Posts Tagged ‘Holy Week’
Love and Sorrow – Br. Luke Ditewig
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Br. Luke Ditewig
Good Friday
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
John 18:1-19:42
“Did e’er such love and sorrow meet?”[1]
The Good Shepherd lay down his life for the sheep, allowing arrest to final breath. “Wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.”
As his followers fought back, Jesus denounced violence and retribution. “Put away your sword.” Jesus spoke with authority not coercion or oppression. “My kingdom is not from this world. . . . Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Jesus spoke tenderly to his dearest giving them to each other: “here is your son . . . here is your mother.”
“Did e’er such love and sorrow meet?” Read More
Live-Wire Love – Br. Lain Wilson
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Br. Lain Wilson
Maundy Thursday
Exodus 12:1-14
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
I’ve attended a lot of Maundy Thursday services in my life, and for me there’s a clear dividing line, a clear before and after: the year 2022, when I entered the Society as a postulant. It’s a dividing line not because of that, though. It’s a dividing line because, for the first time in my life, I participated in the footwashing.
I’m not sure what had held me back before. I suspect it was many things – a sense of restraint, keeping something of myself firmly under wraps (or under socks); a belief that I didn’t need to go forward, that I couldn’t gain something from it that I didn’t already have; and, perhaps, a bit of embarrassment, that my feet were sweaty in my socks and what if they smelled and what will people think . . .
What I experienced in that dividing-line liturgy – when I untied my shoes and took off my socks and sat shoulder to shoulder with these men – well, I can only call it surrender, the surrender of all that had held me back for so many years. Read More
Passion – How Love and Suffering Coexist – Br. Curtis Almquist
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Br. Curtis Almquist
“Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you…” This is like a teacher getting the attention of the class by saying, “Listen up!”[i] Various other versions of the Bible translate Jesus’ attention-grabber here as “Believe me,” or “I assure you,” or “I can guarantee this truth,” or “I tell you for certain…” Does Jesus have your attention? We are primed to know this is very important what Jesus is about to say; however we have to do some homework to make sense of its importance.
Two things. Jesus describes how a grain of wheat must die to bear fruit. A farmer would tell us that as long as a tiny grain of wheat keeps on being a kernel in the head of a stalk of wheat, it remains just that: a lone kernel of wheat among many such kernels. It’s only when a grain of wheat is detached from the head and buried in the ground that it can germinate and produce a whole stalk of wheat. Jesus describes this process as a grain of wheat “dying.” Of course Jesus is speaking metaphorically. What does Jesus mean? Because he has signaled that this is very important: a grain of wheat needing to “die” to bear fruit? Jesus is speaking both about generosity and about suffering. Read More
Palm Sunday, a melodrama ignored… or not? – Br. Curtis Almquist
Br. Curtis Almquist
What’s in the news? What political calamity is happening? On the cusp of Palm Sunday, what garners the attention of the general public is not Jesus, but rather the reports from various sources about all the political machinations – who is in and who is not – and the endless conflicts between various camps. Meanwhile the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Truth be told, Palm Sunday hardly gets noticed by most people, including the Roman and Jewish authorities.
I’m talking here about the original Palm Sunday, two thousand years ago. What garners the attention of the general public is not Jesus, but rather the reports from various sources about all the political machinations – who is in and who is not – and the endless conflicts between various camps. Meanwhile the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Truth be told, Palm Sunday hardly gets noticed by most people, including the Roman and Jewish authorities. Read More
A Place to Stand – Br. Lain Wilson
When was the last time you walked into the ocean? Or sat on the sand with the surf washing up over you? Do you remember the force of the tide, the effort needed to maintain your footing or seat, to counter the push and pull of the current against your body so that you could remain planted in the sand, firm, upright? Do you remember saying to yourself, “Okay, now, I’ve got it,” just before a wave hit you and knocked you over?
Jesus’s listeners in today’s Gospel are trying to find their footing, to find a place to stand upright. “You will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he” (Jn 8:24). His listeners are desperate, pressing Jesus for details – so desperate that, even though they don’t understand what he is saying to them, nevertheless, “many believed in him” (Jn 8:30). But the current of Jesus’s truth will be too strong for them; by the end of this chapter, these same people who believed will try to stone Jesus (Jn 8:59). Their belief is without a firm foundation, unable to brace them against the next wave. Read More
Trouble and Trust – Br. Luke Ditewig
Br. Luke Ditewig
Psalm 70
John 13:21-32
“O Lord, make haste to help me,” cries the Psalmist. … Let those who seek after my life be ashamed. … I am poor and needy. … You are my helper.” The psalmist pleads for help, protests what is wrong, and trusts God is good. This is a lament: naming suffering and believing being heard.
Tonight we pray Tenebrae, which means shadows, with words from people feeling abandoned, isolated, cut-off, and grieving. We lament like them and Jesus, troubled in spirit.
While particularly appropriate for Holy Week, lament is from the beginning. Patrick Miller wrote: “The story of God and the human creature is rooted in and shaped by the experience of pain and suffering and what God does about it, in the human voice that cries out and the God whose ears cannot miss those cries.”[i] Lament, Miller continued, is prayer and part of being human.[ii] From the cross, Jesus cried out with Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Trust and question in tender, wrenching symmetry:[iii]
What is your lament today? What is your suffering? What pain of others weighs on you? Name it with scripture, but words are not necessary. Perhaps you need a break from them. Gaze at something broken. Shake your fists. Stomp your feet. Groan. Roar. Cry.
God hears you. Take a deep breath. Lie down and feel your body fully supported. God hears you. In the shadows with Jesus, cry out with trouble and trust.
[i] Patrick D. Miller, “Heaven’s Prisoners: The Lament as Christian Prayer” in Lament: Reclaiming Practices in Pulpit, Pew, and Public Square. (2005) Eds. Sally A. Brown and Patrick D. Miller. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, p16.
[ii] Ibid, p17
[iii] Ibid, 21
The Hour Has Come – Br. Geoffrey Tristram
Br. Geoffrey Tristram
John 12: 20-36
‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’. I find our Gospel reading today, on this day, this Tuesday in Holy Week, to be really moving. We are in company with Jesus as he gets ready to die. He is fully prepared. As Son of God he knows that his death will bring life and salvation to the world. But he’s also Son of Man, he is just like us: flesh and blood. He is fearful. ‘Now, my soul is troubled he says’. We hear similar words in the other Gospels, “I am deeply grieved, even to death; (Matthew 26:38)
Each day of this Holy Week, Jesus draws closer to his death. We meditate again on his gracious words and actions, culminating in that glorious final commitment from the Cross, ‘Into your hands O Lord I commend my spirit’. In doing so we can I believe be strengthened to prepare for our own death. Jesus was fully prepared for his death, and we should be too. There is something rather important being said in the Great Litany in the Book of Common Prayer when we pray to be ‘delivered from dying suddenly and unprepared.’ It is good to be ready, to be prepared for when our own death comes. St Francis of Assisi could speak of death as ‘Sister Death’, because she was for him a familiar and welcome companion. It is said of Pope John 23rd -good Pope John- that as he lay dying of a rather terrible stomach cancer, he told his secretary, ‘My bags are packed and ready to go.’ In the Rule of our Society we read, ‘We are called to remember our mortality day by day with unflinching realism, shaking off the sleep of denial.’ (Chapter 48). Death for the Christian is no enemy, is not to be feared, but is rather a kind angel waiting to lead us into the presence of our heavenly Father. Read More
Lovely Be – Br. Luke Ditewig
Br. Luke Ditewig
Palm Sunday
Luke 22:14-23:56
Here we kneel at the tomb once more, watching, waiting, numb, and grieving. We stare at love embodied and remember love received. Our song is love unknown, our Savior’s love—to you, to me—love to the loveless shown that we might lovely be.[i]
Remember love shown to children. Jesus invited: “Let the little children come to me”[ii] that we might lovely be.
Remember love shown to blind Bartimaeus who cried out for mercy. Jesus listened, invited, and healed that we might lovely be.[iii] Read More
Love and betrayal – Br. Geoffrey Tristram
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Today, on this Wednesday in Holy Week, we have just heard read one of the most emotionally charged passages in all the Gospels. In an act of intimate, self-giving love, Jesus has just washed his disciples’ feet. But he then turns from love, to betrayal. We are told, laconically that Jesus is ‘troubled in spirit’; perhaps an understatement. For he has just washed Judas’ feet. Jesus loved Judas, as he did all his disciples. Jesus’ heart likely burned with a deep sorrow at what Judas was about to do.
But love and betrayal exist side by side. And there is a very close parallel between what Jesus did by washing his disciples’ feet, and what Judas was about to do. That parallel is made very clear by one word in the text, and that is the word betrayal. But that is only one translation of the word used by John. In the Greek of the original text, the word translated as ‘betrayal’, is ‘paradidomai’. This literally means ‘to hand over or give over power to another, or to hand over another into the power of another’. Here, that verb is translated as ‘to betray’ because this ‘handing over’ of Jesus by Judas is done treacherously. But elsewhere in the New Testament this very same word is used in a beautiful and loving way. In the letter to the Ephesians for example, we read that Jesus ‘has loved us and given himself for us.’ The same verb, paradidomai. Jesus so loves us that he freely gives himself over to the power of another. And this is what Jesus was expressing so beautifully when he laid aside his robe and washed his disciples’ feet. So great is his love for us that he laid down his divine power and became as a servant; became vulnerable and ‘woundable’. Through love he exposed himself to the power of Judas, he gave himself over to the power of the darkness in men’s hearts, ‘and it was night.’ Read More
United with Christ in Suffering and Glory – Br. Jonathan Maury
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“His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done in him.” (John 12:16)
Beloved, today we begin a second Holy Week in COVID-19 pandemic time. We have prayed for God’s merciful assistance to enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts whereby we have been given life and immortality. (cf. The Book of Common Prayer p. 270) We pray as we do on every Lord’s Day for the showing forth of the Lord Jesus’s death until he comes among us again in glory. (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:26) As disciples in ages past have beheld in awe God’s ‘tender mercy love for the human race’ (BCP p. 219) in Jesus’s suffering and cross, so we do this Palm Sunday.
We continue at present separated in longing by disease and death, grief and loss, fear and uncertainty. Yet we join in hope with those who went out of the holy city of Jerusalem to greet the humble Savior. We raise our cries, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” Together we hail Jesus, the Victor over death and evil, present among us now. Our pilgrimage through suffering is in company with that of God’s beloved Son, Jesus. Though scattered and terrified we are being healed, saved, and the whole world transformed and renewed by his glorious cross and resurrection. Read More