​25 March 2018
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Palm Sunday
 
“With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.”  (Mark)
 
            Each morning, we begin the day here at the church by offering Morning Prayer. We pray using a little booklet that includes a number of canticles, which cycle through about every two weeks or so.
            One of the canticles that particularly catches my eye each time it appears is called “A Song of True Motherhood,” by the Medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich. In it, she imagines that the love with which Jesus loves us is like that of a mother: “Christ came in our poor flesh,” she writes, “to share a mother’s care.” So far, nothing too surprising in that—maybe there’s something a little unusual about saying that Jesus the man loves us like a mother, but okay, that’s true enough.
            But then, Julian goes on to say, “Our mothers bear us for pain and for death; our true mother, Jesus, bears us for joy and endless life.” Now that is more radical: Jesus is not just like a mother, Jesus is our mother. Instead of an analogy, we now have a literal correspondence.
            But that’s not all: Julian presses the point further, “Christ carried us within him in love and travail, until the full time of his passion.” One morning, it hit me like a thunderbolt that what Julian is suggesting, is that the pain Jesus experiences on the cross could be understood not as the result of violence, but as the birth pangs of a new creation. So instead of seeing on the cross the end of one life in death, she wants us to see the birth of a new life. The birth pangs of the cross.
            Christians, of course, have always struggled to articulate just what it is that Jesus does through his death on the cross. Even the New Testament has several competing theories. We are all probably most familiar with the idea that what Jesus does is to somehow step in for us to pay the penalty of our sin to God—but quite frankly, I’ve never found that understanding very satisfying or convincing. It just doesn’t square with the God of mercy and compassion who is at the heart of the gospels, and moreover it doesn’t seem to me that the universe is portrayed in scripture as kind of a cosmic law court, but rather as the realm of mystery and awe.
            But when Julian suggests that what happens on the cross is the birth of a new creation—well that is an idea I can start to get my mind around. After all, the creation account in Genesis is very deliberate in ascribing the pain of childbirth as one of the consequences of Adam and Eve’s fall. So there is a sense of poetic completion in the idea that the renewal of humanity’s original blessedness through Jesus—the second Adam—should come about through the pain of new birth.
            Ironically, in the sequence of canticles at Morning Prayer, the one that precedes Julian’s “Song of True Motherhood” is a canticle by Anselm, one of the great medieval theologians. Anselm is most famous for developing the idea that the cross is where Jesus pays the price for our sin—substitutionary atonement, is the technical theological term. In the canticle we say by Anselm at Morning Prayer, however, he actually sounds a lot closer to Julian’s idea of Jesus as our mother: “Jesus, by your dying,” he writes, “we are born to new life; by your anguish and labor, we come forth in joy.” If anything, Anselm makes here an even closer metaphorical connection between crucifixion and childbirth!
            So if Julian and Anselm are both so eager to ascribe this birthing imagery to Jesus’ passion, it leads us to an obvious question: what exactly is being birthed?
            Well, let’s back up just a bit before we try to answer that question. The structure of each of the four gospels is, in a sense, a very long prologue to the climactic account each of them gives of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. In its own way, each gospel first wants to get clear that in his teaching and ministry, Jesus offers an alternative vision for humanity that is not founded on the violence and self-centeredness of human life, but in the peaceableness and self-offering of God. That’s why today we read the hymn from Philippians, of Christ “not counting equality with God a thing to be grasped, but he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.” That is the essential character of God: self-emptying love.
            The crucifixion, then, is not just the final episode in a biographical story, but the fulfillment of everything that Jesus has taught and done. That’s why reading the passion story in its entirety during Holy Week, as we did from Mark this morning, is so powerful: we get a chance to see the full consequences of Jesus’ complete self-offering, through which (as the Easter hymn puts it), “the powers of death have done their worst.” Yet, as we already know, it turns out that even death is no match for the power of the vision that Jesus offers us: a life lived by love in service to others.
            So perhaps what is being birthed on the cross, is a new humanity which through Jesus, turns away from violence, manipulation, and domination, toward a life focused instead on respecting, serving, and even loving the other—no matter who that person might be. This new humanity birthed through Jesus on the cross is God’s substitute for the narrow, self-serving idea we have of ourselves, with which we are all too familiar (especially in the current political climate). So in a sense, Jesus does offer himself as a substitution after all—not as a substitute victim for the penalty of our sins, but as an alternative pattern and vision for human life.
            Yesterday, as I was listening to the speeches at the Albuquerque March for Our Lives rally (organized almost entirely by high school students), I was struck by how this moment in our nation’s political history, also feels like something new is being birthed. There is so much about our civic lives right now that is truly painful. Yet here is a new generation, suddenly awakened to a political activism that is bold, fearless, pragmatic and determined. As one letter to the editor in the Times put it, “We seem to have entrusted our future, to a group of high school kids.”
            Like the Passover in Egypt, which finally liberated the people of Israel from their slavery, perhaps we are in another such moment that we will look back upon as the time when a new era of common purpose and common good began to emerge, thanks to the courage our children. Perhaps they too will have a dream, and make it to the mountain top, from where they will see a promised land of peace and respect and dignity for all toward which they will lead us—though Pharaoh’s heart may yet be hardened against them.
            How important, then, to be reminded this Holy Week, that on the cross Jesus gives us hope through his own birthing of a new humanity, that we can all imagine and bring into being a world that is better and more just than the one we are living in now. Because of the birth pangs Jesus bore on the cross, we know that we do not have to accept the world as we found it, nor the world as it has become, as anything more than a mere vestige of the old creation that Jesus has now upended with the new. As Julian finishes her canticle, “When all was completed and Jesus had carried us so for joy, still all this could not satisfy the power of his wonderful love. For the love of Christ works in us; Christ is the one whom we love.” Amen. 

​18 March 2017
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
V Lent
 
“The hour has come …” (John 12)
 
            Today’s gospel is rather like a trailer for a new feature film that is just about to be released. Jesus gives his disciples highlights of what is to come: his soul is troubled, sensing his impending betrayal. He anticipates his death, but realizes that it is part of a great struggle with the evil of the world, and that through his death the evil, the “ruler of this world,” will be driven out.
            We are prone to hear of all this as a kind of unfortunate conclusion to the life of a true prophet. We may see it as a bit like the assassination of Martin Luther King, or of Gandhi: a life cut short by regrettable violence.
            Jesus, however, doesn’t see it that way at all. He is quite clear that the death toward which he is headed is a fulfillment of who and what he has been, not its end. That’s what the language of being “glorified” is all about: the time is coming when the full meaning of his ministry will become clear.
            And the observance of Holy Week, which we begin together next Sunday, is meant to do exactly that: to bring the meaning of Jesus home to us. Now I know, that looking at the Holy Week schedule that is printed in the service leaflet this morning, your first reaction may be, “that’s an awful lot of church!” But let me take some time here this morning to suggest that what it represents is an invitation into a spiritual pilgrimage, a five-act drama which is not to be missed!
            Act One: Palm Sunday, the Sunday of the Passion. This is the day that lays clear the underlying problem which has to be confronted: the hypocrisy, selfishness, and corruption of human nature. At first, the crowd greets Jesus with branches of palm and cries of “Hosanna!”, betting that here is someone at last who can get them what they want: the security and prosperity that would come from throwing off the Roman yoke.
            When it turns out, however, that Jesus has come bearing a message of obedience to God through service and self-sacrifice for the sake of one’s neighbor, the crowd immediately turns on him. Cries of “Crucify!” replace the hosannas, and we are left with the realization that what is being enacted is nothing less than a struggle over whether God’s vision of a humanity driven by the mercy, love and compassion with which we were created will prevail, or something less. In short, will we human beings succumb to our basest instincts, or will we rise to our greatest potential? We are left with Jesus on the cross to ponder that question.
            Act Two: Maundy Thursday. Here the drama circles back upon itself, returning to the night before Jesus died. This is one of the most intimate nights of the whole year, when the community of the church gathers with Jesus in the upper room to share with him the Passover meal. But Jesus takes that meal, and uses it as the opportunity to put all his cards on the table: “I give you a new commandment, that you should love one another.” Obedience to God will no longer mean fulfillment of the religious requirements of the Law, but instead a life that is given to supporting and helping those around us. And as a sign, Jesus stoops to wash our feet.
            But there is more: knowing that the commandment to love will need constant renewal and encouragement, Jesus gives us the gift of his continuing presence with us, taking bread and wine and promising that whenever we share it in his name, we will sense him at table with us.
            Again, though, the scene suddenly shifts, and from the intimacy and reassurance of the upper room, we find ourselves in the garden where Jesus is betrayed, arrested, and dragged off to trial. Only the silence of a watch through the night remains, as a kind of interlude between acts, as we contemplate the events to come.
            Act Three: Good Friday. Events now come to a climax, as we walk with Jesus through the events of his Passion. This is not, however, a day of defeat, but a day of victory. Despite every insult that is hurled against him, every wound that is inflicted upon him, Jesus refuses to accept the status of victim. He is not the victim of these blows, but the one who forgives them. He refuses to give in to the cycle of recrimination and retaliation that drives human affairs, and thereby demonstrates his power over them. He dies violently, but does not return violence. And so he dies in victory over violence, for its hold on humanity is broken: in the crucified Christ, God shows us another way, a stronger way, whose ratification will come in the resurrection.
            But first, Act Four: Holy Saturday. In the creed, we say that at his death, Jesus descended into hell, a line that we pass over rather quickly without paying much attention to it. Yet in Christian tradition—and especially the tradition of the Eastern church—that is an extremely significant affirmation. For it means that in his death, Jesus goes to the nethermost regions of the world, to a place that seems to be an infinite distance from God, and there summons those who have lost all contact with the love with which they were created to come forth and return to the life God has in store for them.
            “The Harrowing of Hell,” the day is called: the day Jesus arrives at the gates of Hades and throws them open, giving his hand to Adam and Eve themselves who have languished for so long East of Eden. In the Christian East, churches are strewn with laurel leaves this day, as a sign of the victory that has been won. “No more let sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infect the ground!”
            Which brings us to Act Five: the Great Vigil of Easter. If somehow we as Christians were forced to give up every other service of the year, if we could hold on to the Easter Vigil, we would still have the faith intact. It is the moment when the church gathers to rehearse the whole story of our relationship to God: from our creation, through the experience of liberation from slavery at the Red Sea, to the promises given through the prophets of God With Us. We baptize, to make people part of the new vision for humanity that has been given in Jesus. We proclaim through Jesus’ resurrection that God’s resources for ennobling our human nature are not exhausted in death, but that our nature is perfected, not ended.
            And then, for the first time since we were at table with Jesus on Maundy Thursday, he rejoins us for another meal, fulfilling his promise that in Spirit he would not leave us alone and confused, but continue to be with us to encourage us, strengthen us, love us, guide us. That First Mass of Easter is a promise fulfilled, the font from which flows every other service of the year. In fact, all else is only the overflow from that mystical moment when “earth and heaven are joined and humanity is reconciled to God” (as the Exsultet, the great Easter hymn, puts it): even the services of Easter morning that follow are a kind of epilogue.
            So all this comes as an invitation: an invitation to join in the pilgrimage which we will together make through the mysteries of Holy Week. It’s not something we can do alone, because it touches all of us, and each of us. It is, literally, the heart and soul of what we as a community of Christian faith are all about.
            Moreover, no one Passiontide is like another, because no one year is like another. We bring to the pilgrimage this year, for instance, hearts that are especially heavy with concern for the safety of our children in school; concern for the chaos, selfishness and recrimination into which our government has fallen; concern for the ways in which the ugly face of bigotry and prejudice has so shockingly reasserted itself; concern for the sabre rattling around the globe that stirs fears of war; concern for the anger and sense of exclusion that divides us from one another.
            Yet these are precisely the reasons for which we enter the pilgrimage of Holy Week. It is the time when God meets our worst, with God’s best, and the result is nothing less than a new creation in Christ. It is the time we finally realize, that the way things happen to be, is not the way they need to be. We are bound for that promised land. Amen.