TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: Sovereign God, you turn your greatness into goodness for all the peoples on earth. Shape us into willing servants of your kingdom, and make us desire always and only your will, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.” Hebrews 5:7.
This is perhaps an allusion to Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane that the imminent “cup” of suffering and death might pass him by. Jesus had no death wish. He wanted desperately to live. His prayer to God for salvation from death was sincere. It was also heard by God-but not answered affirmatively. Jesus died prematurely, horribly, alone and, according to the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, in conformance with God’s will.
Theologians have struggled for millennia at coming to grips with this affirmation that Jesus’ death on the cross was both necessary and consistent with God’s will. What sort of parents would murder their children and what noble end could possibly justify such perverse means? The explanation offered by substitutionary atonement theology, namely, that Jesus’ death was necessary to satisfy the requirement for just punishment of sin demanded by a righteous God, works well on a very high level of abstraction. The trouble is that human life and experience occurs in the messy concrete. We know from our own experience that it is possible to forgive wrongdoing without extracting repayment. It happens every day within our marriages, within our families and within our communities. If Mom could forgive me for breaking a lamp in my childish roughhousing that was given to her by Grandma and that had been in the family for years, regardless of my inability ever to replace such a treasure, is it too much to expect the same from a supposedly merciful God?
There is, I think, a better way of understanding the necessity of Jesus’ suffering and death. Did God will that Jesus die? In the absolute sense, yes. “The Word became flesh,” John the Evangelist tells us. John 1:14. Unless the body Jesus wore in “the days of his flesh” was merely a clever disguise and never actually part and parcel of God’s Son, then Jesus was, as our creeds confess, truly human. To be truly human is to be mortal. When God became flesh, when God determined to be “God with us,” God assumed all that goes with being human, including death. Jesus was therefore no more immune from death than any the rest of us.
The deeper inquiry takes us to the heart of the gospels. Given that Jesus would necessarily endure death, was it necessary that he die so cruelly. Again, the answer is an unqualified “yes.” The reason lies hidden in the mystery of the Incarnation. I think the Eastern Church does a better job of articulating this mystery, reminding us that the Word’s becoming flesh was not an afterthought or an unpleasant necessity forced upon God in order to straighten out a world that had gone off the rails. The Incarnation was God’s intent from the beginning, before the world was formed, before humanity took its first breath, before Adam and Eve succumbed to sin. From the very beginning it was God’s will to become flesh, an act that God undertook not because of the fall into sin, but in spite of it. God is determined to become human, human as humans were meant to be, living joyfully, thankfully and generously under the just and gentle reign of God, even if this was to be done in the midst of a world determined to reject that reign. The inevitable consequence of being truly human in an inhumane world is suffering and the cross. The cross is the price God was willing to pay in order to stick with God’s eternal intent to be Immanuel, “God with us.”
The reality is that love hurts. Everyone who has ever raised a child, lost a spouse, or been betrayed by a friend knows that people who dare to love, risk getting hurt. Love sometimes calls upon us to make sacrifices, give up on opportunities or close the door on lifelong ambitions to care for the people near and dear to us. The love that is God does not shy away from such sacrifices, even when they threaten to drain the life out of us. Because this love is the very essence of God, the glue that binds the Trinity as one, the Word in which, as Saint Paul tells us, “all things hold together,”( Colossians 1:17), it is eternal. Living in love is to partake in eternal life. Jesus, the embodiment of God’s love, is therefore “the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” Hebrews 5:9.
It is in light of these observations that I believe we need to consider our gospel lesson for this Sunday in which James and John seek to be at the right and left hand of Jesus in his glory. What were their motives? Were they seeking positions of power, influence and privilege? That might have been part of it. But I also believe that they might have been seeking a deeper relationship with Jesus and a more intense involvement with God’s coming reign of justice and peace. Perhaps, like so many of us who end up in the “helping professions,” they wanted “to make a difference,” to change the world for the better. I shared those motivations early on in my ministry. But I don’t necessarily believe that changing the world is our responsibility. In spite of his ministry of teaching, healing and preaching, Jesus did not change the world. God changed the world by raising Jesus from death. If there had been no Resurrection, Jesus would be remembered, if at all, as just one more starry-eyed idealist who got himself impaled on the sharp, cruel edges of reality while pursuing an impossible utopian dream.
Jesus’ resurrection, however, re-defines reality. The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, so far from being impractical for surviving in a violent, cruel and unjust world, are intensely practical if one believes, as do disciples of Jesus, that in the end, what will matter is how we have treated the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the refugee, the naked and the sick among us. Some are called to do this on a macro level in the realm of politics, community organizing and public ministry. Many more of us are called to do it with our children, chronically ill family members, neighbors in need, homebound members of our churches and neighborhoods. But the measure of one’s discipleship, if such a thing is even measurable, is the same suffering love God exercises in the flesh of Jesus.
Once again, I cannot get inside the minds of James and John. I cannot discern their motivations. But one thing I do know. That when Jesus was “glorified,” when the depth of his love was most explicitly demonstrated, those at his right and left hand were hanging on crosses, mocking him along with the rest of the crowd. No wonder Jesus said to James and John, “You do not know what you are asking.” Mark 10:38. Being at Jesus’ right or left hand is not a privilege awarded to those of extraordinary virtue, faith and courage. It is always a gift given to those most in need of Jesus’ healing touch, whether they deserve it or not. In the end, we are as close to Jesus as we are to the person nearest to us in deepest need of God’s redemptive love. We are as great as we are compassionate.
Here is a poem by Robert Duncan exploring some images that give us a glimpse of what incarnational love might look like.
Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal
This is the way it is. We see
three ages in one: the child Jesus
innocent of Jerusalem and Rome
– magically at home in joy –
that’s the year from which
our inner persistence has its force.
The second, Bergman shows us,
carries forward image after image
of anguish, of the Christ crossed
and sends up from open sores of the plague
(shown as wounds upon His corpse)
from lacerations in the course of love
(the crown of whose kingdom tears the flesh)
…There is so much suffering!
What possibly protects us
from the emptiness, the forsaken cry,
the utter dependence, the vertigo?
Why do so many come to love’s edge
only to be stranded there?
The second face of Christ, his
evil, his Other, emaciated, pain and sin.
Christ, what a contagion!
What a stink it spreads round
our age! It’s our age!
and the rage of the storm is abroad.
The malignant stupidity of statesmen rules.
The old riders thru the forests race
shouting: the wind! the wind!
Now the black horror cometh again.
And I’ll throw myself down
as the clown does in Bergman’s Seventh Seal
to cower as if asleep with his wife and child,
hid in the caravan under the storm.
Let the Angel of Wrath pass over.
Let the end come.
War, stupidity and fear are powerful.
We are only children. To bed! to bed!
To play safe!
To throw ourselves down
helplessly, into happiness,
into an age of our own, into
our own days.
There where the Pestilence roars,
where the empty riders of the horror go.
Source: The Opening of the Field, (c. 1960 by Robert Duncan; pub. by New Directions Publishing Corporation) Robert Duncan (1919–1988) was an American poet. He was born in Oakland, California and spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Duncan was heavily influenced by Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle. He is associated with many literary traditions and schools, including the Black Mountain College. Duncan, who came out as a gay man in 1941, figures prominently in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture. In 1944, he wrote the landmark essay “The Homosexual in Society.” In that essay, Duncan argued that society’s treatment of gay persons was a civil rights issue comparable to the plight of African Americans and Jews. It was published in Dwight Macdonald’s journal, politics. You can read more about Robert Duncan and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation Website.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 