On Christ’s Passion

I was looking for a reference for a Dorothy Sayers quote and ran across this by her.  With Holy Week coming up soon, I thought I could put it here.  It’s from her essay, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged.” The full text can be found here along with an essay on Easter:  http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/sayers-greatest/sayers-greatest-00-h.html#toc01greatest

For what [the incarnation] means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worth while.

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For Palm Sunday

This poem has long been a favorite of mine.  I look forward to Palm Sunday every year when I can pull it out and read it again.

The Donkey

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

— G.K. Chesterton

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No Big Thing

Communion Meditation For April 5, 2009 – Palm Sunday

Text: Mark 11:1-11

They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway. As they untied it, some people standing there asked, “What are you doing, untying that colt?”  They answered as Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go.  – Mark 11:4-6

Bethany and Bethphage were two small villages less than two miles outside the city of Jerusalem.  From these two towns began the journey of Jesus into the city, the journey we call the Triumphal Entry and from which begins the story of our Lord’s Passion.

These communities lay on the main route from Jericho to Jerusalem and were evidently close together.  Bethany today, on the Mount of Olives, is still a viable suburb of Jerusalem.  It is regularly visited by buses full of Holy Land tourists who are there to see the supposed tomb of Lazarus and the house of Martha and Mary.  In fact, Bethany is now called el-Eizariya, a derivative of the name of Lazarus.

The Bethphage of the gospels, however, is for all practical purposes lost.  Archaeologists suspect it is the spot on the very top of the Mount of Olives where there are some obvious ruins but little else.   But no one knows for sure.  We do know that all four gospels tell the story of the Triumphal Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and all four of them say that it started up on the Mount of Olives in either or both of these two villages.

In Jesus’ day when the Romans were the mighty force they were, triumphal entries into cities – and especially Rome – were not an uncommon sight.  When a Roman army would finish yet another battle and conquer yet another city, thereby adding to the size and prestige of the empire, a parade would be organized in the general’s honor.   The victorious general would lead his army through the gates of a city, parading the captured people who would soon become Roman slaves if they were lucky, or thrown to the lions if not.  A triumphal city entry was an advertisement of the magnificence of the Empire and a warning shot across the bow of any other group 0f people that they could be next.

The New Testament never calls what Jesus did that day a “triumph.”   But it is clear from the things people were saying as they waved palm branches when he passed by: “Hosanna! … Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” and so forth that the early church considered it something like a Roman Triumph.

From the viewpoint of heaven, it was the most glorious triumphal parade the world has ever witnessed, greater than the triumphs of any emperor or general.  It was the one time that Jesus received his due, public praise for being the promised Messiah.  Regardless of what the crowds were hoping for in Jesus – and, truth be told,  they were still hoping for a political leader who would rid the Jews of the yoke of Rome – the words they expressed were appropriate.  Jesus was the “King who comes in the name of the Lord.”

But the parade didn’t last long, really.  Mark says that when Jesus was finally inside the city walls, he went to the Temple — apparently without the crowds – “he looked around at everything” and since it was late, he went back to Bethany with “the twelve.”

From the viewpoint of the world, the “Triumphal Entry” turned out to be relatively insignificant, a blip on the world’s radar screen.   It started in a small Olivet village and ended with an after-hours visit to the Temple.  It wasn’t even big enough to warrant calling out the Roman guards, all Hosannas to the contrary.  (The guards could have come, you know, as seditious as it might have looked.  That they did not is an indication that the whole precession was not very big.)

But from the viewpoint of heaven it was a glorious sight.  It wasn’t the size of the crowd or the time it took to get from Bethphage to the city gate or the lowly donkey Jesus rode or the quiet, crowdless visit to the temple that heaven used to measure its significance.   Heaven never looks at size to evaluate the worth of anything.

In the kingdom of heaven, small things matter greatly.  Small things like mustard seeds and children, the yeast in a loaf of bread and (need we be reminded?) a baby in a manger – these things are enough to change the world and turn around wayward lives.  As the Lord said to Zechariah when Zerubbabel started to rebuild the temple :  “Do not despise these small beginnings….” (4.10)  And as Jesus himself once promised, if we have been faithful over a few things, he will, someday, give us authority over many things.

We don’t normally associate the Palm Sunday Triumphal Entry with the reminder that in the kingdom bigger, noisier, and splashier are not as greatly valued as small, quiet and plain. But that is the real meaning of it, when you think about it.  What was important was that there were a few voices who shouted Hosanna.  There were a few who waved palm branches.  There was one donkey owner who let Jesus ride that day.  And there were twelve disciples who visited the quiet temple grounds with Jesus in the growing darkness of the evening.

Not many of anything.  Nothing big or splashy.  But it was the kingdom of God, the reign of Christ, in a nutshell that day.  Jesus is always happy with a few if they are also happy to see him.

If we had lived back then, would we have been among the few who waved palm branches and cried “Hosanna!”?  Would we have been willing to throw our coats on the ground in front of Jesus as our small way of giving him praise?   We cannot always wait until a larger crowd forms before we decide if Jesus is worth praising and following.  That day may never come in our lifetimes.

But if you find yourself among the few, be glad and be confident.  It’s how many things of the Kingdom appear to be in the world.

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The Day Nothing Meant Everything

On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb.  They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. – Luke 24:1-3

The women who went to the tomb of Jesus brought with them spices for anointing the dead body of Jesus.   They were ready to pay their last respects to the one they had called their lord and master.  But when they arrived they found the tomb empty.

Luke says in verse 4 that when they did not find the body of Jesus in the tomb, they were “perplexed” – or depending upon the translation, they “wondered” and/or “did not know what to think.”

It’s not hard to empathize with the women’s cognitive disconnect upon finding the tomb without the body of Jesus.  If they had not actually been present when his body had been placed there just three days before, they had it on good word that he really died.  They reasoned rightly that he ought to be still there.  But his body wasn’t there and so, perplexed, they didn’t know what to think and wondered.

Leave it to the messengers of God, two shining angels, to remind the women that Jesus himself had told them long before that he would rise from the dead.  So remembering his words, they ran back to the other disciples and told them what they had found.

What any of them found, of course, was nothing.  The tomb was as empty as it had been the previous Friday morning.  But it was the void of the vault, the clear shelf upon which his body had lain, the absolute nothing that was the story of the day and, we now know, one for the ages.  The nothing they found was more than they hoped for and everything they had been promised.

They didn’t know it right away, but once the angels explained it, it was nothing which they were happy to find.  It meant that the one they loved was not dead after all and death had finally been beaten.

How like God to make the greatest day in human history be about nothing.  Of all that God could have done to show his intentions to the world, he showed up with nothing that day – nothing that meant everything to those who loved him.

Sometimes it takes the angels of heaven to tap us on the shoulder and remind us of all that Jesus once said about life and death and where our true hope lies.  Without the reminder, we don’t always know what to think about an empty tomb.  Ah, but when they ask us rhetorically, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the light dawns and we see the emptiness of the tomb for what it is — the beginning of great new things to come.

Then they remembered his words. – Luke 24:8

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Forty Days

Communion Meditation for
March 1, 2009

Immediately the Holy Spirit compelled Jesus to go into the wilderness. He was there for forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was out among the wild animals, and angels took care of him. Mark 1:12-13

The Bible often uses the number forty when it wants to describe a long period of time. Moses spent forty days on Mt Sinai with God. Elijah walked forty days to get to Mt Horeb. God made it rain for forty days and forty nights in the days of Noah, the Hebrews wandered for forty years in the wilderness before they got to the Promised Land and Jonah gave the Ninevites forty days to repent.

So when the gospels tell us that in the early days of the earthly ministry of Jesus, he was led by the Holy Spirit to spend forty days in the desert as preparation, they meant that he spent a fairly long time out there with no other company than God.

Mark only tells us in the scantest of words that Jesus went to the desert for forty days and while he was there, he was tempted by Satan, but also cared for by the angels of heaven. We are compelled to read the other evangelists for more detail. Luke and Matthew fill us in about the particular temptations Jesus faced and his responses to each of them.

It is from this forty days of wilderness experience by Jesus that the early church created the season of Lent. The forty days of Lent is an opportunity for the Christian to increase his or her spiritual discipline. Lent, as you know, runs from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday; the forty days do not include Sundays – Sundays being mini-Easter celebrations, as it were.

Lent is also a penitential season, a time for sober reflection on and renewed commitment to one’s life with God. The solemnity of Lent leads us to the joyous celebration of Easter.

But why forty days? Why such a long time of spiritual earnestness in the quest for a more prayerful, a more Christ-like life?

Forty days sounds almost quaint to our modern ears, doesn’t it? It’s a nostalgic nod to times past when everything moved more slowly, when everyone had more free time to spend on the needs of personal growth.

It’s not that we are less concerned with our spiritual lives than our ancestors were, of course. It’s just that we are so much more effective, more efficient in everything we do anymore – including spiritual development. Forty days seems like overkill. We can go to a week-end Walk through the Bible seminar, sit in on a one-day marriage enrichment event, or attend three-hour Saturday workshops on prayer and get everything we need. Or so we think. Forty days on one thing? Who has time for that anymore?

But I think our forebears knew something which we moderns often ignore. Spiritual formation is always about more than learning new information on how to pray, how to read the scriptures, or how to get along with spouses. It’s about forming new habits to replace old ones. It’s not about learning something new, it’s about doing something new – or more accurately, becoming someone new.

What they knew and still try to teach us is that we are farther away from the image of Christ than we’d like to think we are. Our sins are more deeply ingrained and have deformed us than we like to admit. And it will take a lot longer time to change old, worldly habits into new heavenly ones than we think it ought to.

Christian discipleship is about more than trusting in the promises of God that will lead us to become happier, wealthier, better adjusted people. If you listen to television preaching, or read only popular devotional books by famous Christian authors, you will almost certainly come away with just such a definition of the Christian life – that the whole purpose of the salvation story is to help us manage our lives more effectively.

The old-timers had no such spiritual fantasies. They knew that the human problem is not about how to manage the old life, but how to crucify it and be reborn anew. For them, they knew how strong was the power of sin and knew even more how essential was the power of the Holy Spirit working over a long period of time in cooperation with our will to move any of us toward even a faint likeness of Christ.

This is, I am sure, the reason Lent is forty days long. It means it takes a long time for God to change us into the sort of people he desires and we do ourselves no favors by being impatient with either him or us.

Friedrich Nietzsche – no Christian, but a wise philosopher nonetheless – once wrote, “The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is. . . that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.”

Recognizing this, we give to God the season of lent – a period of time that really means for as long as it takes.

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St. Patrick

Ask most people who St. Patrick was and you’re likely to hear that he was an Irishman who became  the patron saint of Ireland and once chased all the snakes out of the country.   He is the patron saint of Ireland, to be sure. But he wasn’t Irish – he was British – and there isn’t any evidence that he had anything to do with snakes.

Was there a real Patrick then? we might ask.   Indeed, there was.  Patrick was born sometime about 370 to British Christian parents.  But when he was sixteen years old, he was captured by raiders and sold into slavery, taken to Ireland.  After six years of captivity, Patrick then escaped and went back home when, in time, he joined a monastery.

One night, Patrick had a dream in which he heard a voice asking him to come back to Ireland to evangelize.  “Come and walk among us once more,” pleaded the voice.  So Patrick went back to Ireland and until the day he died, he worked among the pagan tribes and brought many an Irishman to know the love of Christ.

Patrick was not highly educated, but he had a passion for Christian discipleship and learning.  He established monasteries throughout northern and eastern Ireland.

During the fourth and fifth centuries one of the great challenges to the Christian faith emerged and threatened to undo the very gospel of Christ.  That danger came to be known as Arianism, named after its original spokesman, the Alexandrian churchman, Arius.

Arius preached that the Father alone was God and  Jesus, the Son, was merely a creature.  The old doctrine of the Trinity – that Father, Son and Spirit are three ways of God’s true being – was rejected by Arius. The problem with Ariansim, Patrick and others insisted, was that if the Son is not God, then it wasn’t God who died on the cross for our sins; it was just another man.  If God did not die for our sins, then we are still in our sins and have no hope of salvation.

Church leaders like Patrick resisted the teachings of Arius and worked tirelessly to teach the Trinitarian nature of God.  This is how the three-leaf clover (the shamrock) came to be associated with St. Patrick.  Legend tells us that Patrick often used the three-leafed little plant to teach about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit:  three leaves but one plant.  By the time of his death on March 17 sometime between 461 and 490 A.D., Ireland was almost entirely Christian.

Thomas Cahill, the author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, wrote:  “Only this former slave had the right instincts to impart to the Irish a New Story, one that made sense of all their old stories and brought them a peace they had never known before.”  Because of Patrick, Cahill said, the once warring Irish tribesmen “lay down the swords of battle, flung away the knives of sacrifice, and cast away the chains of slavery.”

No one would have blamed Patrick if he had never gone back to Ireland after he escaped from his own slavery.  But Patrick did go back and the church is greater for it.  — KDS

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