Impossible Jesus
Homily delivered on Wednesday after the Third Sunday of Lent
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
15 March 2023; 10:30 a.m. Said Mass
At the Chapel of the Rogue Valley Manor, Medford (Oregon)
Readings: Deuteronomy 4:1–2,5–9; Psalm 78:1–6 Attendite, popule; Matthew
5:17–19
Collect for Lent
Give ear to our prayers, O Lord, and direct the way of thy servants in safety under thy protection, that, amid all the changes of our earthly pilgrimage, we may be guarded by thy mighty aid; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill…” After these words in the Sermon on the Mountain, Jesus adds, “Unless your uprightness surpasses that of the religious scholars and Pharisees, you will not enter into the heavenly domain. “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you, if you merely are angry with someone, you will be liable to judgment, if you call someone ‘Stupid!,” you deserve to be in court, if you call them “Moron!,’ you might land in the burning garbage heap itself…. You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you, everyone who reduces others to objects of lust might as well, as far as their inward beings are concerned, have already committed adultery” (Matt. 5:17- 22).
Have you ever met anyone who has never gotten angry or used even a mild insult to put down someone? And aren’t sexual desire and urges built into us? These statements of Jesus are indeed not additions to the law and the prophets, not implicit ways of abolishing them. They are the ethics of the impossible.
Jesus regularly in his sayings seems at times to make impossible demands of us: “cut off your hand, or put out your eye, if that’s what you need to do to keep from sin” (Mark 9:43-45), “be just as complete as your Father in heaven is complete” (Matthew 5:48), “abandon your family and loved ones for me” ( cf. Luke 9:59-62). I think this is not so much a setting of minimal standards, his own version of the law and commandments, than it it is a way of saying just how impossible it is to be right with God all on our own.
“But what is impossible for us humans is possible with God” (Luke 18:27).
Jesus also says, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30).
The path of following Jesus is not full of super heroic demands and denials: it is gentle and grows organically from where we are. Jesus loves and has the best interest of everyone he encounters in mind, yet he challenges us all. To the woman caught in adultery, he says, “Neither do I accuse you” (John 8:11), adding, “Go, and stop falling short of what you’re supposed to be.” He is asking her to turn from her past, not demanding that she be perfect, right here, right now, and forever on.
I think that one of the great reasons that the Church is in such bad odor in our society, both for the religious and the non-religious, is that we have made Jesus into a point of doctrine, and “believing in” him a point of division between insiders and outsiders. We have made him into a petty tyrant giving us more and more demands, commandments at odds with our very natures. But that's not what our faith is about. It’s about following Jesus, not about beating yourself up to have a particular set of opinions about him or following specific rules you think he has given us to avoid at all cost impurity or contamination. Any opinions and behaviors we should have as followers of Jesus must of necessity follow on, grow from, our trusting him, loving him, and following him--not vice versa.
I find great hope and solace in the line from the Creed: Jesus Christ will come to be our judge. That isn’t a threat of some angry, pissed-off toxic masculine Jesus coming to punish us. It’s an affirmation that in God's economy and plan, the one who will come to set things right and settle all accounts in the final day will be Jesus, our loving and gentle sibling who said “I come not to condemn, but to heal.”
This hope and trust color how we see even the nasty bits of life--the illness and suffering and horror we experience. They color even how we see (I wouldn’t say “understand!”) death itself.
I recently wrote a poem about my experience with deaths that sums up pretty much
how trusting and loving Jesus has changed how I see such things:
May Their Memory be a Blessing
Some say there’s
life after death.
This much is clear:
the rest of us go on living.
Our memories of the dead
May indeed be a blessing
For those of us who go on living,
For a while at least.
Blessed are those who mourn
With memory
And unformed hope
Against hope.
But alas,
We, glorious with bright eyes,
are all born to die.
And our memories with us?
What blessing then?
The rest of us go on living,
With loss and yearning
For those whose death
Reminds us of our own.
I’ve always had
A hard time believing
That anything of us
Endures after death:
A fable just too good to be true.
The only thing we really
“Know” about it
Is when you’re dead,
You’re dead
Unavailable to take calls, really,
At least in any normal way of taking calls.
The dead, so different from us who live,
Share this one thing fully with us:
We don’t communicate well at all.
At all costs we hide our hearts
From others,
And even from ourselves.
Since I was little
I’ve doubted
Any persistence of
The individual after death.
My native skepticism, I suppose, or
Brutal honesty.
Maybe “the individual”
Is just something too abstract
And removed from what’s
Before my eyes
To believe anything about "it" at all.
But then
I was with people as they died.
One, a stranger, brutally
And deliberately crushed
Along with my sanity
for a season
And hope even for live human beings.
So horrible even my memory revolted:
A curse, not a blessing.
A horror
in which the one who died
Was somehow not diminished.
Another, a dear friend,
Quietly lapsing into smiling silence as
I played harp beside her hospice bed.
Like falling asleep, but the breathing stopped.
And what was left began to grow cold.
Blessing.
Another, my beloved,
When she simply did not wake up
From a well-deserved nap.
Agonal breathing aside—
That struggle of the body to keep on
Doing what it's been doing
Though its person is already gone.
When she died,
What mattered most to me and to her—
Her personality, her memories,
Her gritty will, wit, hopes, and love
The beauty that was her
even as the disease ravaged
those many years the parts of her that mattered less—
What mattered most of her
Simply went somewhere else.
Simply went somewhere else.
To say she dissolved, was erased, ended—
That would be dishonest
Too cruel, too hopeless,
And not really honestly tell what I have seen
When I have seen
Our sister Death.
How can I describe
such beautiful and cruel
Mystery?
They were here one moment,
And the next moment, gone,
Though food for worms remained.
“They” left. “They” departed. “They” passed over.
Whatever that means.
What I’ve witnessed when
I’ve been with those who are dying,
I think, is not oblivion, but change.
That’s the only way I can rightly describe
What I’ve seen.
But I wonder too about our bodies.
Meat for worms though they be,
They too are part of
What matters in us:
Integral to personality,
Relationship, and consciousness.
The ground of deep joy and harsh pain.
So I find comfort in the old myths
That say that the Love that made us
Whole and fully alive
Keeps all of each of us in mind.
And will someday,
Soon perhaps,
Make us new
According to the first plan but
“Shining like stars above”
With all our hope and memory intact.
All of each
And all of all,
Whole, well, and untroubled by fear and brokenness.
God’s memory of us: the ultimate blessing.
That Love, too, died and came forth again whole
Though with scars.
At least that’s what I hope
in moments of love.
It’s all about following Jesus, our gentle and loving Lord. I would not have had the blessing of being with those people as they died had I not been trying to follow Jesus. It's about following him, yet we have not always been good disciples, doing his work and learning from him. But Jesus understands and still loves us, gently beckoning, “Keep on following me! It’s OK. It’ll get better and all will end well!” The Way of Jesus is a gentle way, where we are as kind to others and to ourselves as he is to us. “Cast away your ego and self-absorption. Kill your false self and wake up into the true one God has intended for you all along.” Jesus does not ask the impossible, but encourages us to shoulder his light yoke, to have him help us pull along the burden of our lives to that bright place. This yoke and burden, it turns out, is liberation and rest, and no real burden at all. Grace and Peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment