Christian Community Homilies

Friday, April 18, 2014

Good Friday 2008, Many Voices Shout

Good Friday

March 21, 2008

John 19: 1-15

The Gospel reading[s around the crucifixion are ones of enormous paradox and tension. We are presented with a wrenching picture: Christ, the Creator, the Divine I AM, is reduced in mockery to the caricature of a king. They dress Him in royal purple. His crown is of thorns, his scepter a reed with which is himself is struck.

And yet ringing through the whole account are words of great truth. Some truths are spoken in malice by half-consciousness human beings. They convey an irony and truth of which the speakers are unaware. They say for instance, ‘It is necessary that one man should die for the people’. Or, ‘nothing deserving of death has been done by him.’

And through it all, Christ stands, absorbing their hatred and their blows. He even clarifies the proceedings in the beginning by speaking the great truth that ultimately justifies for them their execution: “I am the Son of God.” In speaking these words, He gives them what they need to make happen what He came to do.

The players in this great world drama all represent parts of the human being: in each of us there is a high priest who upholds tradition, the way thing are and must remain. In all of us there is also a Pontius Pilate, put in a position of discernment, who tries to do the right and just thing and fails, overwhelmed by impossible forces far beyond his own control.

And within and among all of us there stands the Christ, gently steering the whole procedure, speaking the great truths of His eternal existence, patiently bearing our own denials of Him and our weaknesses. He has placed Himself at our feet, guiding our steps, cleansing our way, turning our failures into positive strength. He is sovereign, a king over the world of truth. “For this I was born,” he said, “and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” Jn 18:37 The truth is: that He embodies love.

We are subject to the shouting of many voices in our lives, some of them from within our own souls. Some of these voices would enslave, deny, and destroy us. But we can also hear the voice of truth amid the noise. Yet facing and doing what truth reveals can require great courage. For the greatest aim of a human life is to love God back with all that we have.

Thomas Aquinas wrote,

I said to God, “Let me love you.

And He replied, “Which part?”

“All of you, all of you”, I said.

“Dear,” God spoke ….”It is a feat way

beyond your courage and strength.

You would run from me

if I removed my

mask.”

I said to God again,

“Beloved I need to love you—every aspect, every pore.”

And this time, God said,

“There is a hideous blemish on my body,

though it is such an infinitesimal part of my Being—

could you kiss that if it were revealed?”

“I will try, Lord, I will try.”

And then God said,

“That blemish is all the hatred and

cruelty in this

world.”[1]

God’s love is so great that it can embrace hatred and cruelty. We are in the process of growing a love that capable. Sometimes the truth is spoken through the mouths of even our enemies. Again, Thomas Aquinas:

every truth, without exception—no matter

who makes it—is from God.[2]

Christ’ whole life and death summed up the greatest aim of the human soul—to love God with all we have, and to love others as ourselves. In truth, they are the same. For, just as He is in us, Christ is in everyone else as well, in that which is patient and long-suffering, forgiving.

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[1] Thomas Aquinas, “Could You Embrace That? in Love Poems from God, Daniel Ladinsky, p. 136.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, “On Behalf of Love”, Love Poems from God, Daniel Ladinsky,, p. 123.

Good Friday 2009, Living Breath

Good Friday Evening

April 10, 2009

Living creatures breathe. This breathing is a gesture of expansion and contraction. It started with the sea—waves move in and out; tides flow, racing up the shore, and ebb, pulling away. A plants grows, expands, blossoms, then its entire life contracts into the seed. Animals breathe in and out.

In our own lives we too experience these two basic gestures over time—from moment to moment in our own breathing; in the tides of our blood stream; in the growing and declining of the different phases of our lives; and ultimately in the waxing and waning of life itself.

Our real selves are gathered from the far reaches of the cosmos. We have breathed our actual, real selves into our bodies; we have compressed ourselves into the body until we feel ourselves as occupying a center point. Along with this compression of ourselves we suffer pain. With every in-breath we draw into our bodies just a bit; with every exhale we expand a bit. Every night in sleep our soul-spirits stream out to the stars; at daybreak they rush back into the body. One day we will finally breathe our soul-spirits out again fully, so that they can expand to fill God’s heaven.

Christ started out as the greatest, most expanded being possible. He, the Logos, the Great Word that spoke all creation into existence, gradually contracted himself to become human-sized. This extreme form of compression, this final in-breathing of His spirit was completed on the last day of Jesus’ life. And such an extreme compression, down into the marrow of the bones, was itself painful in the extreme. Good Friday afternoon becomes that still point, that moment of quiet between in- breath and out-breath. His heart’s blood pours into the earth. With His last words, “Father, into your hands I commend My Spirit”— He exhales, expires, carrying His consciousness toward the Father.

How we human beings think about this gesture of expansion and contraction

makes a great deal of difference. Our intellect sees these gestures of expansion and contraction as polarities, contrasts. But we must add to the two a third element—that of time; in, out, and in again. It is a process, one that is cyclic and continually starts afresh.

The remnant of the pain and suffering we see hanging on the cross after His death, the body so lovingly taken down by his friends and wrapped in linen and spices, this remnant hides another invisible process taking place on an unseen level. For, in expiring, Christ begins the exhalation of his Spirit’s life back out into the cosmos. His heart’s love begins to expand further, sending His life and love outward toward all humanity, to the whole earth. He begins his journey of toward resurrection and ascension,. It was a new beginning, not only for him, but also for us; for He dies without ending. He ascends while maintaining his rootedness in the earth. We are all carried in His great heart; our souls are kept alive in His unceasing life. The earth, in its slow dance through the seasons, breathing between summer and winter, became His body.

We have nothing to fear from death, for since Christ, death is permeated with life.

The poet comments:

And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence

shall you indeed sing.

And when you have reached the mountain top,

then you shall begin to climb.

And when the earth shall claim your limbs,

then shall you truly dance.[1]

[1] Kahlil Gibran, “Of Death” in The Prophet

Good Friday 2010, God's Human Face

Holy Week, Good Friday

John 19: 1-15

Then Pilate took Jesus and had him scourged. The soldiers braided a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and threw a purple cloak around him, walked up to him and said, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and struck him in the face.

And again Pilate went out to them and said, “Behold, thus I bring him out to you, so that you may know that I find no guilt in him.

And Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple cloak. And Pilate said to them, “Behold, the man!” [Behold, this is Man!]

When the chief priests and the Temple attendants saw him, they shouted, “Crucify him, crucify him!”

Then Pilate said, “Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no guilt in him.”

Then the Jewish leaders replied, “We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he has made himself a Son of God.”

When Pilate heard these words, he was even more alarmed, and again he went into he courthouse and said to Jesus, “From where have you received your mission?” But Jesus gave him no answer.

Then Pilate said to him, “You will not speak with me? Do you not know that I have the power to release you and also to crucify you?”

Jesus answered, “You would not have power over me unless it had been given to you on high. Therefore the greater burden of destiny falls upon him who handed me over to you.”

From then on, Pilate tried to set him free. But the people shouted, “If you release him, you are no longer a friend of Caesar, for everyone who makes himself a king is against Caesar.”

When he heard these words, Pilate led Jesus out, and sat down on the judgment seat in the place called the Pavement, in Hebrew Gabbatha. I was the day of the preparation of the Passover Festival, about midday. And he said to the people, “Behold, this is your King.” But they shouted, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!”

Pilate asked them, “Shall I crucify your King?”

And the chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar!”

Good Friday Evening

April 2, 2010

John 19: 1-15

When we are born, the bones at the tops of our heads have not yet grown

Josephine Wall

together. They are still open. The Father’s sun, moon and stars still shine their living cosmic forces down into us through this ‘skull skylight’. They pour the living, forming forces of the cosmos into us, helping us shape the growing instrument of the body.

As we grow, the skylight closes. To quote Wordsworth:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,….

At length the Man perceives it [heaven] die away,

And fade into the light of common day.[1]

The window to heaven shuts. But all the while, we are shaping our own unique and very individual faces.

Grunewald

Christ opened a new skylight into the human constitution. At Jesus’ Baptism, “as he came up out of the water, he saw the heavens were torn open, and he saw the spirit of God descending upon him like a dove.” Mark 1:9 – 11 Jesus, the unique individual, is born anew, from above, through water and the Holy Spirit. The breadth and power of the cosmic dimension are reunited with the uniquely individual human. And thus a new human being is formed. Christ Jesus becomes the New Adam, our new ancestor. Uniting ourselves with him, the heavens will open again for us too.

Christ Jesus is also God with a human face. His disciples were so united with him in love that they began to look like him, to wear His face. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas came along for the arrest because someone who knew Him had to point out which one to take prisoner.

God, eternally divine, and eternally human, now wears a face that shows what every human being experiences on earth—from radiant joy to deepest anguish--and everything in between. The face of Christ, above all, shows deep compassion, born of an intensely intimate understanding of the human condition. There is no interior space that he has not inhabited. He danced at weddings, and experienced the joy of friendship. He also experienced the terrible and lonely suffering of torture and execution. But above all He knew the mighty joyous sense of triumph of fulfillment, of the accomplishment of overcoming for the first time the deepest tragedy that has befallen us—death itself.

Memling

Scientists studying the brain have recently discovered what are called mirror neurons, sensory centers of empathy that allow us to read faces, and to perceive what others are feeling. Through this perceptual mirroring, we can respond to others appropriately.

The face that Christ presents to us in art is often earnest. His face expresses an intent seriousness. It is as though He were silently asking: will you mirror Me? I have plumbed the depths of human experience in order to understand you, to gather you up from the depths. Will you take Me as seriously as I take you? Will you now plumb your own depths, to find Me there?

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[1] Wordsworth, "Ode On Intimations of Immortality"

Good Friday 2011, Hearts' Burning

Good Friday Evening

April 22, 2011

Many ancient mythologies tell of a bird of great beauty, with colored plumage of red and gold. It first appeared on the primeval mound that rose from the watery chaos at the first creation. It first cry, so melodious that the rising sun stops to listen—marks the beginning of time and its rhythmic division into hours, days, weeks, years. It lives on dew, killing nothing and crushing nothing it lands on.

This bird has a very long lifespan, some say 500, some say 1,000 years. As the end of its life approaches, the bird builds a pyre nest of the branches of aromatic trees, like the myrrh. It sets it afire and is consumed. After three days there arises a young bird, who gathers the ashes of the nest, which was both sepulcher and cradle, and forms them into an egg of myrrh. It takes this egg to the city of the sun and deposits it on the altar of the Sun God, thus ushering in a new era out of its own life.

During this past week, Holy Week, Christ, the great Sun Spirit, walked through his last week of his human life. On the Sunday, he rode humbly into the royal city, greeted with wild enthusiasm as the king. On Monday he confronted calculating human greed and theft as he cleansed the Temple. On Tuesday he warned of the changing of the times, and battled for the hearts and minds of those who oppose him. On Wednesday Mary Magdalene anointed him with aromatic oil in anticipation of his death. By Thursday, after pouring his life and soul into bread and wine to nourish his followers forever, he was barely able to hold onto life as the fire of his love for humanity consumed the body. He was arrested and handed over by one of his own followers. Swiftly and unjustly, He was tried in both religious and secular courts, mocked, tortured and publicly and falsely executed as a common criminal. His friends bury him wrapped in balsam spices.

After his own crossing into the realm of death, he continues His descent. He penetrates into the underworld, releasing the dead from their chains and allowing them to rise.

Christ is the Sun Bird, the creator of time. He lives on the dew of his Father’s will. Because he is also eternal, from beyond time, everything he did in his human life and death is still ongoing. His descent into the depths of existence, in life and in death, means that these are the very places we can always find him. He is here where life becomes difficult or threatening. He is here amid all the temptations. He walks with us through all our greater and lesser deaths. He is here in the midst of all the unfairness and injustices of life. He is here in the times when our very souls may seem to have died.

He is also always here in the very depths of our own being, in the deepest core of our heart, with his power to resurrect. He is in us as the firebird, the force that consumes and un-forms the old when its time is past. He answers when, in the words of the Psalmist:

Out of the depths I cry to you, LORD;

Lord, hear my voice.

Let your ears be attentive

to my cry for mercy.

….

But with you there is forgiveness,

so that we can, with reverence, serve you.

….

put your hope in the LORD,

for with the LORD is unfailing love

and with him is full redemption. (Psalm 130)

He is the phoenix force that helps us re-form ourselves anew out of the ashes.

All during Holy Week, the epistle says that the place of our heart is burning. Though we live in a cold earthly abode, there is a breath of hope that comes to us from the inside of the grave. For our hearts are burning….

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Good Friday 2012, Wrestle Death

Holy Week, Good Friday,

John 19: 1-15