“Dead men don’t rise!” – Canon Peter Collier, Cathedral Reader

May I speak in the name of the living God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

How did the disciples get it so wrong? How could they have forgotten all that Jesus had said on the various occasions when he had predicted both his death and his resurrection. I can understand them not wanting to accept that he was going to die. But when he did die why didn’t they think – well we didn’t really expect or want this, but it has happened, so perhaps what he said about rising in three days will have happened too, let’s go and see.

But dead men don’t rise.

Early in the morning the three women approached the tomb not expecting to find it empty. They were bearing precious herbs and oils to wash the body of their Lord. They had come to comb his hair, to sponge away the dried blood, to massage the precious myrrh ointment into his skin – ritual acts of care traditionally done before finally sealing a body in a tomb. But as they approached, they wondered how they would get access to the cave, given it was sealed with a great boulder. On arrival they saw that the stone had been rolled away, the tomb was empty, and there was a young man sitting there.

And they were frightened. Not because he might have risen but no doubt fearing that Jesus whose life had been stolen from him had now even had his body stolen away. That would have been the final insult following on all those other insults of his arrest, his mock trial and his judicial execution.

So, having come with a sense that death had defeated all their hopes and dreams, it now seemed that death had even swallowed up the body of their Lord. And we can perhaps understand that as we know from what we see and read about people who for one reason or another have no body to bury – maybe a loved one lost at sea or just someone missing and presumed dead.

Then the young man who was there spoke. He told them not to be alarmed he said: “you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

You might expect that at that point they would have not only remembered all that Jesus had predicted. You might have thought that that young man’s words would have been a great encouragement and comfort to them.

And more than that they might have remembered recent times spent with Jesus and listening to him and all that he had said about being killed and rising again.

But none of that seems to have been in the mind of these disciples. Rather surprisingly we read that what the young man said seems to have had just the opposite effect. We are told they went out and fled from the tomb because terror and amazement had seized them. The word for terror is our word trauma. After all dead men don’t rise. So, what on earth was going on?

What were they afraid of? Did they think the young man was lying, perhaps a Roman guard having a bit of sick fun at their expense?

Or were they terrified because they realised that it was true – that Jesus was alive and if Jesus was alive nothing could ever be the same again. They are told to go to Galilee to meet with him. So, what is it he will have to say to them there? what will he expect of them from then on? Who knows? They don’t know and that could raise terrifying prospects for them.

Today we follow in the footsteps of those women Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome. Those three women didn’t see Jesus. Neither do we. They didn’t hear Jesus call their names. Neither have we. They weren’t invited to touch his wounded hands. Nor have we. They stand beside us today. Like them we have to make decisions on the basis of what we have been told. We too have been told that He has risen as he said he would.

There is of course very good evidence for accepting what we have been told about the resurrection.

As a lawyer I have always been attracted to examine the evidence for the resurrection. I have an old book here, published in 1734, called “The Tryal of the Witnesses”. In 1729 a theologian called Thomas Woolston had published a book questioning the literal historicity of the miracles of Jesus including the resurrection. He was prosecuted and convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to 12 months in prison.

My book is an account of what happened when some members of one of the Inns of Court, responding to that book held a mock trial in which the apostles were charged with falsifying the evidence for the resurrection. Twelve of the group played the part of the jury and having examined the evidence, they found the apostles not guilty of giving false evidence.

A much more recent book is called “Who Moved the Stone”. It is written by a journalist, and the first chapter is entitled “the book that refused to be written”. Frank Morrison had set out to write a book to explain why the account of the resurrection could not be true. But as he examined the evidence, he was persuaded that it had happened.

And now like the women in our reading, we have been told that he is risen. And like them we have to decide how we will respond.

The followers of Jesus took time to work it out. Each came at it in their own way. As the Dean reminded us this morning the only real response is to acknowledge that we have been sent out to speak of what we have witnessed.

Maggi Dawn, author and theologian, wrote recently on her blog: “It’s a good thing to remember that the church season of Easter is 50 days long, and that even for the first disciples, while Easter morning brought a certain amount of hope and promise, it was also quite bewildering, and it took them some time to work out the detail of what to do next. The same is true for us. We can never just go back to where we were before – back to the world, back to the church, back to life as if nothing has happened. Every place we have ever been will now look different because we have met Jesus. Easter isn’t a single day of celebration, but a hinge moment in a life that is being transformed.”

Now we have the 50 days of this Easter season to work out what our response will be.

Dead men don’t rise – but now is Christ risen from the dead!

Amen.

“Why are you weeping?” – The Very Reverend Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Dean Emerita of the Seminary of the Southwest

The Long Goodbye is behind us.

Here at the tomb where his friends had laid to rest the body of Jesus, smeared with myrrh and aloes, wrapped around with linen cloth.

Shades of night still shadow the trees in the garden, the fig and the apple. The brilliance of the blossoms on the vine smothered in dark; the flowers had not yet turned their faces to the light, nor released their mingled scents.

His beloved friend, bereaved survivor, Mary, returns to the burial place of the fallen hero, the place that some in that time, believed to hold special power. She goes to mourn him, to honor him, and perhaps even to worship.

She prays,

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?

My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, “Where is your God?”

As she stoops to look into the tomb, the angels, who mark the negative space, ask, “Women, why are you weeping?”

I’m weeping for my dead teacher, gone, for our cause that failed, feeding, healing, mending the world. I’m weeping for all my friends who are in danger, my sisters and brothers, crushed, now without hope.

Mary’s weeping echoes, resounds with our weeping, for the pain of being human, for how much love hurts, for suffering, change, the strength of sin. We weep for pointless quests, wasted effort. We weep for the warring world. For meaninglessness. For the demise of decency. Lust for power, burning, a furious pyre.

Then Mary turns. Away from the sacred empty spot where the body had lain. To the living person standing.

He asks her again, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?”

All she seeks is the dead body of her crucified Lord.

But then she hears a voice, she knows something infinitely more than a corpse.

She hears her name spoken, “Mary.”

She turns again, “Rabbouni.”

Here he is alive. A human, living speaking, breathing body.

It is the sweetest of all reunions, the most joyful of all returning. And then in an instant the physical reunion is over. Jesus invites Mary to a higher kind of knowing, another form of friendship

Go to my sisters and brothers, go to the rest of my friends, the rest of my beloved disciples, that I am ascending to the Father we share and the God we know.”

Beneath the flowering trees, among the crimson, white, violet blooms, the morning glories open, as the morning breaks, as the dawn breeze blows, and the lilies give off their perfume, she runs back find her friends and announce to them her vision,

“I have seen the Lord.”

And we have seen his glory, It is for this vision that we who have gathered every day have prepared ourselves this week. You who are baptized and confirmed tonight are initiated into this vision, given this story to interpret the world.

At this Easter Vigil we all take part in, we relive, this Passover from death to life, this ordeal of transformation, this drastic, scandalous, reorientation of power that is resurrection.

That change so complete and total that can only be described as making that perilous passage from darkness to light, from water to breath, into the world to be born again.

In resurrection we see that all that for which we weep is held in God’s comprehensive, enfolding, magnanimous, stupendous, unending Love.

To all the images for resurrection, passing over, going through the water, falling to the ground and dying, being buried with Christ, being lifted up, being glorified, we can add turning, turning to see to hear to touch the risen Christ.

The divine presence, the glory of God, will not be found at the tomb of the dead hero. It will not be located even in the body of the Risen Jesus on earth. In the temple of his body. But it will be forever present among the sisters and brothers, children of the same Father, friends of the same Lord, who abide with Christ, dwell in him and he in them.

The long goodbye of Jesus becomes God greeting us, God’s Yes, the divine Hello, the warm, warm welcome into the community of beloved disciples for those baptized and confirmed tonight, into a new body.

We are invited into a higher form of knowing, a different form of friendship with Christ. Another kind of touching, and holding, abiding close to the bosom of Christ. Not a return to life as we know it, but another kind of life, eternal life.

Here on Easter morning we breathe again the fragrance of the perfume, poured out by Mary, filling house and the whole world. We remember the morsel of bread shared at the table with Judas, the intimate enemy. We recall the touch of hand and the coolness of water upon our feet, blessed by the dying parent, by our departing teacher, washing into a community, not of slaves and masters, but of friends.

In resurrection Jesus gives birth to us, in blood and water and in breath.

We know his abiding with us in the sacrament we share at the table, bread and wine, flesh and blood.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a Father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Alleluia. Christ is Risen!

Amen.

“Born at the Cross” – The Very Reverend Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Dean Emerita of the Seminary of the Southwest

John 18:1-19:42

Today we remember Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and burial.

We remember those who suffered the shock and agony of Jesus’ execution by the Roman government, the devastating loss of their teacher, their friend, and their hope.

They are the predecessors of those who are crushed by systemic/organized/state violence who live on in the shadow of that trauma.

In the passion of Jesus Christ, as recorded in the gospels, that pain is present, that trauma visible, but that shock and grief has been reread and understood anew.

The devastated followers of Jesus experienced a shock on Easter morning, and in the days that followed. They looked back together on Jesus’ life and teaching and on his final days in light of holy scripture and the divine presence among them, keeping them alive.

This is the remembering we have paid attention to in these reflections in Holy Week.

So, we come to the reading of the Passion according to St. John.

Having heard these words and acted them out with students and …. for many, many years, I can attest that it is not possible to take in all the elements of the passion narrative in one hour.

You have let the words wash over you, the cacophony of horrifying events, and the reasons you know from Christian teaching and centuries of theologizing.

We know, you know, that for those who can see, for those who have faith, the details of Jesus’ passion speak of a truth beyond themselves.

The disciple whose memories are the origin of this fourth gospel and those around him remembered this terrible day, they saw patterns.

The Holy Spirit had spoken among them with new images and ways to understand this death.  We have explored these in the homilies in the past days.

In the passion according to St. John, there is agony, but it’s a highly theologized, retrospective agony.

That’s the puzzle – the tension between shock and foreknowledge, irrationality and reason, human evil and divine love.

Suspense when you already know the plot.

You see, in John, it’s death itself that is the saving thing. It’s the cross lifted up that is the glorifying thing, In the gospel of John, Good Friday is already Easter.

In the trial before Pilate, the evangelist brings into focus all that has been whispered or thundered throughout the gospel.

When Pilate brings him out with the royal purple clothes and crown of thorns, and declares, “here is the man – the human one – literally it is mockery… but for those with eyes to see, it is truth.

Jesus’ trial is Pilate’s trial- Pilate himself is judged by Jesus, and silenced by his testimony to the truth.

“You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

“You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.”

But it is this one luminous moment in John’s story of Jesus’ crucifixion on which I linger now:

“Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. ²⁶ When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.”  Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

Jesus’ mother, his godmothers, and the friend he loved. Tradition read this literally, and you can go on pilgrimage and see the house where John kept Jesus’ mother in Ephesus.

But in the theological imagination of the fourth gospel, this is way more than practical accommodation, in this gospel it is the creation of a new family.

A better translation might be “from that hour the disciple took her as his own mother.”

It is a radical new relationship, reconstituted out of enmity and violence, coming into being through death. With the words, Son behold your mother, mother behold your son, Jesus births a new family…. our new family, the family of those who have become children of God, born not of blood or the will of the flesh or the will of man, but of God.”

In the gospel of John, Jesus is a rabbi who is a riddler. He is a prophet who is a poet. Jesus speaks with the voice of someone who comes from another place than here.

He told Nicodemus,

“No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above without being born again.”

He is not from here. But we all are here because of him. He came down, the dayspring from on high hath visited us.

He became human, he entered into the flawed world and the fragile flesh.

And many did not recognize him, for logic could not explain his coming.

The riddling rabbi, was there when the light met the darkness when the world was born.

When it went wrong, God the Creator would make the world right, would remake it.

In these three days, God the Creator is about to make the world right in a strange, awful, and illogical way.

The world will execute the rabbi, will heave up the cross from its place on the ground, straight up to vertical, lifting him up towards the place from which he came, high up, where all could see, and live.

One more riddle:

When Jesus’ body is taken down:

Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out. ³⁵ (He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.)

The waters of birth and the waters of creation flowed with blood from his pierced side, as from a women who is in labor: she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world.

Jesus dies so that new life might be born.

Even on this saddest of days, as we wait for resurrection, here in the gospel of John, we have it already, our birth from above, the creation of a new family of friends, a family of love whose hearts will rejoice and no one will take our joy from us.

Amen.

“And this is Eternal Life” – The Very Reverend Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Dean Emerita of the Seminary of the Southwest

“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

We near the conclusion of our Long Goodbye in this Holy Week, before we observe the Good Friday liturgy and read the account of Jesus’ arrest, trial, crucifixion, and burial. And then tomorrow endure the silence and emptiness of Holy Saturday.

In the gospel of John, Jesus does his most memorable teaching not on the mountain or on the plain or in the synagogue, but at the table with his friends, in the meal he shares with them before the Passover. We celebrated this table last night in the Maundy Thursday liturgy: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” He washed and wiped and loved and laid down his life and sent Judas out into the night.

And after the footwashing, in the sequence on the pages of the gospel of John, Jesus stays at the table and teaches them in John chapters 14, 15, and 16. We read these familiar passages on Sundays of Easter, as though they are spoken by the risen Jesus: “Love one another as I have loved you, I am the vine you are the branches, I am the way the truth and the life.”

His long goodbye is his last will and testament, when like Moses does in the book of Deuteronomy, like a leader, a prophet, a patriarch, with this children, his heirs, (or his graduate students) gathered around his bed, Jesus teaches them everything he wants them to remember. They remember it more vividly because they were his last. These chapters are really part of Jesus’ “Even Longer Goodbye” to those who will carry on.

But let’s populate this table – give it color and texture with our sacramental imagination.

I imagine that at this table …. are all the ones Jesus has loved throughout the gospel (John doesn’t restrict the number of the disciples to 12)  — the missionary woman from Samaria he met at the well, Nicodemus on his way to being born from above, Mary and Martha of Bethany, Lazarus, the one he called back from the tomb, his mother, and the anonymous disciple whom he loved – all these and more…

They are going to miss Jesus, the way we each miss those we have lost to death. We hear this agony expressed in Mary and Martha’s grief at the death of Lazarus their brother and Jesus’ friend.  They will miss the sound of their loved one’s voice, the warm nearness of their bodies, the taste of the food and the fragrance shared.

And perhaps Jesus will, as we will as our death approaches, miss the salt sea and the laughter of children…. as we would miss holding the hand of our spouse, embracing our children… glimpsing the first light of the sun at dawn… tasting the sweet juice of the grapes… breathing the scent of spring.

But this loss is not what Jesus speaks of now. He concludes his long goodbye with a prayer. A prayer to God, the Father. He prays on behalf of those gathered at the table and for us / those who hear it today.

Jesus looks into heaven, and he speaks to God. We hear the first five verses in our reading.

The prayer is long. It’s passionate and poignant, supremely confident, authoritative, personal, conveying the character of Jesus as we have known it throughout the gospel.

For generations people of faith have heard in this prayer what Jesus most wanted for his friends, for the beloved community, for what we now call “church.” after he was gone.

Time is collapsed.

The prayer is about the future. It’s about the work he is about to do with Pilate and the cross in the garden.

And it’s about the past –  “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do.”

Jesus refers to it all as finished even before the story has told us about the cross and his (really) last words.

It speaks of what the friends will face in the future, be scattered, be threatened by the evil one, be always challenged by a hostile world which “hates” them.

It asks God to do what they have known that God indeed to have done: protected them from the evil one, and left them to live together in the world with the ongoing presence and knowledge of Jesus through the teaching of the Holy Spirit and through his flesh and blood, made them to be “one.”

We hear this prayer, and it gives us the key to the door of the passion narrative we will hear in the next hour. It’s the same key that scripture has been telling us in the readings all week.

Jesus, this rabbi we know in Galilee and Judea, whose mighty works and signs we have witnessed on the water and in the desert, by the pool, in the village—-he comes from a time before time, when the Spirit hovered over the face of the deep.

He was one with God and with God. He enjoyed the presence of the Father “before the world existed.”

Because God so loved the world, He became flesh, entered into human life, set up his tent, tabernacled among us, lived, dwelt among us.

And now He’s getting ready to return, to depart from the people he loves and the landscape he knows.

He’ll be all right.

It’s those he leaves behind, making our way in the world of …. mortality… division… conflict.. violence…

It is us that he cares about now and for whom he fervently prays at this moment.

From where we stand today, I think this prayer of Jesus has a tragic dimension. Those who have faith in Christ have not been one, but have but have split and schismed, fractured and fought one another.

And also the sad truth that those for whom he prayed to be protected from evil, the community of those he loved, that community of Christians, of people of LOVE, has in its later generations inflicted harm in the name of Jesus. They have heard Jesus’ prayer for them as excluding, denying divine presence to those who have not become part of this fellowship.

We hear it most poignantly and pointedly in the polemic against the Jews (in the readings that has infiltrated our Holy Week liturgies and that has sown violence and hatred in the name of the one who loves us.)

So in our prayer today, for the ways that hatred and exclusion has overwhelmed love, we repent. For those who have been harmed, we lament on this holiest of days

It is for us who embrace the story of Jesus who loved the world and who became one with it, to gather all people into a world where we can live together. Perhaps wider and more diverse than Jesus imagines in this prayer.

In the liturgy to come, we will hear the details of the hour when in John’s words, the Father will glorify the Son.

We hear it as a human goodbye, physical pain, institutional evil,  political execution – at the same time we know it to be the work of God completed, and Jesus’ return to the presence of his Father.

And we know that its ultimate motivation is love, its ultimate gift, is life. Eternal Life –

With the gift of eternal life, we are freed from fear of the finality of death.  Glory radiates in the flesh of Jesus. And flesh, every human friendship, in laughter, in sunlight, in shared food and fragrance, eternal life shines.

“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

Amen.

“The Temple of His Body” – The Very Reverend Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Dean Emerita of the Seminary of the Southwest

“But he was speaking of the temple of his body.”

“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts, Heaven and Earth are full of thy Glory.”

Who is God?

Where shall we look for God?

Where does God dwell?

How shall we worship God, Creator and Father of All?

You can look to the rocks, the trees, the sun, moon, and stars, planets in their courses. You can peer into ancient musty books to unearth divine secrets. You can go into the Temple, make offerings, and come into God’s courts.

All the gospels recount the incident of Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem, raising a ruckus, wrecking it, one of my biblical studies colleagues has renamed it, not the mild term, “cleansing of the Temple, “but rather Jesus’ Temple Tantrum. Like his ancestor, the prophet Jeremiah does before him, Jesus calls out the Temple as corrupt, no longer worthy to house the name, no longer embodying its holy purpose.

The gospel of John recounts this story very early in the gospel, and it’s not the crime that instigates the plot to arrest and destroy him, but rather because it holds one key to the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

We are given the clue very early on, right after the joyous wedding at Cana. Like so much of John’s gospel, what is hidden is made known to the reader who has eyes to see. The passage speaks of the process of rereading, and remembering that created the passion narrative that we have, rich with allusive details, and resonant with scriptural echoes.

The earliest Christ believers told Jesus’ life after they had known the Risen Lord. They told and retold it, in light of their history of faith, and what happened in their community, in their searching of scripture.

“After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”

In John’s version, you can see Jesus’ zeal – in the description of his fury, even violence, with that cat whip of cords. Driving out the animals and emptying the banks, he speaks the words of the prophet Zechariah, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”

As with many of Jesus mighty deeds, those who see do not understand, and Jesus’ “explanation” confounds them further.

“Destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up.”

They take him literally, as people do, and miss the meaning.

“This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and you will raise it up in three days?”

What beautiful stones, how intricate, and how enormously sturdy are those towers. It took years, it’s practically permanent, we can rely on it. In their hostile question lies the truth. Here it is, the hidden meaning, in broad daylight, amid the scattered clutter of the ravaged building:

“He was speaking of the temple of his body.”

“He was speaking of the temple, his body.”

Compared with this building a human body is so fragile. Easily destroyed. Temporary.

Where do we locate God? Where do we go to worship? One answer: The temple, of course, where the name of God dwells. where we worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, let the whole earth stand in awe of him.

Later on the gospel explores this question: Once upon a time by a well in Samaria, Jesus argued about worship with a woman who carried water.

“Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Jesus answered:

“But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

And then she confessed him as the Christ, and he disclosed himself as the great I AM.

Today, on this Good Friday, in the passion and death of Jesus, the hour is here. The sectarian dispute between Jesus and Samaritans about the place to worship will be moot.

Those who worship in spirit and truth will locate God, in neither tabernacle or tent, mountain or desert, but in Jesus. It is here we will worship.

Jesus’ body, his flesh, is the place where God dwells, the location of the divine presence, the Word, made flesh.

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. Dwell there.

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them. They dwell in me.

In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. You will stay with me.

Jesus’ body, his flesh is the temple where God is present.

Attend to the body of Jesus in the Good Friday liturgy – Flogged, robed and crowned. Crucified. Pierced. Taken down. Stripped. Buried with piles of spices in the garden tomb. Then on Sunday morning, notice and marvel at the place where his body lay, only the linens and the headcloth to mark the space.

What began way back with the sign Jesus did in the temple, is coming to its conclusion on this day of crucifixion.

Zeal for God’s house will consume him today. Let us experience it, let us contemplate, let us worship.

“Heaven and earth are full of thy glory.”

Amen.

“He loved them to the end” – The Very Reverend Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Dean Emerita of the Seminary of the Southwest

“Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

It is a theological seminary classroom on the last meeting of the semester. Our class has spent fourteen weeks studying the gospel according to St. John.

The fluorescent lights give the space a bright unforgiving light. The floor is linoleum. The seminar table is arranged in a rectangle with chairs pulled up to it. As the professor where I sit is at one of the narrower ends in front of the window.

We are assembled for the final student presentations. The room is silent.

Laura a member of the class, has brought a basin of water and a white rag. Handling it gingerly, she kneels down, she crawls between the legs of the seminar table and drags the basin and the rag toward her classmate on the left.  We look around at each other above the table, “Is this happening?”

Laura crawls under the table from person to person, counterclockwise, while we all observe. Time slows down. The silence echoes.  It seems interminable.

She doesn’t stop until she has worked her way around to every person in the rectangle. I am at the end of the line, the far right of the seminar table. When she’s done, she comes back up from the floor and goes to her seat. No words. No music. Just the ticking of the wall clock.

It is stunning. It is embarrassing, shocking. It’s awkward. It violates sacred conventions of the classroom, and it is utterly beautiful. The space now resonates with a hum of energy.

We have experienced this familiar story as if for the first time, feeling it’s shock, hearing its silence, bearing its humility. Awaiting our turn to be brought into this story whether we invited it or not.

Tonight, we share in the liturgy of Maundy Thursday when we commemorate the institution of the Lord’s Supper and the new commandment given by Jesus.

In the strange and wonderful gospel that is from John, at the crescendo of the Last Supper, the meal when Jesus gives his most important instructions for what the community is supposed to do forever after, when he explains in word and deed, everything that is going on with his death to come, he doesn’t tell them to do the eucharist as we know from the other gospels. He just gets up from supper, takes off his outer garment, ties a towel around his waist, pours water and washes the feet of his friends.

The sacred element isn’t bread or wine, but water, and the action isn’t eating, but touching – hands on feet, feet on hands.

In the Anglican tradition, this Johanine foot washing did not catch on liturgically the way the sacrament of the Eucharist did, so instead of doing this this example, every week or every day, we do it only once a year on Holy Thursday.

It’s a challenge to make it into a liturgy – It’s a challenge – it needs water and bare feet. When I grew up it was enough to read about it, not to do it physically…. then our revised prayer book brought back the washing… …

In some services twelve are washed, sometimes everyone. In some places it is danced or pantomimed, some places (missing the point entirely), instead of feet, they wash hands.

In the gospel of John Jesus does this prophetic sign; he gives this embodied sermon so we can understand our life with God.

It shows us our life as beloved disciples together  in the face of human death and inevitable goodbye, and it issues in the creative new life from Jesus’ death.

Jesus kneels and washes into being a new community – a scandalous community of friends, who serve each other as equals.  No more master and slave, no more teacher and student, no more host and guest. No more ruler and subject.

It is shocking how it overturns convention.

A man, foregoes his privilege, and kneels and washes and wipes, as Mary of Bethany prefigured in the anointing supper we remembered on Monday.

Whatever power we have as Christians, as as a disciples of Jesus, As a bishop, a deacon, a priest, it is this kind of power – no dominance, no submission but a relationship of friendship, more commonly known as love.

The physical sermon, this catechetical dance, of foot washing communicates relationship — physically close, hands touching feet, skin on skin, getting up, taking off an outer garment, tying a towel, pouring, washing, wiping. It is the same physical closeness in the posture of the disciple who reclines on the bread of Jesus, and the Son who is close to the Father’s bosom, who has made him known.

This is the ideal of life with God in the gospel of John – closeness, tightness, cheek to cheek of the Son and the Father, of friend and friend. It is a really intense, corporeal way of describing communion with God. For it’s really no more radical than “take, eat,” no more intimate than “that he may dwell in us and we in him,” but we have more practice with the weekly Eucharist.

I’ve always experienced Maundy Thursday as the saddest moment of Holy Week, the time during the Long Goodbye, when Jesus’ impending death, casts a shadow of grief over his loving action and his last commandment. For in kneeling down to wash their feet, he is laying down his life, he is going to die.

We are going to have to endure the stripping of the altar and the putting away of the shiny vessels and embroidered vestments.

We are going to ask ourselves,

“Will we be orphaned?

“Will we survive the loss of our friend?

It is Peter who speaks our objection to the reversal of status, alarm at the sacrifice made by a friend, grief at the inevitable and sorrowful parting by death.

“You will never wash my feet.”

Stunning, embarrassing, utterly beautiful.

Amen.

“Night falls” – The Very Reverend Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Dean Emerita of the Seminary of the Southwest

“And It Was Night”

Today we remember the moment that is, for John’s gospel, the deepest pit, the darkest dark. This is the instant when sin ruptures friendship, wrecks God’s family, and threatens to destroy the Father’s only Son, sent to save the beloved world.

It is a cosmic catastrophe, like the crucifixion is in the rest of the gospel tradition, when at noon, darkness covers the whole land, returning creation to primal darkness, unmaking it.  A total eclipse of the sun. This is the malevolent night. Full of darkness that people loved rather than light.

It happens at the family meal when Jesus has washed the feet of his friends and given them the new commandment. This final supper mirrors the anointing – it expands the table around which Mary, Martha, Lazarus, Judas, Jesus dined amid the encompassing fragrance of the pure ointment of nard. Here at the last supper is the larger family of spiritual sisters and brothers that is the Johanine community.

Among the gathering of friends is the disciple we know as Simon Peter, and also another, who we see for the first time here.

This one is at the supper “lying on the breast of Jesus.” Or lying on his bosom. He is as close as he can physically be, as close as the Son is to the Father. As close as siblings who share a bed, or as a child cradled with his mother.

We do not know his name, only that he is the one “whom Jesus loved.” Like Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Like his own who were in the world whom he loved to the end.

He is never called the one Jesus loved better than the others or the one whom he loved the best. He is however, the most physically close to Jesus’ body here, and later when Jesus’ body is taken down from the cross, he witnesses visionary details of the body of one whom they had pierced.

When dinner is almost done, after Jesus washes their feet – Jesus tells his friends, “one of you will betray me.” The one whom Jesus loved asks, on behalf of the others, “Who is it?”

Like the wicked fairy at the christening party, the bad apple in the barrel, the one who plans to ruin this party, Judas is there, the spoiler, as he was at the supper in Bethany.

Judas has haunted the action in this gospel from the beginning even as early as the feeding of the five thousand at the sea of Tiberias. By now we all know that it is Judas.

That Jesus is betrayed by one of his own is a stubborn stain in the story of Jesus.  His enemies could have taken him with overwhelming force, but instead there was an insider who ratted. It is an embarrassing fact, that casts shame on Jesus and his followers.

Judas is “the intimate enemy,” the one who uses his privileged position to do harm, takes trust and throws it away, who humiliates his host.

Of all the afflictions portrayed in the psalms, sickness, injury, despair, death, the perishing of your name, it is the mockery of enemies that is most terrible. And worst of all is when a friend turns against you.  If you have ever been in this situation, you know this to be true.

It could have been a routine reorganization or a planned retirement, but it is a coworker, in whom you confided, who knows your weakness, who reports you.

You believed her to be a confidante, but she kept from you one key fact.

It keeps you up at night, obsessing over the hurt of it.

From the Psalms, Jesus’ Book of Common Prayer: “Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.”

John’s gospel is most uncompromising in its condemnation of Judas. The author tells no mitigating backstory, provides no excuses, reports no future regret.

Judas personifies the power of evil, the refusal of the world to welcome its creator. The embodies the perverse ignorance we have seen throughout the gospel from those who encounter Jesus, who fear, instead of welcome him.

Like sin in John’s gospel, you never know why or how sin happened, but you know its power.

Darkness threatens to overwhelm the light.

As the night closes in, we who read and who watch this event unfold, are filled with horror.

Our response to Judas may be fear… what wickedness is capable of. It may be hate, as burning and merciless as his own. It may be relief, that it is not us. And pity.

As readers of John, we know who is it who will betray Jesus. And Jesus knows also. He has spoken of scripture: ‘The one who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.’

To answer the beloved disciple’s question, Jesus says:

“It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.”

So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. After the morsel, Satan entered into him.

Jesus said to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.”

And it was night.

In the middle of this dark night we watch evil unfold – a righteous person is betrayed by a treasonous friend. It’s utterly awful.

And as with all this remembering during this long goodbye in John, dim light glimmers in the details that the evangelist has hidden in plain sight. Jesus’ giving of the morsel of food to Judas recalls the picnic at the sea of Tiberias, when Jesus fed the people in the great sign of the loaves and the fishes and when he spoke of himself as the prophet who conjured bread in the wilderness, and of himself as the Bread of Life, who came down from heaven. And the sermon unwraps itself and it reveals and proclaims that it will be Jesus’ flesh that will give life to the world, through eating his flesh, and drinking his blood.

So here Jesus offers the bread to Judas – we are not told whether he put it into his mouth or spat it out or tossed it on the floor but whatever he did Judas participates, even without intending to, in the fractured eucharist, the messed up holy communion, the sacrament of life that is made possible by the death that Judas instigates in this betrayal.  Jesus is eating at the table spread in the presence of his enemies, and Judas is the enemy eating at the table spread by the host who loves his own to the end.

Here is the hope, glimmering, as darkness surrounds the shining light. Her is the foretaste of the table where Jesus’ friends, generations and generations later, will know his presence and abide in him and he in them. Here is hope in the disciple whom Jesus loves, who stands for us, faithful friend of Jesus, who plays his role, asking on behalf of the others, all the time close on Jesus’ bosom.

Even this deepest, darkest night is held in God’s love, in the light of Christ, in the divine desire, that will unfold in the days to come.

And it was night, deep dark.

“The light shines in the darkness, and darkness has not overcome it.”

Amen.

“They said it was thunder” – The Very Reverend Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Dean Emerita of the Seminary of the Southwest

“The Word become Flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son full of grace and truth.”

You know God is present when God’s glory appears – blazing on the mountain, shining in the desert, at the altar, feeding, providing, leading. Jesus, Divine Wisdom, coming from her home above to call people to the way of life.

In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus’ “hour” is shorthand for the whole plan of divine salvation, which is the revelation of God’s glory.

As the descendants of the beloved disciple remember the words of Jesus, and the Spirit speaks Jesus’ voice through their own prayer and prophecy, their understanding of Christ opens wider and wider. Jesus’ parables of the kingdom – about shepherd who seek lost sheep and lamps that get hidden under a bushel – become revelatory speech about the identity of Jesus himself:

“I am the good shepherd. I am the light of the world.”

The enormity of Jesus’ death requires many, many images to help those with faith to grasp it, to hold it in the mind, to know it within the heart.

Here, Jesus states a botanical fact, and makes it poetry.

Perhaps its origins are in the wise parables of Jesus about the seed scattered on the path or the seed growing secretly or the tiny mustard seed that makes a bush for the birds of the air.

Or from Paul — What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.

Jesus says:

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Jesus offers here another key to unlock the door. One more clue to the riddle of himself.

One ordinary thing to explain necessity and inevitability.

You know that paper packet of morning glory seeds, that you bought on a hopeful whim at the hardware store, that is still sitting on the shelf in your shed?

It must be torn open—  and the seeds sown in the dirt, covered up with soil, and watered, and tended, if you ever want to see the vines covered heavy with brilliant blue blooms.

Falling, descending, rising, growing, ascending, visiting, departing, down and up, up and down… here is another image for this radical act.

No farmer here, scattering seed by the handful, but one grain, a lone one, all by itself. And it will stay alone, single… ungiving, withholding, isolated, lifeless….

…. unless, unless, it falls, comes down, unto the earth, and dies.

If it dies, goes the parable from the lips of John’s Jesus, it bears much fruit, it yields bushels of berries, heaps of grapes, abundant produce, more than enough everyone.

From transformed parable to another tradition remembered by John.

“Now my soul is troubled”  —  agitated, mixed up, confused, apprehensive, stirred up like troubled waters.

Here is a trace of a treasured gospel tradition, passed down among earliest writers.

The most gut-wrenching moment in the passion accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke is Jesus’ agony at the place called Gethsemane. The kiss of Judas and Jesus’ arrest are imminent. With his inner circle, Peter, James, and John, Jesus asks them to wait while he prays.

The gospel of Mark describes Jesus as “distressed, agitated, deeply grieved” He prays “let this hour pass, please… remove this cup.”

Readers of these gospels and those who hear them in Holy Week, are swept up in the crisis of Jesus’ doubt and fear and spiritual struggle.

Jesus’ emotions and his prayers stir up and mirror our own horror as the clangor of swords and clubs, muffled at a distance, comes nearer.

We relate to Peter, James, and John who, overcome – with fatigue, with desire to escape, give in to the weakness of their flesh and sleep.

John’s community remembered this tradition. But we won’t hear it in John’s gospel. They knew God had answered Jesus’ prayer. They asked: “What did God say?”

What Mark leaves dark, raw, wretched, John transmutes into divine revelation, the voice from heaven, loud and clear.

“Now my soul is troubled…. what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour.’?”

But immediately he is without doubt.

“It is for this reason that I have come to this hour.”

Jesus asks for confirmation from the ultimate authority: “Father, Glorify your name!”

Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”

‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”

We are spared the awful scene of Jesus’ agony. We are given instead an auditory epiphany:

A voice from heaven.

This voice sounds a lot like the voice that was heard as Jesus came up out of the waters of the Jordan and opened his eyes to the sky on the day of his baptism, “You are my Son.”

Or the voice that resounded on the rocky mountain when Jesus’ face changed and his clothing dazzled white, Moses and Elijah materialized on his right and his left.

“This is my Son.”

For the gospel of John, this booming, deep, rumbling voice, that pronounces, in Johannine language, how Jesus’ death is to be understood, is a climactic word.

It is baptism and transfiguration and passion prediction all wrapped into one.

It’s about glory. The reality and presence and power of God.

God showed Jesus’ glory at the wedding when he made wine from water.

God showed Jesus’ glory when he made the man to see who was born without sight.

God showed his glory when he called his dead friend out of the tomb.

And again, one last time, through this grain falling to the earth… he will glorify it for good.

Words from God from heaven, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are meant to be messages, sent, and messages received.

But here in John, even God’s voice from heaven is not clear enough. God’s revelation is mistaken, misunderstood by the crowd.

They see it on the surface. They take it literally and leave it at that.

“They said it was thunder.” Thunder.

It was deep, it crackled and resounded over the face of the deep. It was charged with electricity, it heralded a storm.

Others said an angel had spoken.

Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.

Angels – at home in heaven and traveling to earth as messengers.

Ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.

They were wrong of course.

And they were right.

The voice of the LORD is over the waters;
The God of glory thunders;
The LORD is over many waters.
The voice of the LORD is powerful;
The voice of the LORD is full of majesty. The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars,
Yes, the LORD splinters the cedars of Lebanon.

Listen, listen to the thunder of his voice and the rumbling that comes from his mouth.

In John’s gospel, there is no agony at Gethsemane, no prolonged troubling for Jesus.

We hear God’s answer.

And there is no falling asleep under the thunder.

On this Tuesday of Holy Week, we are hearing God speaking,

We are awaiting Jesus’ glorification.

Hoping for the judgment of the world.

Asking how Jesus might be lifted up from the earth.

Walking while we have the light.

And very soon the light will go out.

Amen.

“Fragrance fills the house” – The Very Reverend Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Dean Emerita of the Seminary of the Southwest

“The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

There is no one like a sister, no one like a brother, you’ve all grown up together.

I remember the day each of my siblings came home to our house, carried in by our Dad.

My second sister moved into a crib in the room I shared with my first sister.

When our brother was born, he slept in a nook carved off from the room where my parents slept.

We snuggled, we roughhoused, we taunted and teased and tussled.

We shared a lot of skin.

We shared – or tried to share our parents.

We didn’t need each other for care the way we needed our mother and our father, but were we to be separated by illness, or ultimately by death, the loss would feel unsurvivable.

In John’s gospel there are four people who are described as being loved by Jesus – one is the anonymous beloved disciple, from whose memory the gospel derives.

The others are the sisters, Mary and Martha, and their brother, Lazarus.

In this supper with the siblings of Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and (their honorary brother, Jesus) we bring the spectacular, climactic sign of the raising of Lazarus down to a human scale.

After the sound and fury of Palm Sunday on the Monday of Holy Week, the long goodbye begins with what the gospel of John knows as Jesus’ “hour.”

In this hour we turn the questions over and over and over again.

What kind of king is this? How will he be enthroned?

How will we bear the grief that is coming?

Where is God?

Each of  the gospels recounts a time when a woman anoints the body of Jesus. Some criticize her, while others understand. All these stories echo in my ears when I read this one, but I care most today about this one here in its place in John chapter 12.

The evangelist of the Fourth Gospel cared that the woman who recognized Jesus before his passion be remembered not only with a name, but with an important name, a significant name amont the original core family of the friends of Jesus. Unlike in the other accounts, Mary’s not a stranger or an outsider or an uninvited intruder at the party.  She and Martha and Lazarus are giving the party.

These are the siblings, Jesus’ family, his miniature community. They have been ravaged by the illness and death of the brother with whom they shared childhood and parents and history. Whose skin they knew as well as their own.

They are gathered in joyous reunion with their brother and with their friend, Jesus, who called him into life.

These are not Luke’s rivalrous sisters. But their ministries complement each other. Martha had confessed faith in Jesus, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” She’s the Peter of this gospel, the Rock, the representative of the faith of the Johannine community. She took the larger role in the scene before. It’s right that she should be serving, a deacon at the saved-from-death, eucharistic table.

Mary, her sister, is the protagonist here, doing in action what her sister confessed with words.

“Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped his feet with her hair.”

Her gesture is rich with meaning, full of emotion, open to multiple interpretations — Over the ages, scholars, mystics, poets have played with its resonances and allusions.

Notice on what the text lingers:

The substance is precious, expensive, pure. “Nard” whispers of the garden in the Song of Songs where the lovers search for one another… it partakes of the flowers of the garden.

She touches Jesus’ body with hers, his feet. And wipes his feet with her hair. So close, so intimate, it has embarrassed readers, this stress on their bodies. The shared skin.

What she does conveys her knowledge, that her friend, a perplexing Messiah, will not be with them for long.

What she does expresses her gratitude. Her grief. Her love.

What she does anticipates what Jesus will do in the larger company of his friends, washing and wiping their feet.

She acts as Christ will act. Here at this table she is the priest.

As in the other gospel stories, her anointing is misunderstood. Here it is Judas, who personifies evile and the rejection of Jesus, who objects.

He says what she does as pointless. Meaningless because it is not a transaction. A scandal because the pound of costly oil of pure nard is a commodity, worth only what it can be sold for on the market. An illogical sacrifice with an unworthy recipient. Judas reduces her liturgical gesture to cold hard cash and what it can buy.

He does not understand what Mary understands and conveys with her touch, her hands, the precious substance in her embodied sermon.

Jesus says, no, what she did has to do with my death. She’s saved it for my burial, not literally… He says, I won’t be with you for long. “You will not always have me.”

It is the sharpest of contrasts: forever/not forever… all the time in the world/a very short time.

Supper on a human scale. Brothers and sisters who have been parted by death. Their lifegiving friend with them only a brief time longer. Able to eat together and to hold each other. Fragile bodies, vulnerable to illness, threatened by violence.

The whole paradox of Holy Week is crystalized in this one poignant penultimate supper.

And the ravishing magic of Mary’s act of anointing, is concentrated in a most memorable, olfactory memory:

“The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

It pervaded the dwelling where the family that Jesus loved lived.

All who were there at table shared in it.  Martha, Mary, Lazarus. Judas breathed it.

Only Jesus was touched with the oil, but all partook of its fragrance.

Perhaps it left through the open windows and filled the whole world.

Here is the beautiful fragrance of Easter, of eternal life.

Here is the scent of love, of lover’s gardens, the scent of home, of shared family bedrooms.

The scent shared with the fig tree and the blossoming vine.

A fragrance that anticipates the garden where Jesus will be buried.

In the days to come we will journey through darkness and encounter the ugly odor of pain.

For those with eyes to see, the truth of resurrection is always side by side with the fact of death.

We can recall the fragrance of Mary’s perfume, touching us, filling the house, spreading in the entire world.

A foretaste of the joy to come, the love to come, and the reunion that awaits us.

Amen.

“Behold your King is coming” – The Very Reverend Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Dean Emerita of the Seminary of the Southwest

“… and then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.”

Holy Week begins with a noisy, jubilant parade.

Solitary people break out of isolation when they become a crowd, when the energy of individual hopes and dreams fuses together to become a force exponentially more compelling than the sum of the parts.

I’ve felt this “crowd vibration” when on warm, fall Friday nights, the marching band and the high school football team enters the stadium. (I refer, of course, to American football.)

Some people know it at rock concerts when everyone is on their feet, dancing and singing every lyric along with the band. You are swept up in emotion that transcends you. The founder of Sociology called it “collective effervescence.” Contemporary theorist, Jonathan Haidt, calls it “hive mind.”

I’ve seen the newsreels when crowds along the streets cheered the troops marching to war.

I experienced this crowd vibe in the fall of 2000, on Election Day, when after a long campaign and the voting process, one of two rival presidential candidates would be chosen.

I live in Austin, Texas, the capital of the state, where one of the candidates was the Governor.

All day long people confided, gossiped, speculated, anticipating a final win for their candidate, and there were victory parties being set up all over the city, the sense of anticipation was so thick, you could hardly breathe.

It was as though a balloon was filled to the breaking point, (on both sides) hearts were brimming with anticipated joy.

When we woke the next morning to learn the outcome, an eerie quiet hung over the city. There had been anomalies with the balloting. No victor would be announced today. The outcome was delayed.

It was like the whole city deflated like that giant balloon,

all that collective effervescence had no place to go;

no one could feel either the joy or the disappointment they had been building up to; no one knew what to feel.

It was in that “day after” that I realized how high we had all been.

A high like this infected the crowd that went out to meet Jesus.

They waved branches of palm torn from the trees, and shouting Hosanna, Save Us! Save Us! Save Us!

They were filled with that collective anticipation of a king, their king, who was coming in the name of the Lord, entering the city of Jerusalem, riding on a donkey.

It was a partisan parade. The king would finally deliver them.

The king would bring back the glory days. They were high as kites,

and as worshippers on this Palm Sunday, hearing this reading we too share in their buzz.

Jesus had brought a man back from the dead. His friend Lazarus had died. His family and the whole village had mourned and wailed – then they wound the hands and feet of his corpse in cloth and covered his face. They buried him in a cave and plugged it with a stone.

At his tomb Jesus’ prayed, “Father,” and then he cried,

“Lazarus Come out.” And then “Unbind him and let him go.”

The crowd was getting ready to crown this man king, the one who brought life to the dead.

The pinnacle of his popularity was the time of his most severe peril.

Now is set into motion the collision course, between Jesus and the rulers of the world.

It was their power over life and death that kept the rulers in their high places.

They were asking themselves:

Would he be calling other corpses out of their tombs?

What if the people feared death no more?

What if death were not the final end?

But the exuberant clamor of the procession of the palms collapses into the confused quiet of the passion we hear chanted today. The days after the high when the giant balloon deflates.

The last days of Jesus’ life are the center of gravity of the gospels. It is this traumatic, unexpected, this spiritual, political, personal disaster – the death of the rabbi, preacher of the kingdom of God, that the first followers of Jesus suffered.

How could they bear it?

How could they comprehend the incomprehensible?

How could they take it in, the shame and devastation?

Even when they met the risen Jesus again, alive, but wounded, flesh and not flesh, eating and reading with them, they did not understand fully.

“His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.”

It was only afterwards, as they remembered how it all unfolded,

and as they broke bread together and ate and drank in his memory,

as they read the scripture psalms and prophets,

that the scattered details began to come together,

the way God works in mysterious ways started to appear, the colored threads wove themselves into a pattern, then a picture, then a tapestry. Over time they read what had been written… they prayed and opened up to God’s enlivening spirit. They discovered words for it – “emptying,” “dying,” “exalted” or “glorified.”

They began to comprehend the incomprehensible and see how through the most horrific ugly act,… God was doing a new thing.

In Holy Week we join in this act of remembering.

We read with the evangelist of the gospel of John, that germinated in the memories of the disciple whom Jesus loved, and bloomed into the extraordinary theology and poetry.

I call it the long goodbye, because it is long, literally, in the gospel of John.

And it is long, because it takes multiple lifetimes to comprehend, to apprehend the glory.

In Holy Week the church relives these most sacred days, together, in ritual, with music, objects, palm branches, fragrant oil, water, bread, wood. Not an hour on Sunday but stretched out across a week of days, attending to each incident, every word, of each day that preceded Jesus’ execution.

When we do this, we enter into living remembering, present remembering. We bring into the present the past, and in it we experience the struggle to understand, the wrestling with evil, coping with what should not happen but does happen. Like the disciples we exercise “sacramental imagination.”

Palm Sunday sets up questions for the week ahead:

Will we be able to endure this parting from our beloved teacher?

Of what nation, is this man the king?

Who will prevail, the “world” or the Father?

Finally, were they wrong, the jubilant people waving the branches and singing with joy, Save Us! Save Us! Save Us!?

Or were they… in some mysterious way… were they right?

Amen.

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Lent – Passion Sunday – Canon Peter Collier, Cathedral Reader

Ezekiel 37.1-14; John 11.1-45

We began our Lenten journey going with Jesus into the wilderness, where he faced the temptations that we know only too well. In various ways, as we prepare for the Easter Feast, we are encouraged to use the season of Lent to deepen our discipleship in our own mini wildernesses.

The valley we read about in our OT lesson is very much wilderness territory. And there in that wilderness the prophet sees a lot of dried out human bones. They are not the recent dead, they are very dry – they have been like that for a long time.

The question he is faced with is whether theses bones can live. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been the first thing that came into his head when he saw them, such was their state. But the question is posed for him – Is there a future here? Is there any hope in this situation? Can anything be done to bring life-giving change after so long?

What are the dry bones that we so often find ourselves looking at?

As we contemplate the world around us – there is Iran; Gaza; Sudan; Ukraine; to name some of the places we hear about almost daily.

Or as we contemplate our own society here in the UK – we look at increasing poverty; family breakdown; and growing mental health issues.

Or as we contemplate our own lives – many of us are aware of our own ageing bodies; our fear of being able to make ends meet, and our anxieties about what lies ahead for our children and their children.

The question that is posed for us this morning is however dry these various bones may be, however long they’ve been like that – is there any possibility of change and any hope of new life?

The natural answer is the one that the prophet gave – “God only knows”.

And God responds to Ezekiel telling him he should speak to the problem. He isn’t to do any of things we are tempted to do when facing intractable problems, such as carry out some research, devise a plan, attempt to engineer a solution. He is just told to prophesy. He is to announce God’s promise. So he speaks God’s promise into the silence and something extraordinary happens – there is a rattling sound and the bones come together and form skeletons, and then he sees sinews and flesh and skin appear, and there are now bodies in front of him, but they are not alive, they are still dead.

And once again he is told to speak, to prophesy. This time he is to address the winds and to call upon the winds to breathe life into these bodies. And so he does that and that vast army of bodies comes to life.

The combination of word and spirit that had brought about life at the very beginning of all things, has again brought about new life where there was not even any hint of hope.

So, now come with me to Bethany and to another scene of death. Here the death is more recent. We face not dry bones but a decomposing body that has begun to smell. Lazarus is dead. He and his sisters Martha and Mary were friends of Jesus, and Jesus has come to visit the grieving sisters. And the response of each of them is “if only you had been here”. And how often do we respond to the anxieties, fears and problems we face in exactly that way? If only …. If only this or that had happened; if only I had done something a little bit different; if only they had kept their noses out … if only …

We know that when Jesus initially heard that Lazarus was ill he hadn’t dropped what he was doing and gone immediately to Bethany. But when he does arrive he finds the sisters in deep distress. The impact of their brother’s death has overwhelmed them.

And we read that Jesus enters into their pain and grief and shares it to the extent that he is greatly disturbed in his spirit and groans, and he is deeply moved. Deep, deep within himself he is profoundly affected to the extent that he himself begins to weep. Why? Why does he behave like this when he knows he is going to bring him back to life? This is not some affected grief but a genuine deep down visceral pain in the heart of God. Sin and death have impacted this world to its great hurt, but even more to God’s hurting heart. And that effect of sin and death cannot be denied, although it is to be overcome.

And so Jesus weeps. And nothing has changed in that respect. He continues to suffer this world’s pain. To know deep within himself the effect of sin and death.

This chapter is the turning point of John’s gospel. This is the last of the signs showing us what God is like, and what God is about. And in chapter 12 we move into the last week of Jesus’ life and his own death and resurrection.

And this last sign is to prepare us for all that will follow as he enters into suffering, abuse and death, and to prepare us for his resurrection which we will celebrate on Easter day.

When Jesus tells Martha that her brother will rise again, she responds with what she has been brought up to believe – “yes I know he will rise at the last day”. But Jesus’ response is to tell her “I am the resurrection and the life”. He is telling her that that new life is already here and is to be found in him. And that new life he can and will impart to her brother, and to all who believe in him.

And though like Lazarus, he will die and rise, unlike Lazarus who would die again, Jesus will rise to a life that changes everything. By his dying and rising he will have overcome death and all that goes with it once and for all. So he tells Martha that those who believe in him will never die. His rising will be a final and definitive act.

Unlike the other signs in John’s gospel where the event happens, and is followed by Jesus’ explanation, on this occasion we have the explanation first, and then the miracle where he calls upon Lazarus to come out and out he comes.

So as we face the last few days leading us to Easter, what are we facing in our lives? Are we looking at dried up bones with no hope that anything can be done to produce a positive outcome? Or are we facing some deeply distressing personal grief?

The message of Lent is that God knows all about it. God knows the hopelessness of our situation. God gets our brokenness and distress because he shares in it, and so God weeps at it all still. But then God says there is hope because in me is new life, a new type of life, a life that cannot be overcome and that will never die.

But there’s a post script. When Lazarus came out of his tomb, he was still bound with strips of cloth and his face was still wrapped in a cloth. So Jesus tells those who are there that they are to unbind him so that he can go on his way and enjoy his new life.

And there is a message for us that though we have God’s new life within us, we need to help each other to experience that life to the full. We need to unbind one another. We need to share our lives and build each other up in our faith. As we learn together what God’s word says and what his promises are and above all as we express to each other that unconditional love that God has poured into our hearts, so we will unbind one another.

In the week ahead you may want to reflect and recall times in your own life when you have been aware of God bringing you into fresh a experience of his life but you have needed others to help you to begin to work it out. And you may think of others even now who you might draw alongside and help discover more of God’s love.

Amen.

Sermon for Ash Wednesday – The Very Reverend Richard Sewell, Dean of St George’s College, Jerusalem

The season of Lent is an invitation to contemplation. It is an opportunity to strip away some of the clutter of our lives in which, all too often, we suffer from an excess of everything. There can be so much crowding into our consciousness, vying for our attention, competing for our time. Depending on one’s stage of life the elements that cause the clutter will vary. It can be the demands of work which can end up spilling over into many parts of life and sometimes knows no limitations. If one has a young family, the needs of the children often dictate almost anything and everything that we do. Time to oneself for stillness and quiet can be difficult to find. Even for retired people, it’s all too easy to live a rushed life where we pack our days full of activity and time to read, pray and contemplate can be hard to find. Whatever stage of life, the relentless news cycle of distressing events pursues us, our phones bombard us with notifications of issues important and often trivial, social media draws us into controversies and celebrity lives and we are tempted to overshare our lives with friends and strangers alike. Or is it just me?

It is possible to receive the season of Lent as a gift and not simply as another guilt-inducing demand upon our time. The gift of Lent could be to take the opportunity to find a different pattern of day-to-day life. Lent is a 46 day period of time which invites us to identify with Jesus’s isolated sojourn in the desert after his baptism before he launched into his public ministry. The gospels tell us it was a period of contemplation for Jesus and we focus most particularly on the ways in which he was tempted by Satan. It’s an incredibly powerful story which can be both frightening and enthralling for us and which opens a door for us to step back from the busyness of life to refocus on the heart of faith: what does Christ call us to be and how can we live faithfully?

Jesus’s forty days of isolation took place in the desert of the Jordan valley and there is something of Lent which is an invitation into a desert of our own imagining. Ash Wednesday, the doorway into Lent, is a stark confrontation with our humanity which is a challenging but useful way to begin that journey into a desert place. I consider myself very fortunate to live close to the Jerusalem wilderness (el Bariyah). In just 20 minutes from my home in occupied East Jerusalem I can be in the midst of that desert, unable to see a single living soul or dwelling. I have come to love this place and I have often travelled there, even solo, to enter into that extraordinary wilderness. At St George’s College, which is the Anglican Centre for pilgrimage in the Holy Land, we always take our pilgrims into this desert too. In a land of many breathtaking sights, this is one of most impressive. And we don’t take people there just so that they get a glimpse and to say they have seen the desert. We always read the passage of Jesus’s temptations in the desert and then give people the chance to find some time alone for their own prayers and thoughts. We want them to have an experience of the desert, to dwelling it even if only briefly. When one does, it leaves a powerful impression on most people.

Tragically, time in the desert near to Jerusalem isn’t as easy to find as it once was. Since the war began, Israel’s military forces have restricted access to these areas. There are illegal settlements throughout that part of the Occupied West Bank, and in order to protect those settlements, Israel has made the movement of visitors, be they pilgrims, walkers and also more significantly the movement of Palestinians who live there, far more difficult. Even in the desert, a place of such awesome beauty and a location of the apparent absence of the infrastructure of humanity, the offence of oppression and apartheid practices cannot be escaped.

Despite all of that and perhaps also, in the light of it all, to take time to contemplate and perhaps especially on Ash Wednesday, to repent of the things which are harmful to ourselves, to others and to our relationship with God. If we do not create space to reflect and to process our lives and our relationships we may find that we become driven by our own selfish preoccupations rather than by the divine call to walk in the way of Jesus Christ.

Thomas Merton, the 20^th century monk, knew how to create desert space without necessarily being in the desert and he said: ‘The contemplative life must provide a place of liberty, of silence, in which possibilities are allowed to surface. New choices, beyond routine choice, are allowed to surface.’ So perhaps here we see the great value of retreating from the frontline of our own life: to see who we are before God our creator and to understand better the choices we can make so that we can be more faithful and more fully human. On Ash Wednesday, marked with ash in the sign of the cross we are reminded that ‘you are but dust and to dust you shall return’. However, through the entirety of the season of Lent we have the opportunity to learn the truth of St Augustine’s famous phrase that, ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive’. We can do this through stepping back, taking time out, allowing space for contemplation in order to hear again the power of the call of Christ to each one of us to, ‘take up your cross and follow me’.

It would be wonderful if it were possible to experience the truth of all of this regardless of the context in which we exist. But as humans it is hard and often impossible to detach ourselves from our wider situation. Palestinian Christians enter into the holy season of Lent with a deep sense of fear that their lives as individuals and as a community are becoming more threatened and increasingly damaged as each year passes. Under these conditions in which a cruel regime is creating such devastation and suffering, most of all in Gaza, but increasingly in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, to be ‘a human being fully alive’ becomes less and less possible. This is the struggle in which we are engaged: to lift the shackles of oppression. It is a spiritual battle but it is a political one too. I believe that as humans we are more fully alive when we make wider connections  of shared humanity beyond our immediate circle of concern.

When Jesus was driven into the desert to face down the demons of temptation, he did not do it for the sake of his own enlightenment but in order to equip him to fulfil his calling for the sake of humanity. Likewise, our time in Lent ought not to be only a journey of self-discovery but also to attune our ear further, wider, deeper: to strengthen the bonds of humanity reaffirming the truth revealed to us in Jesus Christ – we are all children of God, united in our common humanity.

Christians here in the UK have a role to play and it is to stand in solidarity with the suffering Palestinians and to exert effort to pursue peace and reconciliation for all people. So, as you journey from Ash Wednesday through Lent towards the liberation and joy of Easter, please remember, those who suffer, not only in Palestine and Israel but in many other places in our fragile and damaged world: those who are literally under fire and in fear of their lives. In the stillness of whatever desert or wilderness place you can discover here, please attune your ear to the cry for justice which is too easily drowned out by the voices of those who have a vested interest in silencing that voice. As Thomas Merton also said, ‘Contemplation is the spring and action is the stream.’ So, let us find that spring of life-giving water in our desert.

Amen.