immediately moved by the song.
Above all powers; above all kings
Above all nature; and all created things.
Above all wisdom and all the ways of man,
You were here, before the world began
Above all kingdoms; above all thrones
Above all wonders the world has ever known.
Above all wealth and treasures of the earth,
There's no way to measure what You're worth.
Then came a dramatic change in tone and perspective.
Crucified, laid behind the stone.
You lived to die rejected and alone.
Like the rose trampled on the ground,
You took the fall and thought of me
Above all …
I wept that afternoon as the cosmic proportions of Christ’s death struck to the very core of my heart. The greatest man who ever lived was savagely brutalized and executed in a sinister way contrived to desecrate and completely humiliate its victim. “Like a rose trampled on the ground.”
What gripped me even more strongly, though, were the lines,
You took the fall and thought of me
Above all …
The “took the fall” part I got and worshipped. He was “wounded for (my) transgressions.” But, “thought of me, above all”? That sounded a bit like sentimental poetic license to me. And then I remembered Peter’s words in a letter to Christians in the 1st Century. (See 1. Peter 2: 24.) “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” The words of John (1. John 2:2) the Son of Thunder, in a similar letter written around the same time as Peter’s, came to me. “He is the atoning sacrifice – the one who ‘took the fall’ though it cost him everything … everything – for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”
This is not sentimental self-aggrandizement. He did think of me and all the me’s in the entire world on that “GOOD FRIDAY.” All the me’s who were then living. Of whom else was he thinking when he prayed “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” All the me’s who had ever lived were included. All the me’s who would ever live – me among them; you among them – were included. In the heart of the man on the center cross – the God-man – you and I were known intimately. You can say, I can say, every human being who has lived, now lives, or will ever live can say, He “thought of me above all.” Mysterious as it is, it powerfully declares the infinity of the heart of God and the immeasurable magnitude of the mercy poured out as his heart was broken for every “me.” The great, unfathomable heart of God contemplated and took to itself every sin; all the guilt; all the shame; the embarrassment; the ignoble, disgustingly humiliating details of all I have done wrong. No modern writer has understood and expressed what took place that day better than Walter Wangerin, Jr. In his book Reliving the Passion: Meditations on the Suffering, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus as recorded in Mark he creates a deeply moving word portrait of how Jesus was affected, seeing me, in his heart, that day.
“Guilty? Is this thinkable, that Jesus is guilty? No, it is not thinkable. It is as unthinkable as the pain such guilt must cause – but it is true! There are moments right now when Jesus looks down on the sick derision of the people at his feet and he agrees: It is right. I am worse than false priests and outright criminals.
Who can fathom the grief of the Holy one of God, when he must say in his soul: I deserve this. Yet that, exactly, is the sorrow before us now.
Maybe none shall see with more terrible clarity the sorrow of our Lord than the apostle Paul: ‘For our sake,’ he writes, ‘God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Corinthians 5: 21). … ‘God made him to be sin.’ Jesus has become a bad man, the worst of all men, the badness, in fact, of all men and all women together. … Jesus is sin! Jesus is the thing itself! … he has become the rebellion of humankind against its God.
He is, therefore, rightly crucified. He bows before his deserving. There is nothing to ease his sorrow – no, not even some sweet internal sense of innocence. However mistaken the motives of his enemies, Jesus belongs on the cross because sin deserves – sin requires – the complete, judicial damnation of the Deity.
And yet, and yet: this same Jesus is also the Holy One of God, now as much as ever before – because now he is completely obedient to the Father. Holy, he must hate sin with an unyielding hatred. Behold, then, and see the sorrow unlike any other sorrow in the universe: that right now Jesus hates himself with an unyielding hatred.
He is, in his own eyes, vile. He cannot console himself with the goodness of his sacrifice or the wickedness of his detractors, passers-by, priests, criminals – because they are right!”
Overwhelmed by all Jesus knowingly saw and assumed as his own, that day, Wangerin is moved to pray; a prayer I too, filled with remorse beyond words, must pray.
“This, Christ?
Is it from such anguished self-knowledge as this that you have saved me? – the deep knowing of my own sinfulness, a knowing from the vantage of the Judge, my unrighteousness in God’s most glorious eyes? Self-loathing for eternity? Hell, therefore?
Yes. Because in you I have become the righteousness of God.
Yes! Amen."
This is the paradox. He is damned. I am pardoned. He drinks the Cup of Redemption to its last sorrowfully bitter dreg, “… we … rejoice in God through … (Him) … by whom we now have been reconciled to God.” (Romans 5:11)
GOOD FRIDAY! to you all !
Have you ever wondered why Christians call the day their rescuer was brutally slaughtered, as if he were the worst of all evil ones, a GOOD day? I’m sure a lot has been said and written about that. To me it is a vivid reminder of how completely paradoxical our “WAY” really is. The tragedies of this day are its triumphs.
We sing about it. I heard the song, “Above All,” for the first time, driving a borrowed car from Toronto, Canada, along the North shore of Lake Ontario, East to Kingston. The CD in the car’s stereo was a recording of one of Michael W. Smith’s concerts.. I was immediately moved by the song.
Above all powers; above all kings
Above all nature; and all created things.
Above all wisdom and all the ways of man,
You were here, before the world began
Above all kingdoms; above all thrones
Above all wonders the world has ever known.
Above all wealth and treasures of the earth,
There's no way to measure what You're worth.
Then came a dramatic change in tone and perspective.
Crucified, laid behind the stone.
You lived to die rejected and alone.
Like the rose trampled on the ground,
You took the fall and thought of me
Above all …
I wept that afternoon as the cosmic proportions of Christ’s death struck to the very core of my heart. The greatest man who ever lived was savagely brutalized and executed in a sinister way contrived to desecrate and completely humiliate its victim. “Like a rose trampled on the ground.”
What gripped me even more strongly, though, were the lines,
You took the fall and thought of me
Above all …
The “took the fall” part I got and worshipped. He was “wounded for (my) transgressions.” But, “thought of me, above all”? That sounded a bit like sentimental poetic license to me. And then I remembered Peter’s words in a letter to Christians in the 1st Century. (See 1. Peter 2: 24.) “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” The words of John (1. John 2:2) the Son of Thunder, in a similar letter written around the same time as Peter’s, came to me. “He is the atoning sacrifice – the one who ‘took the fall’ though it cost him everything … everything – for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”
This is not sentimental self-aggrandizement. He did think of me and all the me’s in the entire world on that “GOOD FRIDAY.” All the me’s who were then living. Of whom else was he thinking when he prayed “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” All the me’s who had ever lived were included. All the me’s who would ever live – me among them; you among them – were included. In the heart of the man on the center cross – the God-man – you and I were known intimately. You can say, I can say, every human being who has lived, now lives, or will ever live can say, He “thought of me above all.” Mysterious as it is, it powerfully declares the infinity of the heart of God and the immeasurable magnitude of the mercy poured out as his heart was broken for every “me.” The great, unfathomable heart of God contemplated and took to itself every sin; all the guilt; all the shame; the embarrassment; the ignoble, disgustingly humiliating details of all I have done wrong. No modern writer has understood and expressed what took place that day better than Walter Wangerin, Jr. In his book Reliving the Passion: Meditations on the Suffering, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus as recorded in Mark he creates a deeply moving word portrait of how Jesus was affected, seeing me, in his heart, that day.
“Guilty? Is this thinkable, that Jesus is guilty? No, it is not thinkable. It is as unthinkable as the pain such guilt must cause – but it is true! There are moments right now when Jesus looks down on the sick derision of the people at his feet and he agrees: It is right. I am worse than false priests and outright criminals.
Who can fathom the grief of the Holy one of God, when he must say in his soul: I deserve this. Yet that, exactly, is the sorrow before us now.
Maybe none shall see with more terrible clarity the sorrow of our Lord than the apostle Paul: ‘For our sake,’ he writes, ‘God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Corinthians 5: 21). … ‘God made him to be sin.’ Jesus has become a bad man, the worst of all men, the badness, in fact, of all men and all women together. … Jesus is sin! Jesus is the thing itself! … he has become the rebellion of humankind against its God.
He is, therefore, rightly crucified. He bows before his deserving. There is nothing to ease his sorrow – no, not even some sweet internal sense of innocence. However mistaken the motives of his enemies, Jesus belongs on the cross because sin deserves – sin requires – the complete, judicial damnation of the Deity.
And yet, and yet: this same Jesus is also the Holy One of God, now as much as ever before – because now he is completely obedient to the Father. Holy, he must hate sin with an unyielding hatred. Behold, then, and see the sorrow unlike any other sorrow in the universe: that right now Jesus hates himself with an unyielding hatred.
He is, in his own eyes, vile. He cannot console himself with the goodness of his sacrifice or the wickedness of his detractors, passers-by, priests, criminals – because they are right!”
Overwhelmed by all Jesus knowingly saw and assumed as his own, that day, Wangerin is moved to pray; a prayer I too, filled with remorse beyond words, must pray.
“This, Christ?
Is it from such anguished self-knowledge as this that you have saved me? – the deep knowing of my own sinfulness, a knowing from the vantage of the Judge, my unrighteousness in God’s most glorious eyes? Self-loathing for eternity? Hell, therefore?
Yes. Because in you I have become the righteousness of God.
Yes! Amen."
This is the paradox. He is damned. I am pardoned. He drinks the Cup of Redemption to its last sorrowfully bitter dreg, “… we … rejoice in God through … (Him) … by whom we now have been reconciled to God.” (Romans 5:11)
GOOD FRIDAY! to you all !
Thursday, April 13, 2006
LifeLog - 04.14.06 - A Seasonal Letter to Family and Friends
Greetings Family & Friends on this Maundy Thursday,
This evening Christians will take the sacrament of our Lord’s Supper. This Maundy – mandatum – commandment – Thursday practice was inaugurated by our Lord Jesus when he took the “hidden” bread of the Seder identifying it as his own body, and the Passover Cup of Redemption declaring, as he offered it to his 12 closest followers, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” It was this same night, in Gethsemane, that our Lord made the final decision to drink the bitter “Cup of Redemption” to the very last dreg.
For most of my life as a follower of Jesus I’ve believed that these days commemorating his Passion and Resurrection ought to be celebrated at least as enthusiastically as Christmas if not more so. These events are the reason for Christmas. It is, for this that Christ came. “Behold,” writes Walter Wangerin in his superb book, Reliving the Passion ... , “this is the central event of the whole of history; behold this is the sun that keeps the planets and bequeaths importance to the peoples and makes significant even me and all I do: AND THEY CRUCIFIED HIM. It happened. Eternity entered time. They crossed at the cross.
“We are altogether meaningless, except God touch us. God touched us here.
“We fly into an infinity of hell, separated from life and from each other and from divinity forever, except God hold us. God holds us here.”
And so, in this, the week we remember and contemplate “the central event of human history,” I am doing what we didn’t do last Christmas. I am writing a “Seasonal Letter.” I am giving to these holy days some of the attention we customarily reserve for the celebration of Jesus birth. I’ve been prompted to do so through some events I’ll tell you about.
In late March, 2003, Shirley’s and my very valued friends, Mel and Marcia Means, gave us a book that has become my frequent study and meditation companion. In that book, Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God, the writer, Marva Dawn, recommended another book, Reliving the Passion: Meditations on the Suffering, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus as recorded in Mark. I bought it in April that same year. It is a small, simple, yet profound series of 40 reflections, one for each of the days of Lent from Ash Wednesday to the Day of the Resurrection of our Lord. That year, inspired by this exceptionally gifted writer, I established a personal Lenten discipline which I have practiced each year since. This letter is a new piece being added to that ritual.
If ever there were anything to “write home about,” these events we commemorate today and throughout this Holy Week are it. Usually Seasonal Letters are about Family Life, personal passages, individual accomplishments. The magnitude of what happened this week about 1,973 years ago must be the theme of an Easter Season letter. Today is the day Passover begins. The moon is full. Its brilliance reminds us that on the day Jesus was arrested the Passover Lambs were killed for possibly the 12 hundredth time. This time, though, their deaths resolved in the slaughter of the “Lamb sacrificed before the foundation of the world.” It’s beyond imagining. 1,973 or so years ago the events we remember this Week fulfilled what had been enacted on a specific night in every Jewish Community for well over a thousand years. They retold the Passover story not only to recall a great deliverance but to foreshadow the completion of plans formulated before there were clocks, or calendars, or full moons; before there was time. Makes you feel like you’re part of something very large and very important. And so we are.
Because of the ways in which our Lord has used Walter Wangerin to heighten my appreciation of just how marvelous these events are I wish I could send a copy of his book to you. Since I cannot I will share an excerpt from it and a prayer of praise that Wangerin has written. It is a prayer Shirley and I pray with you as you celebrate the miracle of the Passion; the conquest; the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Mark 15: 37 – 39a
And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.
And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.
And when the centurion who stood facing him saw that he thus cried out and
breathed his last …
“A loud cry.” In Greek the words are phone megale, which, transposed, begin to look familiar: a mega-phone.
A shout of triumph!
“… this centurion … has lingered through a truly terrifying storm, a blackness three hours long, here on a hill, exposed to the wind’s lash, protecting … what? Who is this Jesus? The rain runs his body in rivulets, beard and hair stuck to flesh, head bent backward, upward. The rim of his top teeth shows. Whereas his companions have begun shivering and crying in the cold, till now he has held his peace. One curses. One weeps. Common responses. The man in the middle flares his nostrils and groans.
“Then, just in the last minutes, he breathed deeply, he swelled his chest and bellowed a hoarse word: ‘Eloi, Eloi …’ something. Can’t translate. But this, finally, is what the centurion expects. Right about now, six hours into the torment, even the best begin to break. Okay, then: so this Jesus of Nazareth is no different from everyone else who …
“What was that?
“A loud shout! Phone megale! What? What? No, this is not at all what the centurion expects. It’s a cry that he has heard before, to be sure – but never in defeat and never, never in death, always when the soldier has won the battle or the king the war!
“This is a cry of triumph!
“The centurion whirls around to see Jesus: he sees eyes like fiery darts in the darkness; he sees a mouth thin and thin, as thin as the blade of a sword, grinning!
“Victorious? King of the Jews – victorious over what? What do these flaming eyes announce?
“Satan, thou art defeated in my defense! Sin, dispossessed of a people! Death, look about thee; thou art not mighty and dreadful. Lo, I close my eyes and die – and death shall be no more.
“Then, suddenly, he dies. The centurion’s jaw drops. He stares, but he’s seen it before; he knows the signs: Jesus is dead. Dead. No coma, no deeper sleep than another sleep. All at once the eyes see nothing, the mind thinks nothing, the heart has ceased to beat – but suddenly! That’s what rivets the centurion. It is as if this man chose to go fully conscious straight to the wall of death, and there to strike it with all his might and, in the striking, die. Aware of absolutely everything.
“… (This) one thing astounds the centurion: how can a crucified criminal act so convincingly like the victor?”
“O Christ!
When you died, you broke the wall that divided us from God: you struck it, you cracked it, you tore it apart – you made a door of that which had been death before.
And the sign was that ‘the veil of the temple was rent in twain, from the top to the bottom,’ and the mercy seat was made open to my approach.
Amen
This evening Christians will take the sacrament of our Lord’s Supper. This Maundy – mandatum – commandment – Thursday practice was inaugurated by our Lord Jesus when he took the “hidden” bread of the Seder identifying it as his own body, and the Passover Cup of Redemption declaring, as he offered it to his 12 closest followers, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” It was this same night, in Gethsemane, that our Lord made the final decision to drink the bitter “Cup of Redemption” to the very last dreg.
For most of my life as a follower of Jesus I’ve believed that these days commemorating his Passion and Resurrection ought to be celebrated at least as enthusiastically as Christmas if not more so. These events are the reason for Christmas. It is, for this that Christ came. “Behold,” writes Walter Wangerin in his superb book, Reliving the Passion ... , “this is the central event of the whole of history; behold this is the sun that keeps the planets and bequeaths importance to the peoples and makes significant even me and all I do: AND THEY CRUCIFIED HIM. It happened. Eternity entered time. They crossed at the cross.
“We are altogether meaningless, except God touch us. God touched us here.
“We fly into an infinity of hell, separated from life and from each other and from divinity forever, except God hold us. God holds us here.”
And so, in this, the week we remember and contemplate “the central event of human history,” I am doing what we didn’t do last Christmas. I am writing a “Seasonal Letter.” I am giving to these holy days some of the attention we customarily reserve for the celebration of Jesus birth. I’ve been prompted to do so through some events I’ll tell you about.
In late March, 2003, Shirley’s and my very valued friends, Mel and Marcia Means, gave us a book that has become my frequent study and meditation companion. In that book, Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God, the writer, Marva Dawn, recommended another book, Reliving the Passion: Meditations on the Suffering, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus as recorded in Mark. I bought it in April that same year. It is a small, simple, yet profound series of 40 reflections, one for each of the days of Lent from Ash Wednesday to the Day of the Resurrection of our Lord. That year, inspired by this exceptionally gifted writer, I established a personal Lenten discipline which I have practiced each year since. This letter is a new piece being added to that ritual.
If ever there were anything to “write home about,” these events we commemorate today and throughout this Holy Week are it. Usually Seasonal Letters are about Family Life, personal passages, individual accomplishments. The magnitude of what happened this week about 1,973 years ago must be the theme of an Easter Season letter. Today is the day Passover begins. The moon is full. Its brilliance reminds us that on the day Jesus was arrested the Passover Lambs were killed for possibly the 12 hundredth time. This time, though, their deaths resolved in the slaughter of the “Lamb sacrificed before the foundation of the world.” It’s beyond imagining. 1,973 or so years ago the events we remember this Week fulfilled what had been enacted on a specific night in every Jewish Community for well over a thousand years. They retold the Passover story not only to recall a great deliverance but to foreshadow the completion of plans formulated before there were clocks, or calendars, or full moons; before there was time. Makes you feel like you’re part of something very large and very important. And so we are.
Because of the ways in which our Lord has used Walter Wangerin to heighten my appreciation of just how marvelous these events are I wish I could send a copy of his book to you. Since I cannot I will share an excerpt from it and a prayer of praise that Wangerin has written. It is a prayer Shirley and I pray with you as you celebrate the miracle of the Passion; the conquest; the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Mark 15: 37 – 39a
And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.
And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.
And when the centurion who stood facing him saw that he thus cried out and
breathed his last …
“A loud cry.” In Greek the words are phone megale, which, transposed, begin to look familiar: a mega-phone.
A shout of triumph!
“… this centurion … has lingered through a truly terrifying storm, a blackness three hours long, here on a hill, exposed to the wind’s lash, protecting … what? Who is this Jesus? The rain runs his body in rivulets, beard and hair stuck to flesh, head bent backward, upward. The rim of his top teeth shows. Whereas his companions have begun shivering and crying in the cold, till now he has held his peace. One curses. One weeps. Common responses. The man in the middle flares his nostrils and groans.
“Then, just in the last minutes, he breathed deeply, he swelled his chest and bellowed a hoarse word: ‘Eloi, Eloi …’ something. Can’t translate. But this, finally, is what the centurion expects. Right about now, six hours into the torment, even the best begin to break. Okay, then: so this Jesus of Nazareth is no different from everyone else who …
“What was that?
“A loud shout! Phone megale! What? What? No, this is not at all what the centurion expects. It’s a cry that he has heard before, to be sure – but never in defeat and never, never in death, always when the soldier has won the battle or the king the war!
“This is a cry of triumph!
“The centurion whirls around to see Jesus: he sees eyes like fiery darts in the darkness; he sees a mouth thin and thin, as thin as the blade of a sword, grinning!
“Victorious? King of the Jews – victorious over what? What do these flaming eyes announce?
“Satan, thou art defeated in my defense! Sin, dispossessed of a people! Death, look about thee; thou art not mighty and dreadful. Lo, I close my eyes and die – and death shall be no more.
“Then, suddenly, he dies. The centurion’s jaw drops. He stares, but he’s seen it before; he knows the signs: Jesus is dead. Dead. No coma, no deeper sleep than another sleep. All at once the eyes see nothing, the mind thinks nothing, the heart has ceased to beat – but suddenly! That’s what rivets the centurion. It is as if this man chose to go fully conscious straight to the wall of death, and there to strike it with all his might and, in the striking, die. Aware of absolutely everything.
“… (This) one thing astounds the centurion: how can a crucified criminal act so convincingly like the victor?”
“O Christ!
When you died, you broke the wall that divided us from God: you struck it, you cracked it, you tore it apart – you made a door of that which had been death before.
And the sign was that ‘the veil of the temple was rent in twain, from the top to the bottom,’ and the mercy seat was made open to my approach.
Amen
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)