Isaiah 52:13—53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10:16–25
John 18:1—19:42
In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
As we proclaim the death of Christ as worthy of reflection and focus, indeed the central act under which we are constituted, we have arrived at what Celtic mythology calls part of the “thin places,” where what is visible is joined with what is invisible. The cross is where God is closest to a needy humanity. The death of God is where we find life. It’s indescribable, mysterious, and awesome.
Can we indeed encounter God as we find ourselves wrapped up in the story of Jesus’ passion, suffering and death?
Where are the “thin places” for us, places of suffering, shame, and scorn?
Are they near to us, in our own experiences of rejection, where if people really knew who we were they would just about crucify us?
Are they far away, where Palestinians are forcibly removed from their homes and live as refugees, second-class citizens, under decades of occupation?
Are they in our adoration of the tree that holds a bloody body with nails piercing hands and feet for the whole world to see?
Tonight we will not rush to Sunday, but linger on Friday. We must linger in the presence of God as an experience of absence.
This is the reality, or the truth that I think Pilate asked about.
Suffering is redeemed. Death is made holy. Christ’s agony and bleeding, in his death, is at the thin place of utter hopelessness and abandonment, and while all seems lost God really and truly is, while hidden, present.
In his chapter on “The Bible and Suffering,” [from The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart: HarperSanFrancisco © 1996, pp 211ff] renowned Harvard preacher Peter Gomes suggests that “as a rule most modern Christians in the industrialized West, if they think of suffering at all, think that it happens to other people, or if it happens to them, that it is the exception rather than the rule of their faith, and that it must be a stroke of bad luck which God or the minister needs to explain away in a hurry.”
He goes on to say that this notion is why Mother Teresa was most disturbing, because she made no apologies for the suffering in the world, or like some that we would call saints that she was solving the matter. Gomes relates a story from the book about Mother Teresa called Something Beautiful for God in this way. When asked what “good” her work of caring for the dying in the streets of Calcutta did, what its lasting social value was, and how she could go on in the face of remorseless suffering, she replied
Without our suffering our work would be just social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, no part of the Redemption. All the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed. And we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.
So today, we come to Jesus who suffers and dies for the redemption of the world. We declare that violence, cruelty, and wanton human destruction are not the way of Christ’s followers. We reject anti-Jewish interpretation of Jesus’ final days, and find ourselves under the indictment that we all have abandoned and rejected God’s will and ways for peace and harmony. We bring our own spiritual poverty, ignorance, and apathy at the plight of the suffering and leave it at the cross.
We might consider how the cross informs and creates something new in us. We would do well to mark the cross on our bodies as a way to allow the way of Christ’s death and resurrection to be the pattern for our every day, our relationships, our community, our prayer, our ways of serving each other and the poor.
As we come close to the hidden presence of God, the glory of Christ who died that we might be forgiven and brought to new life in the Spirit, let our song, gesture, and behavior, and finally a poet’s voice bring us to the thin place:
Weary of all trumpeting,
Weary of all killing,
Weary of all songs that sing
Promise, nonfulfilling.
We would raise, O Christ, one song:
We would join in singing
That great music pure and strong
Wherewith heav’n is ringing.
Captain Christ, O lowly Lord,
Servant King, your dying
Bade us sheathe the foolish sword,
Bade us cease denying.
Trumpet with your Spirit’s breath
Through each height and hallow:
Into your self-giving death,
Call us all to follow.
To the triumph of your cross
Summon all the living
Summon us to live by loss,
Gaining all by giving.
Suff’ring all, that we may see
Triumph in surrender;
Leaving all, that we may be
Partners in your splendor.
--Martin Franzmann
In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Rev. Timothy J. Keyl, Pastor
Christ the King Lutheran Church
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