Good Friday, Holy Week, ABC

Quotes That Make Me Think


"Today the Master of the creation and the Lord of Glory is nailed to the cross and his side is pierced; and he who is the sweetness of the church tastes gall and vinegar."

Byzantine Liturgy, Triduum, (LTP, 1996)


Sunset to sunrise changes now,
For God creates the world anew;
On the Redeemer's thorn-crowned brow
The wonders of that dawn we view.
Although the sun withholds its light
Yet a more heavenly lamp shines here; and from the cross on Calv'ry's height
Gleams of eternity appear.
Here in o'erwhelming final strife
the Lord of life has victory;
And sin is slain, and death brings life,
And earth inherits heaven's key.
Clement of Alexandria

"In the end, Pilate attempts to crucify the Truth. He places a placard nearby mockingly announcing Jesus as The King of the Jews. The irony is thick, of course, because Pilate has unwittingly announced the truth."

Commentary, John 18:33-37, Jaime Clark-Soles, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

General Resources for Sunday's Lessons

Prayer

Prostrate on the ground, your Son prayed, O God, that this hour might pass, this cup be taken away.  But then he rose to do your will, to stretch out his arms on the cross, to be lifted up from the earth an to be glorified by you.  Prostrate before you, O God, we ponder the mystery of your saving will.  In this hour of Christ's exaltation, we beg you: Open our hearts to hear the story of our salvation, to stretch out our hands in prayer, to venerate the cross by which the whole world is lifted up to salvation, life and resurrection.  We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.

From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year C, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.

Some Thoughts on John 18:1 - 19:42

Oremus Online NRSV Gospel Text

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Raymond Brown writes:  "The other gospels mark Jesus' death with miraculous signs in the ambiance: The Temple curtain is torn; tombs open and bodies of the saints come forth; and an expression of faith is evoked from a Roman centurion. but the Fourth Gospel localizes the sign in the body of Jesus itself: When the side of Jesus is pierced, there comes forth blood and later. In 7:38-39 we heard: "From within him shall flow rivers of living water," with the explanation that the water symbolized the Spirit which would be given when Jesus had bee glorified. That is now fulfilled, but the admixture of blood to the water is the sign that Jesus has passed from this world to the Father and has been glorified. It is not impossible that the fourth evangelist intends here a reference not only to the gift of the Spirit but also to the two channels (baptism and the Eucharist) through which the Spirit had been communicated to the believers of his won community, with water signifying baptism, and blood the Eucharist."

One of my mentors once remarked of how careful one must be when dealing in sermons preached in the midst of the great liturgies of the church. I have come to understand and to agree. When we address the text that is before us we quickly realize that the text itself, and the reading of it in publicworship, is carries a weight which can barely be matched by a few meager words from the pulpit.

The piece that I find the most interesting is the uniqueness of John's Gospel and in particular the last words of Jesus. There is a tremendous feeling of agony and suffering in the last words of the synoptics: "My god, my God, why have you forsaken me?" John's words echo Luke's in their triumphant nature and give us a sense that in this moment we have victory.

Jesus in the fourth Gospel accepts death, in all of its pain and suffering, as the completion of God's plan to unite the world (its earthiness and creatureliness) with the Godhead. The fourth Gospel's death scene from the cross is a song of victory.  It relishes the death of death, the finality of sin, as the falling cross bridges the gap once for all between heaven and earth.

Psalm 22 gives us this victory song:

1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.
3 Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.
4 In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them.
5 To you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.
6 But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people.
7 All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads;
8 “Commit your cause to the Lord; let him deliver— let him rescue the one in whom he delights!”
9 Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
10 On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.
11 Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.
12 Many bulls encircle me, strong bulls of Bashan surround me;
13 they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion.
14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast;
15 my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.
16 For dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me. My hands and feet have shriveled;
17 I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me;
18 they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.
19 But you, O Lord, do not be far away! O my help, come quickly to my aid!
20 Deliver my soul from the sword, my life from the power of the dog!
21 Save me from the mouth of the lion! From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me.
22 I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:
23 You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
24 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.
25 From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him.
26 The poor shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord. May your hearts live forever!
27 All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.
28 For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations.
29 To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him.
30 Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord,
31 and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.

The Psalm captures both the defeat and the ultimate victory which is God's. It is John's Gospel thought that is most like the end. The words, "It is finished." are a victory cry and not some pitiful words from a dying prisoner!

Raymond Brown explains it this way, "In John's theology, now that Jesus has finished his work and is lifted up from the earth on the cross in death, he will draw all men to him. If "It is finished" is a victory cry, the victory it heralds is that of obediently fulfilling the Father's will. It is similar to "It is done" of Rev. 16.17, uttered from the throne of God and of the Lamb when the seventh angel pours out the final blow of God's wrath. What God has decreed has been accomplished." (John, vol II, Anchor Bible, 931)

If we combine this then with the images of Brown's above, Psalm 22, we see that the piercing then is the handing over of the sacramental life of the Godly community into the hands of those who will come after. The Spirit which is about to be poured out in chapter 20 is already here prefigured. Be cautious not to move into Pentecost too soon. However, I do think it is important to understand that the work of Jesus on the cross is the culmination of his earthly mission and for John it is the final death blow to the ruler of this world.

Some Thoughts on Hebrews 10:16-25

Oremus Online NRSV Epistle Text

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Paul has been teaching the Hebrews that the Holy Spirit has brought them to faith, and that it is the same Spirit which speaks to them in scripture.  As an example he pulls from a passage that I spoke about in the Maundy Thursday meditation and that is the passage from Jeremiah chapter 31.  

31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

The passage speaks of God's promise for a new covenant.  Paul says that the promise itself is that God's action on the cross, takes away the sins of the past and moves the follower of Jesus towards a sinless life. Craig Koester (Hebrews, Yale Bible, 441), Luther Seminary professor of New Testament, writes that Paul offers to his readers the notion that "God creates a situation in which he does not allow past or present sins to define his relationship with people."  God wills that such a divide is bridged by the cross.

There is justification and reconciliation between God and humanity.  The work on the cross is complete and final.  This is a unique Christian thought.  There is no need for a temple or Colosseum where sacrifices need to be made in order to create a renewed relationship between humanity and the gods.  There is no long list of law that is to be followed in order to fulfill the requirement to bridge the gulf.   God's action upon the cross is what puts and end to remembering the human disobedience.

We are boldly given permission to be in God's presence.  The sacrifice of Jesus, freely given for the sake of his friends and on behalf of sinners is what provides the release. This is new and it is a way of living.  Paul says the sacrifice is made and the curtain removed.

New life is given through the opportunity of putting behind us anxiety, fear, death, and impurity. (Koester, 444).  Instead we are given the opportunity as Christians to live a new life, to participate in the new covenant.  The Holy Spirit gathers us in and sends us out. We are purified by Christ's action and with the character of boldness and hope we are sent out to confess and make known our faith.  We are to "provoke" one another.  [Paul here uses a negative work in a positive sense. (445)  We are to encourage a new life of witness in one another.  Furthermore, this new life is to look like love and good works.

Craig Koester writes, "Love is not simply an emotion, but entails care for others, including strangers and the afflicted.  Love is congruent with righteousness and can be expressed in parental instruction.  Good works of love are the opposite of the 'dead works' of sin....they are the saving work of Christ in the believer's actions. (445)

The Hebrews text gives us both a theological underpinning to the Johannine Gospel of victory.  It defines what that victory is and it offers a vision of what the Christian is to do with their new freedom.

Some Thoughts on Isaiah 52:7 - 53:12

(Isaiah 53:4-12) 

Oremus Online NRSV Old Testament Text 

Resources for Sunday's Old Testament Lesson

The passage from Isaiah that we read is very much tied to the nativity story. It is part of the liturgical recognition of the uniqueness of God in Christ Jesus as the eternal Word. The excitement of the good news of Christ is now once again heralded on the day of the crucifixion.

The passage falls within what most Old Testament scholars call the fourth servant poem. God is speaking in this text to Israel. And, in the context of the Old Testament God is speaking to Israel’s sufferings and God’s ultimate triumph.

Dirk G. Lange, Associate Dean and Chair of Missions and Professor of Worship at Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, Mn, writes:

Not only is a messenger coming to announce a victory from the battlefield, but God’s self is coming in triumph. The Lord returns! The battlefield is not just any confrontation between two armies but the field of history itself in which God is triumphant, for it is not only Jerusalem that is redeemed but also all the nations. Finally, the watchmen watching for the messenger cannot contain themselves! Even before the messenger arrives they recognize the news and sing it out! 

The news is stated in cosmic terms: “Your God reigns!” Once again, we encounter the realignment of all earthly power and authority. The victory that is proclaimed does not belong to this or that king, to this or that country, to this or that ideology, but to God alone. Psalm 97, one of the psalms appointed for Christmas Day, also echoes this theme in song. (Read more here.)

Reading this on Good Friday the text naturally shifts it to a Christian perspective revealing the “suffering servant” and the servant’s triumph as that of Christ. The suffering is Christ’s suffering on the cross. The servant’s triumph is Christ’s resurrection. The triumph is for the people of Israel but for the Gentiles as well.

Saint Athenasius writes:

They say then: “A man in stripes, and knowing how to bear weakness, for his face is turned away: he was dishonored and held in no account. He bears our sins, and is in pain on our account; and we reckoned him to be in labor, and in stripes, and in ill-usage; but he was wounded for our sins, and made weak for our wickedness. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his stripes we were healed.” O marvel at the loving-kindness of the Word, that for our sakes He is dishonored, that we may be brought to honor. “For all we,” it says, “like sheep were gone astray; man had erred in his way; and the Lord delivered him for our sins; and he opens not his mouth, because he hath been evilly entreated. As a sheep was he brought to the slaughter, and as a lamb dumb before his shearer, so open he not his mouth: in his abasement, his judgment was taken away.” 3. Then lest any should from His suffering conceive Him to be a common man, Holy Writ anticipates the surmises of man, and declares the power (which worked) for Him, and the difference of His nature compared with ourselves, saying: “But who shall declare his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth. From the wickedness of the people was he brought to death. (Read whole text here.)

This text from Isaiah, Richard Hays believes, forms the background of the Good News presented in Mark’s Gospel. It is with an eye to this passage that our first Gospel author sees and understands that God has returned to God’s people in the person of Jesus. (Hays, Echoes of the Scripture in the Gospels, 30) Here then in the Gospel of Mark the revelation of God’s man is about the incarnation. Mark does not mention the suffering servant at all in the rest of the Gospel – not even in the crucifixion. (Echoes, 86)

For Matthew the image will come alive and dwell throughout the narrative. Keeping the Markan material, by the time Matthew writes it is clear that the correlation between the suffering servant of Israel and Jesus is essential in understanding the work of Jesus upon the cross.

Luke’s Gospel is the one New Testament narrative that draws the most from this passage. Hays points out that every bit of the narrative from the meal onward reveals Jesus as the suffering servant. (Echoes, 216ff) It might be easy to say that the arc of developed theology spans the first 5 decades of Christian writing after Jesus resurrection with an ever more pronounced and definitive understanding of Jesus as the suffering servant. Isaiah’s prophecy speaking beyond the return of the people Israel to their homeland to the defeat of death itself and the doors of heaven being opened to all humanity.

Here in all of this though is an interesting correlation worth exploring homiletically but seems to be outside of most of the discussions I have read. In fact, I have never preached on it before. And that is this: The suffering servant is an image of Israel (God’s people suffering) and God’s triumphant act. It seems a powerful image to play on the notion that Jesus, while on the one hand embodying the image of the suffering servant, also takes on the embodiment of Israel –yes – but all humanity. It seems of the utmost important to understand the catholic (the universal) nature of the suffering servant’s identity as that of the people. The suffering servant of Isaiah reveals the burden of all Israel, the suffering servant of the Gospels (Jesus) is revealed as the vessel in which is poured not the burden of any one people but the burden of the whole world.


Previous Sermons for Good Friday

Look

Sermon Good Friday Year B, March 30, 2018, St. Mark's, Bellaire

Reflections: The Broken Man and his Breaking Cross

The Crucifixion is a Public Warning

Jesus Thirsts for Righteousness and Thirsts for Us

When Death Met Christ

Lives Lived, Boxes Filled

Maundy Thursday, Holy Week, Year ABC

Quotes That Make Me Think

"Infinite, intimate God; this night you kneel before your friends and wash our feet. Bound together in your love, trembling, we drink your cup and watch."

New Zealand Prayer Book

"Oneness in love is the language of intimacy. It applies to our relation with God and Christ (and to their relationship). It is to apply also to our relationships with each other in community."

"First Thoughts on Year C Gospel Passages in the Lectionary: Easter 5," William Loader, Murdoch University, Uniting Church in Australia.

"Fortunately, this passage actually has TWO new commandments: 1) Love one another as I have loved you. And, 2) Forgive one another as I have forgiven you. Christ-like-love is the goal. Forgiveness is the salve that heals brokenness and makes love possible once again."

Holy Textures, Understanding the Bible in its own time and in ours, John 13:31-35, David Ewart, 2012.

General Resources for Sunday's Lessons


Prayer

With joy, O God of salvation, the assembly of your holy people begins the three day pasch, in which Christ manifests the gospel in his own flesh and blood.  Stir our hearts by the example of this Savior, who welcomed to his table even those who would betray, deny and desert him, the Lord who knew their weaknesses yet bend down to wash their feet. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.

From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year C, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.

Some Thoughts on John 13:1-35

Oremus Online NRSV Gospel Text

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Much like the place of Maundy Thursday as the beginning of Christian Passover or the doorway into the Triduum, our passage is the beginning through which the disciple walks into the important teachings in following chapters which then lead directly into the crucifixion.  This passage is a doorway in John's Gospel for the disciple to follow Jesus to the cross, through the grave and to Easter.

Meister des Hausbuches,

Jesus Washes the Feet of the Apostles 

Most scholars including Raymond Browne see that our passage falls into three distinct sections.  The action in 1-5, the interpretation to the disciples, and the further interpretation to those who read the Gospel and believe.

Section One: The Action
13Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 2The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper 3Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, 4got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. 5Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.

We see a clear Johanine understanding that Jesus is returning to the Father. We might remember the earlier teachings on John wherein I talked about how Jesus clearly is the incarnate word come to dwell in the world.  Furthermore, we see the very deep roots of our orthodox faith which understands that it is Jesus' loving of the disciples that brings them into the family of God.  Despite the work of those that would destroy the community and creatures of God, Jesus will be victorious. He washes their feet. This may be a sign of baptism. What is clear is that Jesus serves the disciples and loves them as if they were his own to care for and tend.  This is the first and essential piece of the Gospel; and it is radical.  Jesus serves his followers.

The Second Section: First Interpretation
We shall remember that this is "Commandment day", this is the meaning of Maundy. Here we have the essential ingredient to all of Christian teachings about discipleship.  While avoiding words that are liturgically connected with baptism Jesus offers this very basic exercise of cleaning and washing.  Jesus is enacting a sign of hospitality. It is a welcoming into the company of God's family, formally in baptism, here signified with the tenderness of a mother or father.  Jesus is uniting all of creation and all of humanity with God. We are being adopted into Christ's household as a person might be brought into one's own home (Genesis 18:4  1 Samuel 25:41; Luke 7:44; 22:27).  This is the way our community is to be like. Within the covenant community which claims Christ we are to accept the freely given grace of our Lord and share it with others by repeating the act of loving embrace to others.

We know that the outward washing of the body does not cleanse the soul, but it is clear that this love and care is to be a hallmark of the inward grace.  It is the hallmark of Jesus' ministry and it is to be the hallmark of our own lives lived in the wake of Jesus' ministry. The hospitality of God is to be echoed by all who come after him. 1 Peter 2:21, the author writes: “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps”.

The Third Section: The Second Interpretation Here it is as if Jesus stops focusing upon his disciples and steps out of the Gospel in order to focus on the reader.  When we welcome, when we open ourselves up to those who have been sent by Christ into the world we too become part of the family.  While certainly Jesus is to be betrayed, nevertheless we are to act in accordance to the witness we have been given. We are to “love one another”.  This is the basic sign of ones salvation and knowledge of God and his Son Jesus.  We witness in this text the breaking of bread and sharing of wine, the emblems of a self-giving God.  We are to love and keep his commandments.  While we often will spend our time in the pulpit on this Holy night speaking of love, it is important to recognize the reality that forgiveness is also part and parcel of the life lived in Christ.

And in a miraculous way, beyond all that pulls at our church, all that works to destroy and condemn us, all that we do to one another in word and action, in our most broken and most divided, it is tonight, this holy night that we pause, and remember to love and forgive. We pause and put down our destruction and remind ourselves of the service and hospitality of our God. We remind ourselves that it is his grace and love which unites us one to another and into the family of God. It is his love which binds us forever. And so, it is on this night that we are challenged to be a better people, a loving people, a hospitable people, a kind people. This is our work should we choose to follow.

"O Lord Jesus Christ, though didst not come to the world to be served, but also surely not to be admired or in that sense to be worshiped. Thou was the way and the truth - and it was followers only thou dist demand.  Arouse us therefore if we have dozed away into the delusion, save us from the error of wishing to admire thee instead of being wiling to follow thee and to resemble thee." Soren Kierkegaard

Some Thoughts on I Corinthians 11:23-26

Oremus Online NRSV Epistle Text

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This section of the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians is dealing with accusations by fellow members of the community that others are abusing the Lord's Supper.  Our theologians have pulled out of the text for us to read on this Holy Thursday the passages that deal with the tradition of the "supper" itself; and Paul's interpretation of Jesus' actions at the Last Supper.

The first followers of Jesus have already formed a tradition and this tradition is given to the Corinthians from Paul.  He provides the words that have been given to him and the meaning that these remembrances are to remind the follower of the first supper and the grace they receive by continuing the tradition.  The elements are offered with the same words we use in our liturgy today.  Thanks is offered, blessings made and the gives are shared.  The bread is broken, literally, and shared.  This is a very different tradition than the Aramaic formula in the Passover tradition. (Joseph Fitzmyer, First Corinthians, Yale Press, 438).  Like the washing of feet in tonight's Gospel from John, it is very clear that these things are done, broken, and given to those gathered - the faithful.

Fitzmyer reminds us (443) that the "new covenant" that is mentions is a reference to Jeremiah 31:31-34.

31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

It is Paul's, and the new Christian movement's, understanding that Jesus and this meal is fulfillment of this ancient prophecy and promise.  For Paul the rehearsal of these things by those who follow Jesus - was essential.

In the last verse we have Pauline material which makes clear his understanding.  Fitzmyer says it well:

The active sharing of the bread and the cup is a way not only of expressing one's belief in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and of commemorating the Last Supper, but also of announcing to others what the death of Jesus has achieved for all Christian believers.  The act of sharing is not only memory and recollection, but above all, proclamation, based on the Passover event of old...this double aspect of the Eucharist, remembrance and proclamation, is not to be neglected....there is no worship without remembering, and there is no liturgical remembering without proclamatory narrative. (444)

Therefore, the remembering and rehearsing of this ancient meal is not simply something God is doing but it is essentially something the one who follows this God does in order to remind themselves of the Gospel narrative.

Chosen on this night of Holy Thursday as our reading, it is has special meaning.  The congregation rehearses and retells our sacred story.  For the preacher it is an opportunity to make the connection between our weekly remembrances and the first supper of passion week.

Some Thoughts on Exodus 12:1-14

Oremus Online NRSV Old Testament Text 

Resources for Sunday's Old Testament Lesson

Moses has attempted to convince the Egyptian Pharaoh to let God’s people go. The Pharaoh’s heart hardened, he has refused. Again and again, God has sent signs, portents, and plagues to reveal that God intends to raise God’s people from Egypt.

The passage that is appointed for the Maundy Thursday liturgy is about the Passover of course. That moment when the people of Israel consume a goat and mark their doors in order to be spared from the last and terrible slaughter of Egyptians. Stanley Hauerwas once told me, “God is getting over God’s tendency to violence.” Regardless of how you read this horrific story, it is of paramount importance for following this last of the plagues the Egyptians allow the people of God to go free. By the blood of the sacrifice, painted upon their door mantle, they are freed…they are delivered…they are passed over by death and have life, they pass over from slavery into freedom. The story which is the “Passover” has another meaning too: God’s compassion spares.

Now, there are two very important arguments here. The Gospel narratives place Jesus’ last supper and death near the time of Passover. The first argument that is made (and I fear has won out in our present time) is that Jesus’ last meal was the remembrance meal of the Passover called the Seder. This is celebrated by many religious Jews today. J. Jeremias in his text The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, 1966, has influenced a generation of people that this is in fact the case. The argument is based upon a “conjecture” found in the text that there was an older Palestinian calendar for Passover that is now lost. Though this cannot be found anywhere or referenced specifically.

It is clear that the authors of the New Testament saw Jesus’ death and resurrection as a metaphor for the Passover. The Passover, if you will, prefigured the resurrection of Jesus. This can be seen emerging theologically in the middle of the second century in the work of Irenaeus of Lyons.

However, there is a second case made for a different root for the liturgy we now recognize as the Eucharist, and that in fact Jesus’ last supper was not the Seder but the Chabûrah or Feast of Friends. C. Kucharek on the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, L. Mitchell in his book The Meaning of Ritual both track the Chabûrah as a major link in the tradition. Their research taps into the ancient texts of The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles and The Didache - two early Christian texts. The biggest proponent of this tradition in the Episcopal Church is our very own Gregory Dix, who in The Shape of Liturgy, places Jesus’ death before Passover. And, that the Chabûrah was a feast kept between rabbis and their followers. (I take all of this from my longtime friendship with Richard Fabian and his work on liturgy and the Eucharist at St. Gregory of Nyssa.)

I say all of this because people will be quick to draw a direct lineage between the Seder, Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, and the modern-day Eucharist. What seems important is that rather than appropriating a perfectly good liturgy of our religious ancestors we might ought to see that what Jesus was doing in his feast with friends was an essential breaking of the specialized meal for the religious to a meal for all people. Friends here being redefined not by those who are given any particular religion by virtue of birth or by nurture of family. Friends instead are those whom God loves in Christ Jesus. Friends are those bound by love and for whom new families are structured out of their participation in a table meant for all people and not a few. This is accentuated when we take into account the nature of customary seating. Jesus was most definitely killed for eating with sinners. At the final supper, he sits with John on one side and Judas on the other – my friend John Peterson is quick to point out. Jesus places his greatest follower – the one whom he loved and his greatest detractor on both his left and right.

If we keep this in mind and return to the text and how it is used in the New Testament we see something very interesting. While there is reference to the looming Passover, there is no direct reference to this passage. This passage, the Passover passage, is used differently.

Luke uses the text, refers to the text, as a charge to Jesus’ followers to be ready. In Luke 12 Jesus tells them to be ready. His time is approaching when he will no longer be with them and they must be ready and be on the move. (Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 203) Again, Luke seems to nod in the direction of our passage from Exodus when in Acts the tradition of Jesus as being key and not passages of laws including but not limited to keeping the Passover. (Hays, 220) Finally, in John’s Gospel, often called the “book of signs” the idea that Jesus’ legs were not broken so like the pure lamb was seen as a sign of the sacrifice.

We can spend a lot of time on the kind of food served at the meal or the meaning of the meal itself. When we do so we miss, most often the fact, that it is not the meal nor the lamb that was slain in Egypt that is our deliverance. Rather that all of those stories prefigure the unique person of Jesus who will be our final deliverance. God in Christ Jesus shall bring all of us to the table of friends (where both the good and the bad shall be seated), and from the table we shall all go united in Love with haste into the world to proclaim a story of deliverance. We are delivered. We know the work of Jesus because we know the old old story of God’s deliverance of a people from death into life, from slavery into freedom.

Previous Sermons For This Sunday

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Bread Is For Re-membering

Sermon Maundy Thursday Year B, March 29, 2018, St. Mark's, Bellaire

The Passover of God

Maundy Thursday sermon preached at Trinity Church, Galveston 2011.

Liturgy of the Passion, Palm Sunday, Year C, April 13, 2025

Prayer

Richard Rohr, Roman Catholic Priest invites us

Archive picture shows statue of Christ on cross
on tree in Fricourt, France, during World War I

to consider the cross and Jesus' invitation. He 

suggests we hear these words from Jesus and 

his cross:

"My beloved, I am your self. I am your beauty. I am your goodness, which you are destroying. I am what you do to what you should love. I am what you are afraid of: your deepest and best and most naked self—your soul. Your sin largely consists in what you do to harm goodness—your own and others’. You are afraid of the good; you are afraid of me. You kill what you should love; you hate what could transform you. I am Jesus crucified. I am yourself, and I am all of humanity."

You might sit quietly and listen. 

Then Rohr invites us to pray these words -

responding to Christ crucified. He invites to pray them as we see Christ Jesus hanging at the center of the world, at the center of human history, at the "turning" of God's creation. Pray:

"Jesus, Crucified, you are my life and you are also my death. You are my beauty, you are my possibility, and you are my full self. You are everything I want, and you are everything I am afraid of. You are everything I desire, and you are everything I deny. You are my outrageously ignored and neglected soul.

Jesus, your love is what I most fear. I can’t let anybody love me for nothing. Intimacy with you or anyone terrifies me. 

I am beginning to see that I, in my own body, am an image of what is happening everywhere, and I want it to stop today. I want to stop the violence toward myself, toward the world, toward you. I don’t need ever again to create any victim, even in my mind. 

You alone, Jesus, refused to be crucifier, even at the cost of being crucified. You never asked for sympathy. You never played the victim or asked for vengeance. You breathed forgiveness. 

We humans mistrust, murder, attack. Now I see that it is not you that humanity hates. We hate ourselves, but we mistakenly kill you. I must stop crucifying your blessed flesh on this earth and in my brothers and sisters. 

Now I see that you live in me and I live in you. You are inviting me out of this endless cycle of illusion and violence. You are Jesus crucified. You are saving me. In your perfect love, you have chosen to enter into union with me, and I am slowly learning to trust that this could be true.

This is taken from Richard Rohr's "Jesus: Forgiving Victim, Transforming Savior." [Transformation: Collected Talks, vol. 1, disc 1 (Franciscan Media: 1997).]

Some Thoughts on Luke 22:14 - 23:56 

"Our Lord passed most of the time on the cross in silence: yet seven sentences which he spoke thereon are recorded by the four evangelists, though no one evangelist has recorded them all. Hence it appears that the four Gospels are, as it were, four parts, which, joined together, make one symphony. Sometimes one of these only, sometimes two or three, sometimes all sound together."

From Wesley's Notes. John Wesley (1703-1791).

"Crucifixion was torture intended to teach a political lesson: Rome can crush the humanity out of you. Remember that. But this crucifixion scene is loaded with Jews who cannot be crushed. This is trouble for oppressors. Rome should worry. The centurion who observes the death seems to have figured this out."

Commentary, Luke 23:33-43, Richard Swanson, Christ the King, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2013.

"Which makes we wonder, Working Preacher, if perhaps on this day we might invite people to call to mind one of those things for which they long to have a second chance so that they might take seriously whatever regret or disappointment they harbor and then take just as seriously the second chance and new life Jesus offers us from the cross."
"The King of Second Chances," David Lose, Dear Working Preacher, 2013.

"What kind of king is this that we honor on this Reign of Christ Sunday? Not one we've ever seen before on this earth, but one who was, and is, and is to come."
"What Kind of King Is This?" Alyce M. McKenzie, Edgy Exegesis, 2013.

"As far as I know, there is only one good reason for believing that he was who he said he was. One of the crooks he was strung up with put it this way: 'If you are the Christ, save yourself and us' (Luke 23:39). Save us from whatever we need most to be saved from. Save us from each other. Save us from ourselves. Save us from death both beyond the grave and before. If he is, he can. If he isn't, he can't. It may be that the only way in the world to find out is to give him the chance, whatever that involves. It may be just as simple and just as complicated as that."
"Messiah," sermon discussion from Frederick Buechner, Frederick Buechner Blog.

Oremus Online NRSV Gospel Text

Let us first begin with God's story and narrative. We shall come to the theology soon enough.

The narrative itself is one that as a whole fits within the wider scripture. We can neither read the crucifixion as an isolated text or as a story within a story. It is in fact THE story and it reaches back to the beginning of creation and reaches forward through Pauline letters and out towards us.

The last supper is part of our Holy Week Triduum and it is also tied (especially in Luke) to the event of crucifixion itself. Fleming Rutledge in her magnum opus makes it clear that all of the Christian Gospels make an explicit link between the meal and the crucifixion. (The Crucifixion, 2017, p. 68.)

She points out that the Last Supper narrative begins in both the Gospels and in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, "On the night that he was to be betrayed..." That the meal and the cross are linked further not by betrayal but by the next words Jesus speaks, "My body and my blood given for you."(Ibid.)

The garden scene begins to reveal Jesus' own preparation for the crucifixion and trial. Here in the garden of Gethsemane Jesus suggests that he is girding himself for the battle. The first battle begun in the desert the last battle waged at the cross. Here then there is complete victory over the powers. What was promised in the desert is fulfilled on the cross. Jesus through submission and powerlessness undoes the hold the powers, principalities and evil hold over the world. (Ibid, 373.)

Let us turn to the crucifixion itself for a moment as it relates to Luke's account. Luke omits the cry, "My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?" This is present not only in each of the other gospels but also in Paul's letters and in the Letter to the Hebrews. Why is it not present? Surely Luke has his own traditions around the crucifixion, but given its presence elsewhere it appears to be an intentional omission. Rutledge helps with our question suggesting that it is perhaps Luke's own desire to show Jesus' commitment to the crucifixion and the sacrifice he promised above. He is being faithful and ready to return to God: "Into thy hands I commit my spirit."(Ibid, 104.)

Here in the crucifixion tradition (though Luke reveals the least of it) is the suffering Christ. Suffering is itself not dignified. It is not to be shown or revealed. For the philosopher, the king, the soldier, even in the narrative of the Maccabean martyrs there is a stoic approach to suffering. But not in the crucifixion narrative. Instead there is anguish, pain, suffering, tears, and a shuddering horror. (Ibid, 374.) Luke does not say this is not true, he simply seems interested in other motivations...ones that I think are linked intimately to faithfulness and the table fellowship.

Now, let us for a moment stop and dwell on what is happening. There is much to do about the word substitution that is well worth a moment of our time. There is great distaste for the word. And, there is most definitely some terrible theology out there. 

For instance...God does not ask for Jesus, his son, to sacrifice himself. God does not sacrifice his son. This is poor theology and goes against the teachings of sacrificial offerings - especially in the story of Abraham and Isaac. So, such ways of thinking should be avoided. They are really bad theology and they are bad for mission! What a terrible god that would be. In fact it would be a different god...a god much more in line with Greek gods and goddesses. It is much more in line with national theologies and mythic tales of heroes. No, this is not what we are talking about here when we talk about substitution. Like Fleming Rutledge I would like to redeem the word. Now, she suggests you can find other words like "exchange", etc... Nevertheless, we must for a moment talk about what is happening in the work of substitution.

When we make the substitutionary theory of the atonement synonymous with a god that demands that the son sacrifice himself, this understanding of atonement can be used to sanction the commission of religious violence against others in many varying and inhumane forms for the sake of peace. By contrast, the gospel of peace reveals God as both a victim of human violence and as a human whose dignity was violated by the shame of the cross. As such, I do not advocate for throwing out the substitutionary model of atonement altogether, but only that we hold this particular model in conversation alongside other models of atonement and always in the context of a Trinitarian theology. 

Outside of a Trinitarian theology, penal substitution becomes a god demanding the sacrifice of his son. However, an orthodox perspective always sees God in Christ acting together to save the world. Our belief in the Trinity will always lead to a mature understanding of any theory of atonement. To illustrate, let us turn to Paul’s letter to the Philippians, chapter 2. Here we see that the second person of the trinity, the Christ, the incarnation becomes lower than the angels in the unique person of Jesus. It is not enough to leave Jesus as a victim. This is not the whole of the story. God becomes fully incarnate in Jesus. 

The very God who in the form of Jesus is willing to set the power of God aside to become a victim on the cross is revealed. It is not that a better version of a Greek god requires his demigod son to sacrifice himself, but that God himself makes the substitutionary sacrifice. Paul writes, Christ "emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” 

The God through whom all things, all flesh, was made is the one who voluntarily becomes powerless even unto death. All of our sinfulness, brokenness, victimhood, violence and scapegoating hang on the cross with Christ, in Christ, and for Christ. Thus, the atonement reveals that we are connected to the Incarnation itself, in our innermost parts. We stand in the middle of God’s narrative, and thus we find fresh power to make our life a substitutionary sacrifice for others so that the borders of God’s Garden expand in and through our life and the quality of our community. (Doyle, Citizen, 2020.)

In the end, Jesus became a scapegoat. He would hear the hailing voices worthy of an emperor. He would wear a robe and crown that mocked him. (Myers, 380.) He took on all of the might of the empire in vestige, abuse, and political torture. The people and the powers condemned him to death because of his subversive teaching and actions; such as healing the sick and eating with the unclean and unholy.  His engagement of powers calling them to accountability made many enemies. His rejection of violence for rebels who wanted Rome gone allied the rebels with the enemy.

Stanley Hauerwas wrote in his exposition of Matthew’s telling of the crucifixion: 

“Jesus must be killed because Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus must be killed because Jesus has called into existence a new people who constitute a challenge to the world order based on lies and deceit. Jesus must be killed because he is a threat to all who rule in the name of safety and comfort. Jesus must be killed because we do not desire to have our deepest desires exposed. Jesus must be killed because we do not believe in a God who creates us and who would come among us after our likeness. So we have learned from Matthew.” 

Jesus’s is sacrificed on the altar of violence and power. He was killed by humanity as a reenactment of ancient religious and political sacrifice. Jesus’ death is the world’s rejection of God’s narrative that no sons and daughters shall be sacrificed. Instead of sparing him like Issac, the powers demand his death. Jesus participated totally in the mimetic sacrifice that God wants no part of. If that were the end of it, then we would be invested in just another community with a scapegoat theology that repeated the violence of mythic gods. 

Instead, God took our violence and broke it open. Jesus was raised from the dead by God and in so doing, Girard says, God “refutes the whole principle of violence and sacrifice. God is revealed as the ‘arch-scapegoat,’ the completely innocent one who dies in order to give life. And his way of giving life is to overthrow the religion of scapegoating and sacrifice—which is the essence of myth.”  God does not let the world’s demand of sacrifice have the last word. (Doyle, Citizen, 2020.)

As we come to the end we return to the reclamation of the crucifixion as a key to our understanding of the whole narrative. Let me for a bit riff on Rutledge but with the whole scope of God's narrative in mind. What we must see that God in Christ Jesus has the ultimate end of the narrative in mind. The whole of the story of the crucifixion fits within not simply a context of apocolyptic writing of the age, but that the end is the setting for the actions that take place. Here the cross is planted firmly between the alpha and the omega. Christ is firmly planted here in tree form. And, that the perfect image of the incarnation - Jesus - arrives in the midst of a fallen world that stretches between the beginning with Cain and Abel and the end's engathering of God. 

The second theme powerfully woven here is that the way in which the Christ becomes victorious is substitution. By becoming the scapegoat and total victim God in Christ Jesus has taken our place. Remember the words of Deuteronomy form Lent 2. God has removed our slavery to sin. Rutledge is at her best here, and encapsulates Luke's own unique telling of this part of God's narrative. In a few sentences she captures the nature of Christ's substitution. I offer it here in its poetic beauty. (It is probably the paragraph that should be read first before reading the rest of the book!) She writes:

...the way in which Christ became the apocalyptic victor was through the substitution. The Kurios could have achieved his victory in some other way, but God chose this way. The incarnate One exchanged his glory for the shame of the cross (Heb 12:2) from the beginning of his life, being born in shameful circumstances, his infancy mortally threatened by a tyrant, branded an impostor by the religious authorities form the first (Luke 4:28-29), being without a place to lay his head through his ministry (Luke 9:58), meeting with hostility everywhere he went. The shame he endured is often expressed in terms of exchange, closely related to substitution: being in the form of God , he exchanged his glory for the form of a slave, exchanging his riches for our poverty, his righteousness for our unrighteousness, even to death on a cross. That is the manner in which he won the victory - "therefore God has highly exalted him"(Phil 2:9; cf. II Cor 8:9; I Pet 3:18). (Rutledge, Crucifixion, 531.)

The final piece is that this crucifixion undoes some of what humans do regarding the law. Humans turn the law into a means of control, of hoarding power and wealth, and for rejecting the hard work of community. Jesus came and died at the hands of this law...which was supported by both the powers of politics and religion. This is the great exclamation point on the death of religion and all those who seek to use it as a stick to keep others down. While we have law within our scripture, this law was transformed by Jesus' ministry to higher virtues and the rest buried in his tomb with his lifeless body. 

Again, Rutledge...

The accursed, Godforsaken death suffered by Jesus was, in some way that we cannot fully articulate, the death that should have been ours, a death under the cursing voice of the Law wielded as a weapon by the Power of Sin. The incarnate Son took our place under the sentence of Death....(Ibid.) 

The death of Jesus on the cross is God in three persons acting together, with one will, for one purpose - to deliver all humanity from the curse of Sin and its not-so-secret weapon, the Law. Jesus, the representative man, our substitute, not only shows us how human will can align itself with the will of God, but also makes it happen in his own incarnate person; and then, in the greatest act of love that has ever taken place , he gives his own person back to us, crucified and raised form the dead, the first fruits of all who belong to him. (Ibid, 534.)

Here then we finish our meditation as we turn to Richard Rohr for a bit of help. What has happened is that our culture has taken one idea of the crucifixion (and a bad theological one at that) and used it to dismiss deep Christian theology. In fact we helped the whole world to do so. Our congregations are filled with people who believe that God asked Jesus, his son, to sacrifice himself. 

This has been combined with the notion that this is a contextual story that can be lifted out of the whole of the God's narrative. That it happened once and for all. The effect is good at the end.  Rohr reminds us that this is not true. . This is instead, he suggests, 

an ongoing transformational lesson for the human soul and for all of history. Christianity’s vision of God was a radical departure from most ancient religions. Instead of having God “eat” humans, animals, or crops, which were sacrificed on altars, Christianity made the bold claim that God’s very body was given for us to eat! This turned everything around and undid the seeming logic of quid pro quo thinking. A view of God as punitive and retributive nullifies any in-depth spiritual journey: Why would you love or trust or desire to be with such a God? The Franciscan School of theology claimed that the cross was a freely chosen revelation of Love on God’s part, meant to utterly shock the mind and heart and turn it back toward trust and love of the Creator. The Divine Mind transforms all human suffering by identifying completely with the human predicament and standing in full solidarity with it from beginning to end. This is the real meaning of the crucifixion. Jesus did not come to change God’s mind about us. It did not need changing. Jesus came to change our minds about God—and about ourselves—and about where goodness and evil really lie. This is taken from Richard Rohr's "Jesus: Forgiving Victim, Transforming Savior." [Transformation: Collected Talks, vol. 1, disc 1 (Franciscan Media: 1997).]

Some Thoughts on Philippians 2:5-11 

"There is nothing better, there is nothing more affectionate, than a spiritual teacher; such an one surpasses the kindness of any natural father."
Commentary by St John Chrysostom: Homily V


"...what works are chiefly to be done? I reply: Especially those which promote chief righteousness and decrease original sin: thus to each and every one is the appropriate examination necessary of his own thing, because original sin expresses itself in one person so, and in another thus."
"Sermon on Three-fold Righteousness" by Martin Luther, c. 1525.

"This revision of a hallowed text throws a monkey wrench into the inner workings of Christian theology. So, let's do it."
Commentary, Philippians 2:1-13 (Pentecost 20), David E. Fredrickson, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2008.

"Paul reads his own life constantly in the light of the story of Jesus (1:20-26). He wants them to read theirs similarly. The great treasure of this passage is that it challenges us to do the same. It is, however, easily subverted into an opposite attitude, a paradigm for success and power."
"First Thoughts on Year A Epistle Passages in the Lectionary," Pentecost 16, William Loader, Murdoch University

"Like Timothy and like Paul's audience, leaders and members of our own congregations are called to imitate Jesus by refusing to insist on their own prerogatives or status, whatever they may be, and serving others in humility."
Commentary, Philippians 2:5-11, Elisabeth Shively, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2013.

"What's in a name? From a biblical perspective -- everything!"
Commentary, Philippians 2:5-11, Elisabeth Johnson, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

Paul in this passage uses a first century Christian hymn (possibly even one they would have known) to urge the members of the community at Philippi to have the same mind as Christ. That means that they are to seek to not insist on their own way or their own rights (determined by their social status) but they are to become lower than their stations. Like God in Christ Jesus they are to seek to become power-less and to serve.

Paul invites them to not be better than the other - this is not after all a quality that Christ illustrated.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form,8he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. 9Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, 10so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,11and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Here as in above, there is physical and spiritual connection between all humanity and the Incarnaiton, between all human labor and the cross, and all human suffering and the crucifixion. Just as God delivers us from sin and the law so does God reveal to us how we are to live and move and have our being. Paul's letter invites just such alignment. Paul desires not simply that we understand the physical and spiritual length but the alignment of life and community.

It is in serving that one is great. It is in taking the lower seat that you shall be known. It is in washing feet and loving each other regardless of station. It is feeding the poor who have no right to be fed and healing the sick who have not fulfilled the law. It is in eating with those who are not worthy to be eaten with. It is in loving those whom you would not dare to love.  These are the qualities by which you will be known as a follower of Jesus.

This is the work of Christ that they are to continue in the world.  

People will talk about a lot of reasons why our church is failing.  They will ponder the reasons why we are shrinking in numbers.  I think in the end it is because we don't do these things very well.  

We do not have the same mind as Christ Jesus and are unwilling to become low. We actually regard equality with God as something to be exploited and lorded over those to whom we do not believe deserve such equality.  We are unwilling to empty ourselves. We will not serve God or his mission over our own needs and desires.  We are quick to take the highest seat. We are not eager to wash each other's feet - especially not the feet of the poor. We are unwilling to hold back or deny ourselves. We will not sit with those unlike us.  We will not dine with those we don't agree with. We will not be seen with those who are not like us. We are wholly unwilling to do the hard and difficult work of following Jesus as Jesus has invited us to follow.

Perhaps this is why Paul has us squarely figured out.  The truth is like the Philippians what is so bad about our church. It is a comfortable place, for comfortable people, comfortable in our going out and our coming in.  Yet Paul may have us figured out...comfortable is not a whole lot like the ministry and character of God in Christ Jesus.

Some Thoughts on Isaiah 50:4-9a 

"The Lenten color of violet hints at the violence sometimes suffered by faithfulness in the short-term, and also sends shivers down the spine. This Sunday the color of a bruise is replaced by that of blood-red, lethal wounds. The full impact of faithfulness is not yet accounted for."
Commentary, Isaiah 50:4-9a, James Matthew Price, A Plain Account, 2016.

"The servant's confidence springs from past actions of God in calling the servant and bestowing gifts up him as well as God's present helping actions in the face of confrontation by enemies."

Commentary, Isaiah 50:4-9a, Tyler Mayfield, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2014.

"What will it mean for us to preach the word of God with the tongue of students, listen like students do, and still stand up to testify confident in God's help?"
Commentary, Isaiah 50:4-9a, Anathea Portier-Young, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

The prophet suggests that God has invited him to be a teacher, to offer a word to the people, to instruct them in God's ways. This is a for a particular purpose though. It is to bring hope and strength to the people...it is to sustain the weary.  God invites the prophet to awaken to the work at hand - to bring comfort and hope.

The prophet listens and does not rebel against the message. This of course implies that the prophet would in fact like to rebel against the message of hope. Perhaps the the notion here for the preacher is that it is easy to become one of the people. But the work of the prophet is to rise above the people's anxiety and weariness in order to offer a vision of God's hope and care.

Moreover, that when we do this as prophets, teachers, and preachers we may not always be liked. People might rather live within their misery. They might rather live within the world of political conflict and power manipulation. They may wish that the preacher parrot the media source of their choosing. In this way the people may not always like the prophet's message.

There is on the one hand sacrifice here ad on the other there is a sense that God works to be the redeemer of both preacher and people. There is support and power in knowing that we are standing, preaching, teaching, and prophesying in the midst of God's narrative.

Sometimes the preacher is tempted to simply mimic the words of the world and the power plays that are all around us. To pick up the narrative of humanity instead of the narrative of God. Let me confess I fall prey to this. All the more reason to take time to listen and ponder God's story of hope and help for the weary soul. All the more reason to offer a true word instead of the word of the world disguised in gospel mimicry.

This is the work that Jesus undertakes in his own preaching and reorienting relationship with God from a temple/church oriented faith to a direct relationship with God. In so doing, he receives the same treatment as Isaiah describes. See especially Mark14:65 and Matthew 26:67. In this way Isaiah's passage here offers a future vision of the suffering servant of Israel. Like all prophets before him, and many prophets after, Jesus receives the prophet's welcome.

The world of human affairs is eager to maintain sibling rivalry, mimetic desire and violence, and scapegoating. We do this to secure our own place and powers. The message of a God who intends that you understand you are invited into God's story and not the other ay around will always be a difficult thing for people to come to grips with. Everything in our lives, from relationships, workplaces, and our technology leads us to believe we are the center of the world/cosmos. God however, through the work of Jesus, the prophet, the teacher, and preacher would like us to understand this is not the situation.

Lent 5C, April 6, 2025

Prayer

Mary Anoints Jesus' Feet by Frank Wesley

Infinite is your compassion, O God, and gracious the pardon that Jesus, the Teacher, offers to every sinner who stands before him. Gladden our hearts at the word that sends us on our way in peace; and grant that we, who have been forgiven so much, may embrace as brothers and sisters every sinner who joins us at this feast of forgiveness. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.

From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year C, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.

Some Thoughts on John 12:1-11

"I know, on the narrative level Jesus is talking to Judas, both reprimanding him as well as interpreting Mary’s gift. But given my own strong reaction both to the cost of Mary’s gift and the intimacy with which she gives it – washing his feet with her hair? really? – I wonder if Jesus is not also addressing himself to me and perhaps to all of us who shrink back from such unconventional and excessive outpourings of faith, love, and service."
"Questions about Discipleship," David Lose, Working Preacher, 2013.


"And so the hardest question for me becomes, how do we preach the love of Christ, who fed and healed people, in the light of Jesus saying, 'The poor will always be with us?'"
"The Poor Will Always Be With You," Carol Howard Merrit, The Hardest Question, 2013.

Oremus Online NRSV Gospel Text

We take a break from the Lukan journey to the cross this week in Lent as we pause for special material out of the Johannine chronicle of Jesus’ last days. Here we have a meal; probably Saturday evening after the Sabbath has ended (as in John’s Gospel that is from Friday to Saturday). It could in fact be the traditional meal to end Sabbath – the Habdalah. Furthermore, we are told the meal is taking place in the town of Bethany identified with the raising of Lazarus.

Following the meal something crazy happens: "Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume."

This is what I found out about this particular and costly perfume. The perfume is myron which is a generic form made from nard rather than from myrrh. Nard is mixed with oil from the storax shrub to create an ointment. This is not the kind of perfume the Magi brought with them but it is nothing less than a kings fortune to obtain it. Judas points this out.

Judas is identified in scripture as the son of Simon. A little family tree from the New Testament scholar J. N. Sanders places Jesus in the house of Simon the leper. Simon the leper is father to his eldest son Judas Iscarot, Lazarus whom Jesus raised, and then Mary and Martha. Sanders describes Judas as a “masculine Martha gone wrong!” (As quoted in Raymond Browne, Anchor Bible, v 29, p 448) Judas is then a brother of Mary, and the rest.

Judas is not happy and says, “'Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?' (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.)"

If we remember that one denarri was a day’s wage. We then can do a little biblical math to understand that 300 silver pieces or denarri is indeed a great sum. This means that we have a lot of money being spent on the anointing. As Browne puts it, “this was a pound of expensive perfume indeed.” (448) It is fascinating to think about the amount of bread this could really have purchased. Interesting comparisons on the amount can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denarius. It would be like a minimum wage employee going out and spending $18,000 on perfume.

Jesus then weighs in, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial."

(Just as an aside there is some debate about this piece of scripture as Mary has no role in the embalming of Jesus. So, it doesn't make much sense.)

Jesus then says something even more unexpected, "You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” We are then told, "When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus."

This is of course a quote from scripture, a paraphrase of Deuteronomy 15:11: “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land”.

So what do we make of the passage? Certainly John is leaning on a synoptic tradition that many scholars believe he had some access to, specifically Mark’s Gospel.  I think you are liable to miss the point by focusing your attention on whether John and the synoptics are describing the same scene.  John seems to have a unique message. 

It is my belief that we have here THE anointing for his burial in John's Gospel. That the tender moment described, and completely missed by Judas and so many of us on our first reading, is that this is in fact Jesus’ anointing and preparation for death. This is happening at this moment at Simon’s house where his children, raised from the dead, the doers, the prayers, and the rebels all gather together for a meal. All nature of follower of Jesus is here and they are all witnessing a most powerful and incredibly intimate moment. This is as Raymond Browne writes, “the culminating expression of loving faith.”

I am always moved by this story when we reach this moment in our Lenten journey. In part because I find my senses have been tuned to a great devotion of our Lord, and so I am truly touched and begin to prepare myself for Holy Week and the veneration of the glorious cross; not out of a sense of rehearsing the past but out of a truly contrite heart’s desire to give thanks for the grace and love Jesus expresses for us.

The moment of anointing stands in stark contrast to the backdrop of a Gospel very rarely focused on Jesus. 

In John’s Gospel we are constantly being reminded that all of this is for us and for the Glory of God. His goal is the restoration of creation. His work is to reorient our eyes upon God and to direct our prayers to his father who is in heaven. So here in this moment is John and the synoptics giving us a glimpse into what our glorious and venerable worship of Jesus might indeed be like were we to observe it with the faith of Mary.

Let us not forget Judas though; it is as he points out an extravagant moment when tremendous amounts of wealth are being literally poured upon a man’s feet. But let us take a few steps back theologically and look at the whole testimony of scripture. We must remember Jesus’ connection of himself with the poor from the Gospel of Matthew, 25.31ff:

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

We are then tempted to mix the two passages and be reminded that Jesus is with us always in the poor. And that we have an opportunity to anoint the poor with service in such an extravagant manner, not unlike Mary in the anointing of Jesus. How would our towns and cities be changed if we through our great devotion to Jesus Christ, anointed the poor with fine oil?

Some Thoughts on Philippians 3:4-14

"Paul pictures himself as a man in the middle, a man who has literally changed his pursuits almost in midstride, and is jubilant."
Commentary, Philippians 3:4b-14, Sarah Henrich, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2016.

"Just as Christ did not regard his high position and stature as something to be exploited but humbled himself and became obedient to death, so too, Paul takes on this cruciform identity and cruciform way of being in the world."
Commentary, Philippians 3:4b-14, Rev. Rob Fringer, A Plain Account, 2016.

"Pursuit and flight are a topos of Greek erotic poetry and iconography from the archaic period onward. It is noteworthy that, within such conventional scenes, the moment of ideal desire on which the vase-painters as well as poets are inclined to focus is not the moment of the coup de foudre, not the moment when the beloved's arms open to the lover, not the moment when the two unite in happiness. What is pictured is the moment when the beloved turns and runs."

Commentary, Philippians 3:4b-14, David E. Fredrickson, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2008.

Oremus Online NRSV Epistle Text

We switch from Paul's focus on the Corinthians (who are having all kinds of trouble) to his letter addressed to the emerging church in Philippi.  

Just before this passage he has been speaking of how Jesus is the example of servanthood and in the most recent passages from this letter Paul has been warning that some Christian traditions will try and make you follow the Jewish law.  Circumcision is only one item, but the the issue is that Paul believes the new tradition is different from the old.  I believe Paul is saying we are not simply Jews with Jesus; this is a greater revelation.  Our relationship with the law has changed because of the ministry of Jesus.  Paul turns this religious law on its head and says: true circumcision is of the heart – and not of the “flesh”.

As an example of the need to circumcise the heart Paul speaks of his own experience.  He speaks from his own experience as a good and religious Jew.  He was circumcised and he was from the tribe of Benjamin.  I love how he describes this, he was "a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless".  He even was a persecutor of the Christians who he thought were lawless!  

Yet, through knowing Christ he has come to understand that when you follow the law you lose.  The law itself obstructs God's love.  If you believe that you are saved or special because you are following the law and being religious then you are engaging in what he calls "rubbish".

The obverse is true.  Christ chooses us. Christ loves us.  Christ suffers under the law so that we do not need to suffer.  We are redeemed and we live anew because of his resurrection.  Our faith in Christ, not godly law abiding citizenship in accordance with legal precepts, is what brings righteousness.  He writes that he, "not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith."

This confession of faith begins the work of transformation.  It bears fruit but the confession itself cannot turn into some new way of doing the work.  We are being transformed from within.  We are, through the power of his resurrection being made new.  Our understanding of life following Christ is our response to this love.  Our Christ like life is our response to God making us his own.  

Paul leaves us with this:  "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus."

It reminds me of Paul's words from Ephesians 3: God's "power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine"

Some Thoughts on Isaiah 43:16-21

"We are all called to take our faith in God from the past and bring it into the present, regardless of how hopeless or desperate the situation may seem."
"Present-Tense Faith," Alan Brehm, The Waking Dreamer, 2016.

"This is a wonderful and very necessary word for the Church to hear in this current age when there is so much change and upheaval. The character of our god has not changed. God's grace and power have sustained us in the past, will see us through the present and guide us into the future."
Commentary, Isaiah 43:16-21, Callie Plunket-Brewton, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2013.

"Lost in Our Own Exiles, We Forget God's Gifts and Promises."
"Remember to Forget," John C. Holbert, Opening the Old Testament, 2013.

"This year can be our turn around time because we serve a God who continually does new things in our lives when we are willing to let go of the past and lay hold upon the future with faith in God who continues to do all things well."
Commentary, Isaiah 43:18-21, William Watley, The African American Lectionary, 2010.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

God is doing a new thing. God is about to free the people from their captivity in Babylon. Who is this God? The prophet reminds the people this is a word from the God who made the sea and those who dwell in it. Isaiah reminds them of how God brought the people out of Israel and tells them God will do the same for those in Babylon.

The prophet says that even though the people do not yet see the results of God's providence, God is in fact already setting things in motion. God will "make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert." God is doing this because the people are part of God's story and there is a relationship between them.

God through the prophets invites the people to have hope, offers the people guidance out of love, and suggests the work of the people is not a geographic or ethnic particularity but a message for the whole world. (See the uniqueness of the prophets in Rabbi Jonathan Sacks essay on Leadership.)

The words from this passage are themselves repeated within the Christian tradition. God invites the people through Christ Jesus to hear the words in a new way - expanding the message to all people. The words of Isaiah are a clarion call and can be found in the words of the prophet John the Baptist who makes the same call to the people alienated from God and who are enslaved and imprisoned in their own land, in their own homes, and persecuted in their own towns. The words of Isaiah are echoed in his invitations to take heart and do not be afraid; as when Jesus comes across the sea.