He did not hide his face from me

Russian icon of Jesus, undated

The Daily Office lectionary readings this week are full of foreboding as Jesus and his disciples walk to Jerusalem, where he will be crucified a week from today.

The Way of the Cross has begun. Biblical scholars will tell you that these events compressed into a week of lectionary readings probably took about six months, but no matter.

Today in Mark 10:32-45 we hear James and John telling Jesus that they would like to "sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory." To our ears it sounds like an arrogant request, and the gospel writer tells us that the other disciples are quite angry when they hear about it.


There might be another way to hear this: James and John are saying that they are willing to die with Jesus and that they will go with him to the grave and beyond. They are declaring their willingness to give the ultimate sacrifice of their lives. Maybe the other disciples are angry because they are not so willing to die. Who can blame them?

And Jesus tells them it is not their turn. He wants them to live, to spread the Gospel, to declare to all who will listen that they are the Beloved and that grace will be their guide. Your turn will come, but not this week, so don't argue about it.

Today's psalm gives another clue to their mission. Today we hear the very haunting Psalm 22 that begins with the familiar, and depressing line, that Jesus says upon the Cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Yet there is more to the psalm, much more. When we hear Jesus saying those words on the Cross, we are meant to hear all of the psalm. Here the last words of the psalm:

For he did not despise or abhor
the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him.

From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will pay before those who fear him.
The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the Lord.
May your hearts live for ever!

Who do you say that I am?

Jesus puts it square to his friends and followers: “Who do you say that I am?”

Simon Peter, the dominant Alpha Male of the crowd, says squarely back: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.”

In this passage we get today, Matthew 16:13-20, Jesus tells Peter that he is the “rock” upon which he will build his church, but to keep it to himself, to say nothing to no one about Jesus being the “Messiah.”

Why would Jesus ask and then tell Peter to hush?

Maybe it is because Peter has no idea what he means by those words: “Messiah” and “Son of the Living God.”

Do we?

The readings today also tell of a vision of a powerful swordsman riding in on a horse to slay the nations in Revelation 19:11-16, but the swordsman has no name.

Is he the Messiah, Son of the Living God?

Maybe in the dreams of some.

Masada, Israel
told in Maccabees

We also hear of the Jews being slaughtered for honoring to the Covenant of their ancestors and circumcising their sons. The scenes in 1 Maccabees 1:41-63 are gory beyond imagining. No Messiah comes on a horse to rescue them.

Where then is this messiah?

Perhaps we might see him in the bleakness of Psalm 88, also appointed for this morning:

“O LORD my God, my Savior, by day and night I cry to you.”
“You have laid me in the Pit, in dark places, and in the abyss.”

That is a hard place to go, but it is exactly there that the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, goes, and his going defines everything about what he means by the Messiah, Son of the Living God.

Christ, the anointed One, goes to the Cross, to share with us in our dark night of soul, to walk with us into the Pit, into the difficult painful places where we hurt the most, and lead us beyond to new life. He goes there to end the way of the Cross.

But Peter cannot know that yet. More is to come.

The Collect for Friday points to the path:

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.

Part III: Original sin, arguing with God, forgiveness, healing and a few other Big Hairy topics: My theological reflection

I’ve taken you on a roundabout theological journey the last few days, starting with questions about the concept of “original sin” as an explanation for the brokenness of the world and the calamities we endure. If you are still with me, thank you and congratulations for coming this far.

As my reflection has unfolded, I’ve seen “original sin” not as a transmission of wrongful acts by a proto-human (Adam and Eve) but as an allegorical statement of the human condition of being born into disconnection from God.

I might add that the original author of the original sin doctrine, Augustine of Hippo, viewed the Bible primarily in allegorical terms.

As an Augustinian Christian, this brings me ultimately to the story of Jesus, but also raises questions about finding the meaning in Jesus dying on the Cross. Often Christians use the shorthand “Jesus died for our sins” to explain the crucifixion, but that phrase has some disturbing implications for how we view God.

The phrase comes partly from a Christian interpretation of the “Binding of Isaac,” the biblical story of Abraham nearly killing his son, Isaac in Genesis 22:1-24, discussed yesterday. In this strain of Christian interpretation, Jesus becomes the lamb – the substitution – for the sacrifice of Isaac, who represents us, hence we call Jesus “the lamb of God.” He died so that we might be spared of being sacrificed ourselves, or the “atoning sacrifice.”

But there is something deeply troubling about this concept of atonement. It leaves us with a blood-thirsty God demanding a blood ransom of his own son for human wrongdoing. And if Jesus is divine, is God killing himself?

And if this was a ransom to get us off the hook from our own sins, why is the world still a mess and full of evil and sin? The ransom didn’t seem to work.

There is another way of seeing the Abraham-Isaac story (see yesterday’s post) and that might also bring us to another way of looking at the meaning of the Cross. But rather than getting bogged down in theological abstractions, let me tell you a few stories:

In my time as priest (and even before) I've heard many stories of people who have had experiences of the Holy coming to them in an extreme crisis; a friend nearly dying in a car accident, and feeling enfolded by the arms of God; patients in hospitals seeing a gleaming face; a woman who thought she was about to lose her daughter to cancer and then feeling the presence of the Virgin Mary.

Recently a young mother told me how one of her children suffered a terrible accident and nearly died. The doctors told her they weren’t sure they could save her son, that it was touch-and go. As she waited in the hospital, she felt she was standing on the edge of the most terrible abyss imaginable.

And then she felt this amazing unexpected presence, and a voice telling her “I love you. I will hold you. I don’t know how this will come out, and it may not come out the way you want, but I will be with you, and I am never going to let you go. I will love you forever and I will always love your son. I will always be your companion.”

Call him Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, or the Hand of God, the divine came to each of these people and absorbed their pain. Each of these hurting people saw and experienced a divine presence in a way that spoke to them personally, and each felt their burden lifted from them.

To me, all of those experiences come from Christ speaking from the Cross. The woman in a car accident had not “sinned” – nor had the young boy who nearly died, nor his mother. None of them deserved to be standing at the abyss.

This was not about a ransom or a sacrifice. It was about Jesus being with them because he had been there before, on the Cross, on the edge of the abyss and beyond.

The message each heard was not about moral failings, but about unconditional love in the worst moment of their lives. The salvation they received was not delayed for their afterlife, but came then and there. Jesus spoke to them from the same place of suffering where they were suffering. He could do that because he had been there.

The story of Jesus, as it unfolds in the gospels, is a story of how he willingly lived with fractured people in their broken places to the point of going to his death with them. He sought out the hurting and the sick, touched them when others thought they were dirty, healed them of their wounds, and traded places with them when they died.

The point of the Cross is that Jesus was willing to dwell with us in our most painful place imaginable. By sharing our pain and showing us we are loved unconditionally, he also points us to a life without fear, here and now by reconnecting us with our creator. It is not about an insurance policy for the next world, but about a way to live in this world.

The biblical stories of healings by Jesus are not about cures that make bodies invincible – that never happens in the stories – and that, I would suggest, is a huge clue about the underlying “original sin.” The healing that comes from Jesus is about reconciling people with God so that they might live no matter what happens to their bodies. Even Lazarus, raised from the dead, passes from this earth again.

Here is where I believe this “original sin” concept is crucial.

Notice that Jesus nearly always mentions forgiveness of sin when he is healing people. The two are usually spoken of together, for example with the paralyzed man in Luke 5:17-26 who is healed and told “your sins are forgiven.” Jesus underlines three times in the story that healing is connected to forgiveness.

Yet we may ask, what sin did the paralyzed man commit? What did he do wrong to deserve being paralyzed? Luke doesn’t tell us. We should presume none at all. Nor does the paralyzed man “repent” of any "sins," or even ask Jesus to be healed (his friends do that for him). He’s done nothing to “accept” Jesus or anything else to deserve healing. He’s paralyzed and he is completely incapable of doing anything, good or evil. He is healed with no strings attached and told he is forgiven.

What then is this concept of sin and forgiveness that Jesus is getting at?

It may be that the sin Jesus is talking about is living in this fractured broken world that seems perpetually disconnected from God – the “original sin.” The paralyzed man, like Job, has done nothing wrong. But by being born and paralyzed he is living in a sort of silent paralyzed disconnection from God. He can do nothing. The forgiveness he receives is not about moral forgiveness, but about reconnection and ending the silent paralysis.

That same disconnection from God begins for each of us when we are born from our mother’s womb. The Garden of Eden is an allegory for the womb, and the “fall” of Adam and Eve an allegory of human birth.

We must be born to be human; we must learn many things including good and evil to survive. To be born is to learn how to live in a fractured broken world. To be healed and forgiven – to have salvation – is to be reconnected with God despite the brokenness of the world that we enter.

As I see it, the forgiveness Jesus pronounces is about reconciliation with God and not about moralistic dogmas. Jesus says to the paralyzed man, in effect, “You are healed, your body mended, and you are reconnected with God. The fracture with God is healed, the brokenness is now unbroken. Go now and live acting in this knowledge.”

That does not mean there are no morals or ethics, quite the contrary. Our morals and ethics spring from our compassion and connection to God and each other. We live morally and ethically because it is the right way to live, not because of an expectation of reward and punishment. Our sin – our silence with God – is forgiven, and that healing brings us back into conversation with God about how to heal this fractured out-of-kilter world we inherit by our birth.

Jesus throughout the gospels links forgiveness and healing to action, or “discipleship.” You are healed, you are reconnected to God, so get up, go forth and do something. To be a follower of Jesus – to be a disciple – is to do likewise: "Forgive others, be an agent of healing and be there with others who are on the edge of the abyss. When you do, I will be there with you because I've been there before."

This call for discipleship weaves throughout the story of Jesus, beginning even before his birth. In Luke 1:68-79, Zechariah tells his baby son, John (the Baptist), how he is to be a follower of Jesus, and it is a mandate for action to all of us:

“To give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

To walk with the way of the Cross is to agree to live in the fractured places with others because that is where Christ truly dwells. That requires being vulnerable to our own brokenness, to touching our own pain (Psalm 23): “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me…”

By being there in those painful places with others, we are also reconnected with God as they are reconnected with God. The silence ends, the paralysis is over. At the very end of the Bible, comes this declaration that the story of original sin is ended, once and for all, because God dwells with us forever: (Revelation 21:3-4):

“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

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Thanks for coming along with me the last three days on this journey of reflection. To any who have been offended, my apologies. Where I have strayed, forgive me; this reflection is mine alone. Whether you agree or disagree, I hope it has given you at least food for thought and prayer. I am also much influenced in this view of forgiveness and the Cross by the writing of Jesuit Jon Sobrino in his book Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims, and former-Domincan James Alison in his book Raising Abel: The Recovery of Eschatological Imagination. And now I am off to the Diocesan Council. Keep me and those who take council in your prayers.

Crucifixion art above: Folk art from Cameroon; Medieval stained glass; painting by He Qi, China; "The Ascension of Christ," Salvador Dali.

Take up your Cross: What an odd thing to say

Today’s sermon is taken from Mark 8: 27-38

“Take up your cross and follow me.”

What an odd thing to say. Being nailed to a cross is not an invitation that I, for one, am particularly inclined to accept, thank you very much.

Whatever is Jesus talking about?

Last week we hear about healing, this week we hear about death and the Cross.

There is an unavoidable edge to the gospel today. This business of bringing healing and hope, paradoxically, does not always lead to immediate tranquility for the healed or the healer.

For Jesus, his mission of healing and hope is bringing him to a place of pain and death. And his follower Peter sees where this is going and objects strenuously.

And that brings us squarely in front of a difficult subject: sacrifice. I do not want to avoid it today, but try to sort this out with you because it is at the heart of the gospel, indeed, at the heart of Christian faith itself.

One conventional way of understanding this is to see Jesus on the Cross as a ransom to bail us out of jail. The idea is that a blood-thirsty, vengeful God needs payment for all of the bad things God’s created beings – humans – have done.

And that is certainly how Peter is hearing this, and he can’t stand the concept. Why should he?

But instead of offering Peter comfort, Jesus tells him to “Get behind me Satan.”

Jesus is saying, Peter, you don’t understand this yet – hold on. Conventional ideas of blood ransom miss the mark, the idea comes from a wrong-headed – dare we say Satanic – concept of God as needing blood sacrifice. Jesus tries over and over to get us to see God differently, and still Peter doesn’t see it.

Jesus is not offering a blood sacrifice to satisfy a blood-thirsty deity, but is presenting an offer of love to go with us into whatever pit we may dwell, experience whatever pain we experience, and go with us even into the to free us from what hurts and wounds us. This is about healing at the deepest core of our being.

But before we can go there, Jesus issues a challenge to us to participate, and not half-heartedly, but fully. And so he declares this challenge in the strongest words imaginable:

“Take up your Cross” and follow. Those words are at least as sharp as the rebuke to Peter about Satan. Let me explain why:

The Cross is the Roman Empire’s favorite tool for execution. By telling us to take up the Cross, Jesus is co-opting the very symbol of evil.

Jesus is saying take up the cross as a sign of defiance against the power of evil, as a sign of defiance against death itself. He is stealing the Roman’s favorite symbol.

And that is where hope enters our story, where we can look for the courage to push aside whatever hurt and pain plagues us, whatever personal demons get in our way, and become being fully the people God would have us be.

Finding strength from outside ourselves will allow us to be servants to each other, to build the beloved community bringing light and hope into our world.

Our task here is to do precisely that: build the beloved community, right here, in our own time and in our own world, right here in this church on this corner.

I want to close by reading something from Oscar Romero, who was the Archbishop of El Salvador. He took up his Cross, giving up his life for his people. His words are a reminder, I think, of Christ’s call to all of us:

This is what we are about: We plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

We plant the seeds for the future and we are the builders in bringing forth this abundant, extravagant love God gives to all of us free of charge.

The question for each of us is: How will we share this love lavishly with the rest of our world? How will we take up our Cross not to die, but to live?

Tuesday in Holy Week: The Cross in sight

Last night Lori and I shared mac-and-cheese with the members of our young adult Shalom Group, and they were most intrigued by the swirl of events that is compressed into Holy Week. We talked especially about Holy Saturday, and how Jesus goes into the depths of Hell to defeat death. We are not yet there in our walk through this week, but the Cross is definitely in sight.

Tuesday in Holy Week has a tone of foreshadowing Good Friday. Today we hear the same gospel lesson (John 12: 20-36) that we heard on the Fifth Sunday of Lent about how following Jesus to the Cross means following Jesus into serving others. Look for the Cross of servicehood today, and if you can, join us for our noon Eucharist. 

The mosaic cross in the photo is near the High Altar at St. Paul's. Look for it the next time you are there. It is easy to miss, just as our opportunities for simple service are easy to miss. 

Here is the Collect for Tuesday in Holy Week. It is about the Cross:

O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.