4th Passiontide, Palm Sunday 2007, Brother Donkey

4^th Passiontide

Memmo

Palm Sunday

Matthew 21: 1-11

And they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage by the Mount of Olives. Then Jesus sent two disciples ahead and said to them, “Go to the village which you see before you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there and her foal with her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, tell him that the Lord needs them, and he will let you take them right away.”

This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:

‘Say to the daughter of Zion,

Behold, your king comes to you in majesty.

Gentle is He, and He rides on a donkey and on a foal of the beast of burden.’

The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. They brought the donkey and the foal, placed their garments on them, and Jesus sat on them.

           

Many out of the large crowd spread their clothes on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of them and followed Him shouted:

Hosanna to the Son of David!

Blessed is he who comes in the Name and Power of the Lord!

Hosannah in the highest! [Sing to Him in the highest heights!]

When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, “Who is he?” The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”

4^th Passiontide Sunday

Palm Sunday

April 1, 2007

Matthew 21: 1-11

This mysterious picture – Christ Jesus asks for a donkey and its foal to be brought to Him. Upon them He will ride into Jerusalem, the city of peace. Why donkeys? Why two?

Francis of Assisi famously called his body Brother Donkey. The donkeys of our bodies are the earthly means of conveyance for our souls and spirits. By nature, the donkey is stubborn and willful. For most of us, if the body decides to go somewhere, say, into illness, it is about all we can do to hang on for the ride.

Christ chooses donkeys as His means of conveyance to picture the final phase of His incarnation. He is choosing the human body as the instrument of His final battleground. His triumphal entry into Jerusalem foretells His full entry into the body of Jesus. He rides the donkey of the physical nature, both the old body, and the new immortal one he will inhabit at His resurrection. The people sense this; but their jubilation is premature. These two ‘donkeys’ are carrying Him where He wants to go – deeper into the body, into the suffering, even into the death that the body offers. Rejoicing will be appropriate days later when the body has been transformed at the Last Supper into a new form; when His suffering has borne fruit; when death has been overthrown because He has wrested human immortality from the death of matter.

Shuplyak

His body has become transformed. At the Last Supper and its iterations He wields the power to make bread and wine into His body and blood, so that He can feed us His own immortality. With His help, we too can make our sufferings fruitful. Through our connection with Him, bit by bit, we can build the new body that is not subject to death, the Christ-body that comes to life in us, through us, in our offering. 

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Good Friday 2014, The Null Point

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

April 18, 2014

John 19: 1-15

Christ is coming to the null point. In a few more hours, at the moment of His death, He will have completed his descent into the body of Jesus. He will have become fully and totally human As He is dying, He will descend into Jesus’s very bones. He will enter and take hold of the secret realm of life at the center of the bone marrow, the place where new blood, new life is generated. And He will take this powerful life-generating force with Him into the realm of death.

But meanwhile, he has allowed Himself to be made into an image, a picture of the mockery which human beings have made of humanity in their mistreatment of themselves and others. He is presented as a caricature of the worth and dignity once bestowed on human beings by the Creator. With sarcasm He has been wrapped in a cloak of royal purple; a hollow reed is the scepter; he wears a crown not of gold, but of thorns, glittering with the jewels of his own blood.

And yet shining through the wreckage is still the glimmer of the One from the beginning, the One in whose image and likeness human beings were created, the Son of God. When Pilate senses this, he is unnerved. His wife had already warned him not to have anything to do with this innocent man.

Pilate, in recognizing Christ’s innocence, tries to do the right thing. But the great Cosmic Drama must play out to its bitter end—and into its new and unforeseen redemptive beginnings.  All the characters are parts of the human being: There are the disciples, fled in fear, the helpless weeping women. 

There are the mockers and spitters, the aggressive leaders, the well-meaning Roman governor, all of them aspects of our own human make-up. And in their midst, in willing powerlessness stands Christ Jesus, bruised and bloodied, yet still clear seeing: you would have no power over me were it not already given to you in the great script. You have your part to play.

Christ is an eternal being; therefore everywhere he was, everything he did, is still happening, eternally. It is still happening in the eternal moment of now. He is suffering, dying, rising; He is still to be found in a state of powerlessness. When we ourselves have been stripped and beaten by life, in our powerlessness is where He always abides. When we have come to the null point, there is where we can find Him.

Good Friday 2007, Seed of God

Good Friday Evening

April 6, 2007

John 19:1-15

At the end of a plant’s life, it forms the seed. This seed may be hardly distinguishable from a speck of dirt or a stone. Yet, although it is inert for a time, when it is buried in the earth, it reveals its inherent life. The seed swells and breaks apart. Its husk falls away, and from the heart of the seed, one shoot dives downward, rooting itself in the earth; a second sprout shoots upward toward light and air and warmth. In doing so, the form of the seed is transformed. The fact that it is alive makes it take on a different form.

Roerich

The corpse of Christ Jesus was like a seed in its husk. It was lowered into the earth. The husk of its material covering fell away like ash. The underlying true body of the human form, imbued with superabundant life, swelled like a seed. Partly anchored in the earth, partly rising heavenward, the life in Him became a new kind of life, an undying human life. He became at once the Old and the New: He restored the old original form of the human being as an image and likeness of the Creator – for all mankind had been corrupted by Adam and Eve’s succumbing to Lucifer’s temptation, and we all subsequently fell into a bodily form which is imbued with matter. This corrupted body has been passed down to us through the generations.

During Holy Week, before His death, Christ Jesus tried to explain what He was about to do. After he had raised Lazarus from the dead, some Greeks came and asked to see Him. In their spring rites, bury an effigy of their god, Adonis, a god of life, death, and rebirth. They would celebrate his rebirth as spring’s new vegetative growth.

And Jesus told them [the Greeks]: The hour has come for the Son of Man to be revealed in His spirit form. Yes, I tell you: Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth, it remains as it is. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his own soul will lose it; but whoever hates that in his own soul which belongs to the transient world will save it for true deathless life. Whoever would serve me must follow me on my path. Where I am, there also must be he who would serve me; and my Father will honor him who serves me. John 12: 23-26 (Madsen rendering)

In restoring the original image, Christ also became our new ancestor. For, like the single wheat seed that swells and grows and ultimately forms multiple seeds for new life, so too is Christ’s immortal human form, a body not weighed down by material substance, capable of producing multiple copies. For each of us, there is a copy of His immortal human form that He is waiting to give us. To the extent that we join ourselves to Him, choose to take Him in, join our lives to His Life, we ultimately receive a non-material bodily form which is a living copy of His immortal form, suffused with the timeless life of Him who carries and orders the life of the world.   

The path of Christ is the path of descent, of grounding and rooting in

Sombart

the earth; and at the same time an ascending one, of rising and growing toward the light and warmth of the Father. It is a path through death into the realm behind it, into the realm of abundant and overflowing Life. It is a realm where the original command, “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 9:7) is given a new meaning. For it is through His dying that He, and we, attain Life. And that life multiplies itself as ongoing life for the earth, and as immortal life for human beings. We pray that His body, and His enlivening blood be for us the abundant overflowing life that strengthens the forces that form us. An immortal spirit body is the gift that He, in his love for us, is literally dying to give us.

In the words of Angelus Silesius:

The Godhead is my sap; what in me greens and flowers

It is His healing Spirit who all the growth empowers.[1]

www.thechristiancommunity.org

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[1] Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer, p. 43

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.

www.thechristiancommunity.org

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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]

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[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?

www.thechristiancommunity.org

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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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