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Austin, Texas
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From the Pulpit:
One of my favorite verses in the Bible comes from the prophet Micah. I know. We didn’t read Micah today. Our Old Testament lesson was from Isaiah. It is one of the passages we know as the suffering servant. But as I pondered our scriptures all this week it was Micah’s voice that kept echoing in my ears. This is what he says: He has told you, O Mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? If you’re ever into memorizing Bible verses, you could do a whole lot worse than to begin with this one. What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? No other day in our liturgical year confronts us as unrelentingly as today. Whether we like it or not, we are the actors in this great drama. Our service opened with the blessing of the palms and the recreation of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. When we sang All Glory, Laud, and Honor we were the crowds who greeted him throwing our coats on the road and waving branches of trees and shouting ‘hosanna!’ which means ‘save us!’ Jesus was acting out scriptural prophecy, riding down from the Mount of Olives on the back of a donkey, just as Zechariah said the Messiah would arrive. For the people of Jerusalem hope was never higher than it was that morning. For the Pollyannas among us this would have been a good time to leave. We didn’t get to stay long at that glorious procession, and neither did Jesus. Actually Jesus knew the parade and the hope would be short-lived. Jesus knew the temple authorities were out to get him. The things he taught and the way he lived were way too dangerous, way to subversive for them to allow him to live. And he chose the Passover for this stunt. Was it the best or the worst choice of time? The town was packed with pilgrims and there were extra cohorts of the Roman army in town for crowd control, and the crowd was feeling uncontrollable. Jesus’ actions were incendiary and he knew it. It is traditional here and in many churches to do a dramatic reading of the gospel. It is always a challenge for me to pick the cast. Whom do I ask to be Jesus? Whom do I pick to play Judas or Pilate? I promise you it is quite random, so be nice to all these people and don’t come up to Joe at coffee hour with a cup of water and tell him you’d rather have a vintage merlot. The toughest role of all, though, is the one the rest of us take, the ones who do not have individual parts. We are the crowd. We are the same crowd who cheered at the parade, shouting ‘hosannah!’ but now we have only one line: Crucify him! Crucify him! I know people right here in this very congregation who refuse to say these words, and frankly, I’d rather not myself. They leave a bitter taste in my mouth and I would like to believe in my heart of hearts that if I’d been there I wouldn’t have been shouting them. But this are the part we play in this drama. Peter Gomes is the pastor of Harvard Chapel. You may remember him as the author of The Good Book, and his newest book is called The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus. The title of the second chapter is An Offending Gospel. We are right to be offended by the drama we enact today, the crescendo of hope that is raised is then is crashed by the voices of the crowd. The trial that is so illegal that justice is never a question. The mockery, the flogging, the degradation that leads toward the cross. The betrayal of Judas and the threefold denial of Peter. It is unbearable even before we get to Golgotha, and then there is the silence of the six hours as he hangs on the cross suspended by the nails in his wrists and slowly dies. We get a mega dose of the pain today, and all through Holy Week we will take it all again, one chapter at a time. Gomes gives an absolutely stunning image in his book. He takes us back to the time when Jesus had just been baptized and was sent out into the desert to come to terms with what it meant to live his life as the anointed son of God. The devil is there to lay traps for him, and in the third temptation he takes Jesus up to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem – the same Temple where Jesus would later teach and where he would scatter the booths of the bankers and merchants – the devil stands with Jesus looking down on the city and tells him to throw himself down, to force God to respond with a miracle by sending his angels to catch Jesus. Gomes writes: If God is who he says he is, and if Jesus is who he believes himself to be, and if angels do what they are supposed to do, then why not engage in a spectacular demonstration of these truths? (35) So, then, let’s hold this picture of Jesus standing on the top of the Temple, but now return to the picture today’s gospel paints for us. Now see Jesus on the cross. On either side of him is a common criminal, thieves who are as guilty and as deserving of their punishment as he is not. Gomes calls these two images – Jesus on the temple and Jesus on the cross -- the bookends of the gospel. The impenitent thief calls out to Jesus, If you are the son of God, come down from the cross, save yourself and us. If God is who he says he is, and if you are who you say you are, you have the power to save yourself. You can pull off the spectacular. But Jesus doesn’t do it. He ignores the taunting words and instead offers forgiveness to the thief, who then confesses and begs for pardon. And then Jesus hangs there until he is dead by suffocation. He dies as if he had no more power than any human being. He gives himself over to suffering and death because he knows that God is who he believes he is and he knows that he is who he says he is. It is not time for the spectacular demonstrations of God’s power. That will come in three days time. We are Christians, though, because we do know they will come. Not with trapeze flights or fireworks but with the gentle speaking of Mary’s name in the garden, the offer to let Thomas stick his finger in the wounds, the trudging down the road to Emmaus and the breaking of the bread. But we’re not there yet. Everything Jesus was about in his life would have been negated had he leapt from the Temple or if he had jumped down from the cross. Everything Jesus taught, every life-giving miracle he had performed, every gesture that he made would have been reduced to nothing more than illusion. Jesus’ authenticity, his full divinity and his full humanity were the incarnation of the truth spoken by the prophet Micah. Jesus himself was the message. His birth as God come to earth to live among us was the message. His life -- his friendships, his healings, his teachings, his submission – his life was the message. His obedience was the message. His humility was the message. And his death was the message. God showed us in Jesus what we are capable of being. He has told you, O Mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? As we live this Holy Week aware of the darkness that is coming, as we come to church on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, I invite you to remember these words of the prophet that were fulfilled in the person of Jesus and to embrace him with the fullness of your honor and gratitude and to inscribe these words in your hearts: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. Amen.
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07/03/2008 | ||||||
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The
Rev. Margaret Waters