I can’t really post the last week’s three Holy Week homilies once Easter comes, so I’ll smoosh them together in a last-minute Lenten homiletical triple-header.
I append (in the “extended” window) homilies from the Palm Sunday service for Northwestern University’s Canterbury House (the Episcopal chaplaincy at NU), a homily preached at Seabury on Monday in Holy Week, and a “meditation” at the Fourteenth Station of the Cross from Friday’s “Way of the Cross” service.
If you don’t read them tonight, I suppose you shouldn’t read them till Ash Wednesday next year. Hmmmm. . . .
When we teach our seminarians and confirmation classes that there are 40 days to Lent, often someone will get all mathematical on us and point out that Ash Wednesday is six-and-a-half weeks before Easter, so where’s the forty? What’s with the extra days?
I have heard two answers to this question. The first is that Holy Week is itself not really part of Lent, that Lent comprises only the period up to Palm Sunday: hence forty days from Ash Wednesday to Palm Sunday, and the rest is Holy Week. The other answer says that Sundays don’t count as part of Lent, since every Sunday is a feast day to the Lord. We call them “Sundays in Lent,” not “Sundays of Lent,” because they subsist as islands of joy and celebration in the midst of lakes of penitence and fasting.
If that be true, if today is a feast of the Lord, it must be the weirdest, most haunted day of joy in the liturgical calendar. We gather this evening in the full awareness of what is coming, of the searing desolation to which we are about to send our Savior. We take part in the readings, we sing “Hosanna!”, we wish one another the peace of the Lord, as though we were not about to betray him, to desert him, to deny him, to crucify him. If this be a feast, it is a feast with a double exposure, wherein we look ahead through the superficial Sunday-ness of our worship this evening to the discomfiting bleakness of Good Friday.
In that double exposure, the crowds who cheer and praise Jesus are ancient pilgrims who have come to Jerusalem to celebrate the greatest feast day of the holy year — and they are we, who have come for this anticipatory feast. In that double exposure, the crowds hail Jesus as their King, as their Deliverer, as the one who was to redeem Israel — and they, we, demand the Roman punishment appropriate for a rebellious anarchist, someone who sets himself up as a rival to Caesar. In that double exposure, Jesus rides into Jerusalem in victory, in a triumph for which we have set him up — and he rides to Jerusalem to experience the cruelest, loneliest, most painful defeat that ancient humanity could devise.
What holds those two images together in that double exposure is God’s power of imagination. We get a glimpse of that imagination in our mixed feelings about celebrating the beginning of Holy Week as though this were an unambiguous feast. That imagination catches us up into the resonances, the harmonies, the patterns and coincidences and rhymes, and then that providential imagination surpasses our capacity to comprehend, spiraling outward in a self-giving compassion that extends beyond all time, in a grace that superabounds for reconciliation and healing, in a love that outlasts resentment and suspicion, in a life that will not die. God’s imagination of us and of what we can be not only conceives of a humanity at peace, in concord, with joy and gratitude and true-heartedness — God’s imagination makes it so, in a scintillating spontaneous reconfiguration of all our notions of what has to be, of what people will always do, of the way it goes.
Paul, I think, names this divine imagination of our best-ness, “the mind of Christ.” We do not possess or attain the mind of Christ, as though our efforts justify any authority we might exercise for or against particular causes; the mind of Christ retreats from our striving, it eludes our power. As Paul points out, Jesus not only had the capacity to exercise God-like power, his innocence and charity would have ensured that his power was used positively, for the benefit of all. Yet although Christ was found in the form of God, he did not count equality with God as something to cling to; rather, he yielded, accepting a slave’s life and a slave’s punishing death, so that by patience and compassion he might embody a humanness that sets us free in a way that no exercise of divine mastery ever would. When we lay claim to the mind of Christ, that imagination withdraws from us; when we relinquish our determination to attain, to strive, then the mind of Christ infuses our hearts with the Spirit of love by which our gestures and our words be-speak God’s imagination.
So in the light of the love that holds together ancient Jerusalem and contemporary Evanston, Fallujah, Madrid, Gaza, Mogadishu, Kigali, New York, Washington, in the light of the love that binds together all our destinies toward a sublime resolution, in the mind of Christ the double vision of Palm Sunday points toward just what’s missing from the recent cinematic portrayal of the passion of Jesus. Where the film shows us the blood, the abuse, the loneliness — there its very explicitness conceals from us the hope God vests in us. Maybe this Palm Sunday we will really mean it. Maybe this year we won’t put down our palms to pick up stones and whips. Maybe this year, God dares to hope, we will follow through when we acclaim Jesus as our King. Maybe we’ll realize what we’re saying, and we will celebrate indeed the enthronement of our Savior as the powerless center of God-glorious lives.
God, however, knows the double vision of Palm Sunday too. God sees past the divine hope, to our persistent falling. But sisters and brothers, what a hope! With such love God entrusts us, knowing us friable, mortal, fickle and slow — and every year, every season, God returns to us with an offer of hope, and a vision of what we may be.
Every season, every day, God invites us to see the singular love that brings our double vision into focus on the unique truth toward which we are called.
Every day, every hour God imagines us truly becoming what we promise to show forth not only with our lips, but in our lives.
Every hour, every minute, God offers us the chance to set out into the world that holds all worlds together.
Every minute, every moment, God wills that we catch the fevered faith that life prevails over death, that truth outlasts lies, that love is stronger than conflict, that at long last we come home to God’s hope for us — and our penitence be perfected in grace, and Lent be swallowed up in Easter, and every day be a joyful, blessed feast day to the Lord.
When I set up the syllabus for the New Testament I course this spring, I reserved a slot for reading a chapter from Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s landmark book, In Memory of Her. The book derives its name from our gospel reading this morning; Schüssler Fiorenza makes a rhetorical point of the poignant irony that Mark tell us about Jesus promising that “wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her” — when Mark doesn’t even give this anointing woman’s name.
The ironies don’t stop there, though. When I turned to find the chapter in Schüssler Fiorenza’s book about this woman, for the NT class to read as an introduction to feminist interpretation of the gospels, I discovered. . . that she doesn’t mention the anointing woman either, except in an allusion that connects the gospel story with the title of her book. Rather than writing a book that affirms and promulgates her memory, Schüssler Fiorenza forgets this morning’s anointing woman once she has served the purpose of providing a provocative title for the book.
I cite this circumstance not because I want to undermine the importance of Schüssler Fiorenza’s work, or to suggest that maybe she’s not as astute a critic as her reputation would suggest. Far from it! Yet we dare not forget the anonymity of the anointing woman, the way she fades out of the gospel proclamation as well as from the critical monograph dedicated to her gesture. Her namelessness, her reticence demonstrate to us some of what Jesus and Paul and the prophets and try to say straight out.
The gospel doesn’t promise us rewards for making ourselves famous or powerful. More than that, however, the gospel reminds us that the whole notion of “rewards” is antithetical to the gospel; if we’ve earned attention, if we deserve applause or authority, if we need power in order to accomplish the ends God has set before us, then we’ve fundamentally misconstrued our calling. We’ve misunderstood, because no one here gets what they deserve, and every one of us stands before God as as no more than a vessel prepared for grace, and grace alone.
Grace makes for a frustrating doctrine; it defies every deeply-ingrained expectation of justice we may cherish. Justice impels us to expect one another to do something about the troubles that afflict our neighbors, to do something about sexism or racism or incorrect theologies of sexuality — while grace reminds us that our side is not holier or more beloved than another, reminds us that even our self-conscious efforts to do the right thing inevitably fall short, as did Schüssler Fiorenza’s effort to honor our anonymous anointing sister, as do our initiatives to remedy racism, as do carefully-planned steps to make Seabury a hospitable environment for all willing colleagues to propound and refine their understanding of the gospel. We fall short, and God catches us with undeserved mercy.
And this way, the disappearing woman reveals how grace works; no saint’s day honors her, no children are named after her, no devotional societies operate under her aegis; even when the world’s leading feminist theologian points a spotlight at our sister’s prophetic recognition that Jesus was walking away from the applause of the crowds, the allegiance of his friends, even when Schüssler Fiorenza identifies her in a book’s title – she slips away before we can congratulate her.
Maybe that, then, is how we must know her, maybe that’s her name for us; maybe she is, after all, “Grace.”
About six weeks ago, a movie about a multitude of gruesome dead people debuted as the most popular film in the USA, displacing another film about a single gruesome dead person.
The obvious contrasts between these two non-identical twin movies may hide from us what they ought instead to reveal.
According to the flesh, we are zombies: shambling, restless machines of consuming, haunted by the awareness that the mouth of the tomb will open for all of us, and that the stone will seal our mortal flesh in death.
But according to the Spirit, the zombies do not have the last word. The bodies that die will live again in Christ; the stone of the tomb, once closed, will be rolled away. And as we draw near the hour of Jesus’ death, we bear in our hearts the promise that we are more than zombies condemned to eternal consuming, that what was born perishable will be raised immortal, and that we will participate with Christ in a life that abounds in giving endlessly, in sharing love joyously, in communion with one another and with God.
Posted by AKMA at April 10, 2004 10:06 PM | TrackBack