Dogwood Cross (Midweek Message)

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Dogwood Cross

March 31, 2021

 

Today is Wednesday of Holy Week, otherwise called “Silent Wednesday” (because none of the four gospels records any activity of Christ on this day), or “Spy Wednesday” (because this was the day that Judas betrayed Jesus by secretly making an agreement with the authorities to turn him over).  It is the day before the Thursday of the Last Supper, Maundy Thursday, and the three day ritual of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter.  This week we think much of the cross—the sufferings and death of our Lord, the empty cross and empty tomb at his resurrection, and Jesus’ call to us to follow him by taking up the cross.   We think a lot about prophecy and fulfillment, in particular how the prophets’ visions of a suffering servant are blended with those of the ideal king of the future, the Messiah.  One lesser known image in all this is found in some preachers’ ahistorical claims that the cross was made of several woods:  a combination of cedar, pine and cypress.  This speculation was prompted by Isaiah’s prophecy that “The glory of Lebanon shall come unto you, the cedar, fir, and cypress trees, to beautify the place of my sanctuary; and I will make the place of my feet glorious” (Isa 60:13).

 

The trees in Ashland are, or are about to be, in full bloom.  And this brought back to me a memory from when I lived in Washington DC.  The cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin and Jefferson and Lincoln memorials are not the only blossoming trees there this time of year: more common are the dogwoods.  A colleague who grew up in West Virginia told me of the story of why people from Appalachia believe that the cross of Christ was made of the dogwood that so completely covers much of Virginia and Maryland.  

 

They point to the four-petaled flower of the dogwood and see the cross of Jesus.  They see in its center’s pistils the nails of the cross.  They see in its berries the blood of Christ.  They explain the dogwood’s delicate and small trunk and branches by saying that the tree was once great, the strongest of the forest, but that after Christ had been crucified on its wood, Jesus had cursed its strength and blessed it instead with delicate beauty. 

 

Of whatever wood the cross was made, the material of the cross is not as important as the One whom it bore and why it bore him:  ^“For in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20). 

 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+

The Two Ways (Palm/Passion Sunday B)

 

He Qi, Entry into Jerusalem

“The Two Ways”

Palm Sunday, Passion Sunday (Year B)
4 April 2021; 8 am Spoken Mass on the Labyrinth;

10 am Spoken Mass with Music livestreamed from the chancel;
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon  

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

 

Passover was a troubled time in Roman-occupied Jerusalem.   The festival celebrated the liberation of Hebrew slaves from slavery in Egypt.  The Passover lambs required for the feast could only be gotten from the Temple in Jerusalem, so the city thronged with religious pilgrims, at least trebling its population during the feast.   And freedom and salvation were on the minds of all.

 

The harsh Roman occupation was abetted by the wealthy elites of Jerusalem and other cities like the capital of the Roman province of Judea, Caesarea.  The Temple establishment itself was part of this group of Jewish Quislings who furthered their own wealth and power by collaborating with the Romans.   This was all at the expense of those whom the elites derisively called the “people of the land,” reduced to poverty and landlessness, dispossessed in their own homeland, reduced to day-labor at less-than-living wages.  

 

As a result, Passover had seen multiple disorders, riots, and failed popular uprisings. 

 

The Roman governors and commanders thus were always well advised to leave Caesarea with a hefty contingent of troops and go to Jerusalem for Passover.  Their presence would give potential troublemakers second thoughts about a possible uprising. 

 

For weeks now, we have seen Gospel stories where Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem, and tells his disciples that he must go there.   Jesus is not going simply to celebrate the festival.  He must confront the leadership, and though he does not see the way ahead clearly, he knows he must pursue this path.  He has no doubts what the likely outcome will be, death.  Despite this, he is determined to go. 

 

So, on the first day of the week before that particular Passover, there were two processions entering the Holy City.   One, from the West, brought Pilate the governor with his military security enforcers.  Keeping with the propaganda needs of governments since time immemorial, the procession was over the top, seeking public attention:  in order to deter rebellion, there had to be a major, awe-inspiring display of Imperial Might, military strength, determination, while ostensibly honoring and respecting the local establishment and its religious scruples.  The governor’s entourage was coming to honor the city and its leaders on this, the greatest week of the Jewish calendar.  Just don’t get in its way. 

 

From the East, from the Mount of Olives, came a smaller, less pomp-ridden procession with Jesus, a procession spring up from the grass roots, not imposed from the imperial heights above.  The coming salvation of Israel was prophesied as arriving from the Mount of Olives to the East of the City (Zech. 14:4; Josephus Ant. 20.167-72).  So the people, excited to finally see this Galilean prophet announcing the arrival of the Kingdom of God and who reputedly had the ability to heal the sick, came out to meet him.   The greet him throwing their cloaks on the ground, waving palm branches, just as the inhabitants of the city had done when the Jewish army of the Maccabees had freed the city and driven out the Greek Syrian oppressors 170 years earlier (1 Macc. 13:14).

 

Anticipating and trying to redirect this reaction of the crowd, Jesus performs a prophetic act, an act with a message.  He asks to ride into Jerusalem seated on a donkey.  Zephaniah 9:9 says that the Coming One to make things right will come in peace and not in war, seated on a donkey instead of a war stallion.

 

His point is:  I am indeed the one you expect, and I am announcing the arrival of the longed-for Reign of God.  But I am not the kind of Messiah you think you need.  I am no military conqueror. I only seek to advance God’s Reign by passionate and powerful engagement with those opposing God’s reign, peaceful engagement, though it may provoke violence by them. 

 

The people welcome him as the one who will free the nation.  “Hosanna, O Son of David,” they say, that is, “Save us NOW, promised one.” 

 

Today is called Palm Sunday, or the Sunday of the Passion, and it is regularly noted to be somewhat schizophrenic liturgically:  joyful and triumphant entrance liturgy with palms, followed by the Passion Gospel, Jesus’ betrayal, the crowds (presumably many of the same crowds that welcomed him a few minutes ago) calling for his death, and then his torture and death.   Some people dislike that often in these liturgies, the people both sing “Hosanna” at the Liturgy of the Palms and then shout “Crucify him” during the Gospel of the Passion.

But the fact is, there is a deep symbolic unity in this day and in its stories, and a profound teaching about how we Christians see the world.

 

We see in the contrast between the Palms and the Passion the struggle between those two parades, between the peaceful coming of a humble, donkey-riding Savior and the force-based and crucifying Imperial Power of Pilate’s military parade. 

 

The earliest Christian writing that has come down to us from after the books we find in the New Testament is a short book called the Didache, or the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.  That book gives us the earliest description of a Christian Eucharist we know.  Most of it is taken up in describing what it calls the “Two Ways,” the Way of Life versus the Way of Death.  Two Parades: Pilate’s and Jesus; Two nations: the Empire or the Reign of God.   Significantly, one of the hallmarks for the Didache of the Way of Life is that it is peaceful, non-retaliative, and loving. 

 

But we must not think that the Two Ways here are identified with groups of people. This isn’t an issue of good people on this side versus bad people on the other. The line between good and evil does not lie between interrogator and prisoner, between political parties, between economic classes, countries, or religions.  It does not lie between any groups of people, however defined.  It is subtle, but clearly defined:  it runs down the middle of the heart of every human being.

 

Preaching Palm Sunday or Good Friday has always been a great moral responsibility for any Christian minister:  it is on those two days that historically most pogroms of Christians against Jews have occurred.  The passion stories’ use of the word Judaioi, that probably in this context refers to residents of the Roman Province of Judea rather than Galilee (that’s why our translation today uses Judeans rather than Jews), and the shameful anti-Semitic blood libel and accusations of genetic guilt at Deicide, lay behind this.  Christians for centuries have on those two days on occasion run out of churches onto the streets, seeking Jews and killing them.   But we must remember, in these stories, we are all Jews.  We are in this together. 

 

Friends, we are all in that crowd of people welcoming Jesus.  And we are all in that crowd calling for his death.  In a very real way, it is we who crucified him.   We must take the Reign of God whose arrival Jesus announced seriously, and make it the central, governing thing in our lives, despite our fears.  We must take this gentle loving figure seated on a donkey as our model, and our Lord, though we possibly fear where he might lead us.  Let us be attentive to him, and present in our lives, our experience of God’s call. 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen

 

Relaxing into God (Mid-week Message)

 

Relaxing into God

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

March 24, 2021

 

“The sum of a human’s days is great

If it reaches a hundred years.

Like a drop of sea water, like a grain of sand,

So are these few years among the days of eternity.

That is why Yahweh is patient with us,

And showers us with mercy.” 

(Sirach 18:7-9)

 

The daughter of a dear friend of Elena and me recently told me of something that “broke her heart.” Her young son appears to suffering from a genetically transmitted severe hearing loss that she herself suffers and has had to deal with for most of her life. On the way to a third appointment to diagnose the exact problem, he turned to her and said, “Mom, I promise I’ll try my very best today to hear all those little sounds in the earphones. I’ll really, really try, and maybe my hearing will be okay.” Our friend said she had to hold back tears when she reassured him that it would be okay however the tests went, that trying hard wouldn’t help, and might actually hurt. “Just relax, and follow the instructions.” 

There are so many things in our lives out of our control. Trying to power over them, while a common habit of many of us, won’t help in the long run, and might actually hurt. Our friend’s advice to her son applies: “Just relax, and follow the instructions.”

As we enter into Holy Week, let us remember that there is nothing we can do or say that will make God love us any more than God already does. Relaxing into God, attentively listening in prayer and following in loving acts for others—these are ways to help us feel God’s already present love.   

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+

Holy Reflection (celtic meditation)

 

Holy Reflection

Meditation for Trinity Ashland's Celtic Evensong 

March 2021 

Fr. Tony Hutchinson  

Celtic Evensong March 2021

 

I grew up in a tradition that said it took scripture “literally.”  I was taught that somehow God was up there, out there, ready to intervene for good in our life if we tried really hard to obey his commandments and punish us if we disobeyed: it was always a he, and always commandments, never suggestions or invitations.  One true church, one true way, all cut and dried: submit or suffer. 

 

Yet as I grew up, I realized that there was a whole world out there not accounted for by such “literalism.”  Good things happened to bad people, and bad things to good.  And many deeply concerned people in divergent traditions seemed to experience the unseen world more deeply than I. 

 

My faith grew first from experiencing the reflection of holiness in the natural world.  I have seen beautiful and astounding things that made me yearn deeply.  Once I accidentally came upon a clamshell with something in it.  It turned out to be an octopus protecting her egg cases.  They began to hatch as I held the shell in my hand under the water.  Another time I saw hundreds of baby sea turtles hatching on a shore, dragging their tiny bodies by their flippers to the sea.  Yet another time, I was surrounded on a small boat by a pod of orcas, who played around the boat and were close enough that I could smell them—not fishy, but definitely large mammal.  And I saw a peaceful and pastel brilliant sun rise above a settling sea of clouds from a high mountain slope after getting through a long, cold night in white-out gale conditions.  Such awe and wonder taught me that our lives are a small part of a glorious mystery, one that includes love and intention.  In awe, our hearts and minds yearn to make sense of it all. 

 

But the natural world is not just beauty and awe.  It can at times be horrible, red in tooth and claw. Some say that there is no God because the world is just too filled with randomness, pain, and injustice for it to allow for a loving, provident God.   

 

But my experience tells me that that is not so. 

 

As the years went on, I realized that those stories about Jesus I had learned in my youth were also holy reflections of the awe, love, and intention I saw in creation.

 

In one story, people who believed in that external, interfering God of rules and commandments brought to Jesus a person born blind. They asked:  “Whose fault is this—this person’s or their parents’?”  Jesus answered with a smile, “Neither.  It was so I could have the chance to heal them!”  (John 9:2-3).

 

Another time, they asked Jesus about people who were worshipping when they were massacred by the Romans. “Why did they suffer so?  What great evil did they do that God punished them this way?”  Jesus answered,  “Who knows?  They did nothing any worse than anyone else… The point is not that they were particularly bad, but that we all need to be better” (Luke 13:1-5). 

 

Jesus did not believe that all life’s puzzles were cut and dried with tidy answers:  “Don’t ask why, or who is to blame. Ask rather, for what purpose? How can I help?”  

 

And as for a God who deals out weal or woe to settle scores, Jesus said God was a loving parent, sending the blessings of rain and sunshine on both the righteous and the wicked, and we should be just as impartially compassionate as that (Matt 5:45-48)

 

The very fact that we are repulsed by suffering and horror is actually an overwhelming sign of the presence of a loving God.  We are made in God’s image, says Genesis.  We are holy reflections of God.   So when we see horror, the apparent absence of God, our hearts say not just “no,” but “hell, no!” 

 

For Jesus, loving God and neighbor mattered, not subscribing to a set of correct doctrines and practices.  What matters is letting the awe and thanks we feel in the presence of holy reflection to saturate our being and leak out in our acts.  What counts is loving, taking care of each other.  And this good is contagious—it drives away the horror that sometimes is from our own hearts.   

 

So caregiving, whether in my family or in the community, has become more and more of my daily discipline.  It can be emotionally draining: encountering hardship each day can be a pebble in the shoe.  But Jesus on the cross reminds me that the blessing of God is not in avoiding pain, but in loving and caring through it all. 

 

So especially in horror faces us, caregiving is a holy reflection.   

 

As a caregiver of my beloved Elena, I say this prayer regularly:

 

“Loving God, you put us in families and relationships, and teach us to care for each other.  Help me to show your love and kindness.  Open my eyes to see each act of assistance as an opportunity to show grace, not as a problem to be solved.  Help me place shoes on with kindness, not cram feet with force; assist walking or movement with gentleness, not hurrying in a rush; listen and try to understand, not chirp “Say again?” in annoyance.  Help me allow my beloved to maintain her dignity, not sink into degradation; focus on joy of being able to do what she still can, not wallow in diminishment or regret loss.    Make us closer and closer even as her disease gradually separates us.   And may someday my grief and sorrow at her passing be an honest pain of a heart longing to be together again, not regret for love I have not shared.  For your mercy’s sake I pray, Amen.”

 

In this time of Covid-19 separation, isolation, and fear, I rejoice each time I wash my hands.  To make sure I wash long enough, I sing to myself Old 100th:     

 

All creatures that on earth do dwell

Sing to the Lord with gladsome voice,

Serve God with mirth; God’s praise forth-tell.

Come ye before God, and rejoice. 

 

Know this, the Lord is God, indeed

We are God’s own, God did us make

We are God’s folk, God doth us feed

And for his flock God doth us take.

Amen.

 

 

Draw All People Unto Myself (Lent 5B)

 

“Draw All People Unto Myself”

Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
21 March 2021; recorded for Diocese of Oregon preaching rota
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon  

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

 

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-13; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33 

 

I preached this for the Diocesan preaching rota for use in zoom services, and posted it on Tuesday,   The Rev. Deacon Meredith Pech preached at Trinity this Sunday: a profound and moving meditation on the sin of racism  that responded in many ways to the anti-Asian and mysogynistic murders in Atlanta on Wednesday.  It will be posted separately on the Trinity Website,  Here is the recording I did for the Diocese:  

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16J8sFyPNuBmDr8y-MPirjxHbOmlBAzwQ/view?usp=drivesdk 

 
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

The scene in today’s reading from John is a turning point in that Gospel.  Several times previous to this, Jesus defers saying or doing something because, “his hour had not yet come” (John 2:4; 7:30; 8:20).  With his final arrival in Jerusalem and  the coming of gentile Greeks asking to be taught by him, suddenly Jesus here declares that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

 

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all portray Jesus’ suffering and death as the painful but necessary prelude to his being raised in glory from death.   But for the Gospel of John, Jesus being raised up on the cross itself is the moment of true glory.  Jesus in today’s Gospel uses a parable to describe this: “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

 

Today’s passage from Hebrews says that “Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears,” for God to “save him from death” (Hebrews 5:5-6).  The three other Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—describe Jesus the night before his death begging in prayer in Gethsemane to be spared from the cross, but ultimately accepting “not my will, but thine.”   But John’s Gospel omits any prayer in Gethsemane.  It rather has Jesus say in today’s reading, “What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?  No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!’”

 

Last week, we saw that John’s Gospel portrays looking to Jesus lifted up on the cross as the means of salvation for the broken, wicked world just as looking on the bronze serpent lifted on Moses’ staff was a means of healing.   Again, in today’s reading, John’s Jesus says, “But when I am lifted up from the earth,” that is, lifted up on the cross, “I will draw all people to myself.” Just as Paul says God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, John says Jesus on the Cross draws all people to him.  This is not a few people, not some small percentage of chosen ones saved from the massa damnata by following some esoteric practice and doctrine.    Jesus’ words here give us hope that eventually all people, the world, everyone, will be drawn to Jesus and healed.

 

Some would object, saying God’s holiness is incompatible with universal salvation.  They point to passages of scripture that talk of God’s wrath, of punishment, justice, and judgment, of one and only one strait and narrow path.     

 

But the Gospel of John, for all its sectarian and at times anti-Jewish animus born of being put “out of the synagogue” (John 9:22), teaches that Jesus came to save, not to judge (John 3:17).   And we must remember that the idea “the wrath of God” describes more how we feel when we are estranged from God, not something about the heart of God, who is love itself.  1 John 4 teaches in love there is no judgment.  To be sure, the Fourth Gospel understands declining to follow Jesus as a type of judgment in and of itself, since it is—for now at least—in fact rejecting the very source of our healing.  But John goes on:  Jesus on the cross is an ensign, a rallying point, who eventually will draw all to himself for healing. 

 

Others might object that the idea of Jesus drawing all to himself is an insult to other traditions, whether Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Baha’i, animist, shamanistic, or even atheistic.  This is true, if we understand this image in terms of a proselyting urge that says, “join us or be damned.”  But if we understand it as a loving desire to share with others the good we have enjoyed, without the demand that others change and become like us, it is not so.

 

The Rev. Karl Rahner, SJ

 

The Opening Mass of the Second Vatican Council.

 

Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner developed the doctrine of the Anonymous Christian, later adopted and promulgated as official Roman Catholic teaching by the Second Vatican Council:  a person can live in God’s grace and be saved through Jesus even outside explicit Christian formulations.  If people, whether Buddhist nun or Muslim imam, try to do the right thing, be right with whatever God they imagine, and follow their conscience, they might be considered anonymous Christians and be saved through Jesus’ victory over death and sin.  They would not have to explicitly accept Jesus or Christianity, or might even, because of circumstances and constraints, have rejected these explicitly.  But God’s universal salvific will and the greatness of God’s grace would save them too.  

 

 

Aslan accepts Emeth.  

 

The idea is also found among Protestants. The final book of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, has the character Emeth, a foreign prince who had fought against Aslan and Narnia and served his own god, Tash.  He has done his best to live uprightly within the traditions he was raised in.  In the end, Aslan receives him as one of his own with these words, “I and [Tash] are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him.^”  

 

Our Prayer Book teaches us to pray, “Remember all who died in the peace of Christ, and those whose faith is known to you alone; bring them into the place of eternal joy and light” (p. 375).

Again, some criticize such Christian inclusivity by saying that it is condescending:  “I’m Jewish, thank you very much, and do not want to become Christian, even anonymously.”   Fair enough, especially in light of historical Imperial Christian persecution of Jews, native peoples, and the non-conforming.    A tradition is truly inclusive only when it recognizes that other traditions have separate yet valid paths.  Accepting that God is bigger than our particular brand is an essential part of Jesus’ teaching.  Our hope that God is doing for us more things than we can ask or imagine means that ultimately there is no conflict between trusting that Jesus will save all people and respecting the independence and truth of non-Christian traditions.   

 

The four Gospels tell very different stories about Jesus, and as we have seen today, John's Gospel tells a story often at odds with the other three’s versions.   I have always taken this as an occasion for great hope. You see, Christians were a diverse lot from the very beginning.   And the Church has not insisted that we harmonize or censor all competing stories about Jesus into one. The Church has let the four Gospels stand in glorious disharmony. “I will all draw all people unto me,” says Jesus here. That means the Church ought to have diversity, a rich variety of keys in which the Gospel tune is played.

Because of the Church’s past history of oppression of Jews, native peoples, racial minorities, and women, because of its colonial proselytism, and because its periodic efforts to identify and root out heresy, we often lose sight of this.  But remember this:  as the early Church sought to define its faith, there were individuals who wanted to eliminate all diversity and possible disharmony in scripture. Some, like Marcion, wanted to get rid of the Old Testament. It was just too distasteful for him.  Others, like Tatian the Syrian, wanted to reduce the New Testament to a single theological viewpoint.   He created a single harmonized Gospel (the Diatesseron) that served as the Gospel lectionary in most of the Church for several centuries.  Tatian wanted it to be recognized as Scripture instead of the Four Gospels the Church finally settled on.  But the Church, seeking to truly reflect the deposit of faith given in the apostolic age, declined Marcion’s and Tatian’s offers.  They decided to keep the Hebrew Scriptures and all four Gospels even as they rejected Tatian’s Diatessaron along with several other Gospels that bore the marks of having come from a period after the first couple of generations of Christians. The apostolic faith thus defined includes the diversity we see in the New Testament.

 

As we begin our final preparations for Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter, may we reflect on Jesus’ love for us all.    May we be more comfortable with diversity and difference, with change and new things.  And, with Jesus, may we welcome the whole world, without judgment.  For it is they that our Lord, this God on the Cross, draws unto Himself.

 

In the name of God, Amen.

Anti-St. Francis Prayer (midweek)

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

An Anti-St. Francis Prayer

March 18, 2021

 

Today is Saint Patrick’s Day, when we celebrate the deep spirituality and great corporeal acts of mercy (charitable service) of the 5^th Century’s great missionary to the Irish.  This has made me think of the need to balance both contemplation and action. 

 

Fr.  Kenneth Leach, contemplative and key voice in the Christian Socialism and Anglo-Catholic renewal in the U.K. in the last half of the 20^th century, wrote in 1974:  “If spirituality and prophecy are not held together, both must decay. There must be contemplation and resistance, holiness and justice, prayer and politics. For our vision is of a God whose holiness fills heaven and earth, and who has called all people into freedom, justice and peace within his new order.” 

 

One of my favorite texts from the Prayer Book is the great call to serenity and service, the St. Francis Prayer, called that not because Francis wrote it (he didn’t) but because it sums up so neatly his take on life: 

 

Lord, make us instruments of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let us sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is discord, union;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

 

A friend of mine shared with me last week an anonymous Reverse St. Francis Prayer that rounds out the action side of contemplation, and explains well how spiritual serenity should never be a kind of opiate or soporific.  God calls us not only to peace and calmness, but also to dissatisfaction, and at times anger: 

 

Lord, make me a channel of disturbance.

Where there is apathy, let me provoke;

Where there is compliance, let me bring questioning;

Where there is silence, may I be a voice.

Where there is too much comfort and too little action, grant disruption;

Where there are doors closed and hearts locked,

Grant the willingness to listen.

When laws dictate and pain is overlooked…

When tradition speaks louder than need…

Grant that I may seek rather to do justice than to talk about it;

Disturb us, O Lord.

To be with, as well as for, the alienated;

To love the unlovable as well as the lovely;

Lord, make me a channel of disturbance.

 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

 

The Gospel in Miniature (Lent 4B)

 

The Gospel in Miniature
Fourth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
14 March 2021

Laetare Sunday
10 a.m. Said Mass with music, live-streamed
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon

   The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D., homilist  

Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

 

God, Take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has faith in him may not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).  

Martin Luther called this verse, “the heart of the Bible, the Gospel in miniature.”

 

Jesus here is speaking to Nicodemus, a devotee to Mosaic Law but a secret follower of Jesus.   Jesus has told him about being born from on high. Nicodemus has misunderstood this as some kind of second physical birth: it’s all about identity or group affiliation, based on who your mother was.   Jesus corrects him and says this is about starting a spiritual life in God, which is uncontrollable like the wind or breath.   He then adds: just as Moses lifted up the bronze snake in the desert to heal the Israelites suffering from snake bites, Jesus would be lifted up on the cross for all the world to see and be healed. 

 

Note that God here loves “all the world,” not just chosen people.  This birth from above is for everyone. 

 

Jesus being raised on the cross like the healing bronze snake on the pole speaks against, not for, the idea of transferred punishment.   The thing that heals the Israelites is a representation of the very thing afflicting them. 

 

So how is Jesus on the cross like this? 

 

Looking on the true nature of the evil we suffer and inflict, identifying their exact nature, is the start of healing, the beginning of recovery.  Lifting up a graphic representation of the fiery serpents heals the Israelites through, it seems, some kind of sympathetic magic.  Likewise, hoisting Jesus high upon the cross is a prime example of human evil, a representation of the very problem it cures.  Jesus’s sufferings are the example par excellence of how rotten we human beings treat each other, of how badly we distort God’s good creation.   Look at the nature of our evil, lose false conceptions about the heart of darkness and cruelty in us at times: only then can we embrace Jesus, the God who loves us so much that he chose to become one of us and suffer such evil.  Trusting this loving God on the cross heals us.   

 

We read in Deuteronomy that anyone who is hanged on a tree is accursed (Deut 21:23).  Paul says that thus Jesus became a curse for us, became sin for us (Gal 3:13). This does not mean that Jesus was bad or evil.  It means that the very fact that we human beings did this thing to him, the fact that we are capable of such cruelty to each other, points to our need for transformation and enlightenment.  In looking at this horror, we see the nature of our ills, and in trusting the one so cursed we find redemption and reconciliation with God and each other.  This is not transferred punishment, but the mystery of God becoming one of us, suffering along with us the worst that we can mete out to each other, dying alongside every other human being, and then being rising as Victor.   

 

That’s why the passage continues, “God loved the world so much that He sent his only son.” Note:  it’s the world we’re talking about here.  In John’s Gospel, that means the wicked world, the big, bad, dark world that rejects the light.    It doesn't mean the good and glorious creation that God declared in Genesis 1 to be so very good.  Rather, in John, the phrase means:    “God loved bad guys so much….”  “God loved messed up humanity so much…”  “God loved those who dwell in darkness so much…” “that he sent his only son, so that everyone who trusts him, finds faithfulness in him, gives their heart to him, should not perish, but live eternally.”  The Greek of the passage is clear—the people who trust Jesus have already attained the unending life his sending was intended to provide to the world. 

 

The point is the universality of God’s love and of God’s gift to all.

 

But a gift is a gift only if it is accepted by someone.  That is what looking at Jesus, or looking at the snake, is all about.  Salvation is there.  Healing is there.  You just have to turn your hearts toward its source and trust.

 

This is not a call to a formal acceptance of a doctrine of salvation by grace, or, God forbid, of transferred punishment. It is an invitation to trust Jesus, to be in relationship with him. 

 

“But what about people who decline the invitation?” you might ask.

 

The passage is clear:  Jesus came to save, not to judge or condemn. 

 

The refusal of people to accept the gift freely given won’t bring judgment or condemnation.  Rather, it is their very act of refusing that means they, at least for now, cannot enjoy the blessings of relationship and trust. 

 

Jesus of Nazareth taught the arrival of God’s Reign, of God being fully in charge, right here, right now.  His teachings demand much from us, but also give us compassion and enable us to be instruments of God’s compassion.  His cruel death on the cross came from the sickness of the powers of his age, in some ways very much with us to this day. 

 

But his rising from the dead vindicated his teaching and meant the cross was not meaningless, that life is not random or pointless.  Christ’s victory over death saves us by pointing all the more to God’s love in the face of the sickness of broken humanity.  If Jesus on the cross is like that bronze snake, it is because we are the snakes that are biting ourselves, ruining God’s good creation. 

 

I pray that this week we may reflect on this passage, so public and popularly misused, and find in it the point John’s Gospel is trying to make:  God loves everyone and is compassionate.  In following Jesus, in trusting him, we can also be compassionate and overcome the sickness that often infects us and our society.    Thus victory is won, brokenness healed, and rescue achieved.

 

In the name of God Amen.