Palm Sunday - Mar 29, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC

Palm Sunday B – Sunday, March 29, 2015

Mark 11:1-11 Philippians 2:5-11 Mark 14:1-15:47

An alabaster jar to hold perfumed balms

We stand today at the threshold of Holy Week when the Church remembers and relives the events of Jesus’ passion and resurrection.

But for today, we heard of the passing glory of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on a donkey and we dwelt on some of the events preceding and leading to his passion on the cross.

Throughout this Holy Week, we’ll be invited to remember what Jesus did for the love of God and the love of us, his followers.

I offer you two suggestions for you to consider in your meditations this week:

• First, Jesus’ utter humility
• And second, the women who supported Jesus’ ministry and surrounded him up to the time of his death.

*****

In Mark’s telling of Jesus’ passion, both religious and political authorities collaborate, if uneasily, to get a rebel executed. In the eyes of the religious authorities, Jesus is guilty of identifying himself too closely with God.

In the eyes of the political authorities, Jesus is a troublemaker who has claims to kingship over the Jews. These claims are enough to make Pilate condescend in the end to the religious authorities’ request that Jesus be executed. Despite his doubts, he doesn’t want to be seen as the governor who’s soft on enemies of the state (whether averred or suspected).

Due process was important to Romans when they prosecuted one of their own.  It had little importance when they prosecuted subjects of a far-flung province of the empire.

In having Jesus identified as an enemy of the Roman state, by allegedly claiming that Jesus wants kingship over the Jews, the religious authorities get Pilate to endorse their plan for an execution.

*****

No matter whom it came from, Romans took political opposition to the state seriously and made sure that a gruesome example was made of whomever dared to challenge the state. It was important for the Romans to make a public display of how political opponents were treated. The opponent would be made utterly helpless, would be made to suffer gruesomely and would be completely humiliated.

Crucifixion victims were often first vigorously flogged with whips that included pieces of rock or metal in order to cause deep wounds and extensive bleeding. Many victims would already be in a state of shock by the time the flogging was over. By then, some would be unable to carry their cross to the place of their execution.

At the place of crucifixion, the victim would be stripped of all clothing and nailed naked to the cross for maximum humiliation. Once hung from the cross, death would come painfully and slowly in a state of radical helplessness. As Bart Ehrman puts it, crucifixion for the Romans was a symbolic statement that WE are Roman power and YOU are nothing.

I won’t dwell in any more details on how horrible and humiliating a death this was. But it is important for us Christians to realize how utterly awful and desolating this would be for the victim and for the victim’s loved ones. Christian glorification of Jesus’ death on a Roman cross can tend to make us overlook the humiliation, the pain and the complete helplessness of such a death.

*****

Jesus and his contemporaries would have known of crucifixion. They would have witnessed it themselves, probably a few times. Crucifixion was not uncommon and the Romans intended it to be a spectacle for all to see of what happened to those who crossed Rome. They did want the populace to witness what happened to those who were crucified.

So when the gospel tells us of how Jesus predicted his death on the cross and yet deliberately journeyed towards Jerusalem anyway, we are not speaking of death as a remote and abstract concept. Jesus also knew the gory specifics of what risk he was exposing himself to.

Nonetheless, Jesus decided to continue his announcing the good news of the Kingdom of God well into the domain of his known adversaries, well into Judea and Jerusalem. He considered his peaceful message of announcing the good news important enough to not skirt the risk of a painful and humiliating end.

*****

Mark‘s account of Jesus’ passion shows us extreme humility. Despite his being one with God, Jesus chose to embrace his humanity fully and regardless of the cost in obedience to God’s will. Jesus tried to ask for God’s help to keep his martyrdom away if that was God’s will. The prayers of agony in the Garden of Gethsemane tell us that Jesus fully understood what awaited for him and yet fully trusted God’s will for him to be what he needed to embrace. And what Jesus willingly embraces was the fullness of human suffering up to and including death.

It is this type of humility that we are called to in our own lives. Luckily we are faced with less trying circumstances for most of us, most of the time. But we are called to discern God’s call and answer it even when it displeases or frightens us. We are to pray for the strength to accept God’s will. We can particularly pray to Jesus for such prayer. We can draw strength from the type of humility Jesus models for us throughout the events of the last week of his life. It is a costly humility, no doubt. But humility is part of our call.

*****

And in parallel to Jesus’ absolute humility and abandon to God’s will, I ask you to consider the complete commitment of female disciples to accompany his life, ministry and death.

Because of the prevalent biases of those who wrote the New Testament, we have only glimpses of how women were involved in Jesus’ ministry and life, and they often go unnamed. Mark tells us there were many women at the crucifixion even though he names but three of them.

*****

In Mark’s gospel, the account of Jesus’ passion is preceded by the episode of a woman who comes in the Bethany house where Jesus stays and anoints his head with a jarful of costly ointment. It is a gesture of adoration and abandonment to love. And Jesus himself commends this woman for having anointed his body for burial. He understands what’s upcoming for him and sees the loving beauty of the woman’s gesture.

In Mark’s gospel, after the crucifixion, Jesus’ body is precipitously wrapped in a linen cloth and buried, probably just in time for sundown and the beginning of sabbath. There is no time to wash and anoint his body before the sabbath.

But Mark’s readers remember that a loving female disciple anointed Jesus for burial beforehand. She is to be remembered for her love and her uncanny intuition of what was right and meet to do for her rabbi.

*****

In contrast, the crucifixion is a time of utter helplessness and dereliction for Jesus. Did he perceive the presence of his female disciples at a safe distance from the haggling and torment of the crowd and the soldiers? I hope so.

In any case, those women disciples were the only loved ones who were near. Can you imagine their courage in braving the opprobrium heaped on an enemy of the state at the time of his shameful death? They were Jesus’ only human support though his agony. They knew what was right and meet to do for their rabbi and they dared to do it.

These women question me. Am I willing to do what it takes to abandon myself fully to the love and the will of God? Jesus did it and these women kept following him to the bitter end. Do I have that courage and that stamina?

*****

In this most Holy Week, I invite you to keep at heart Jesus’ utter humility and the women’s indomitable courage and perseverance in the love of God. Have a blessed Holy Week.

Amen.

Annunciation - Mar 25, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Annunciation – Wednesday, March 25 2015

Isaiah 7:10-14 
Hebrews 10:4-10 
Luke 1:26-38

Michelangelo's Pietà in the Vatican's Pavillion
at the New York World's Fair 1964-1965

Some fifty years ago I attended the New York World's Fair in Flushing, Queens. My real goal was to visit the Vatican Pavilion and see Michelangelo's Pieta. It's almost unbelievable that they actually crated up that masterpiece, put it on a ship, and sent it to New York. But such was the power of Cardinal Spellman and his deep pockets. And it was spectacular.

But not far from the Vatican Pavilion was the the Mormon Pavilion, and being even then a religion junkie, I couldn't resist. The building was impressive, at least from the outside, modeled on the facade of the Salt Lake City Temple with a golden Angel Moroni atop blowing his horn. And inside I found dioramas, bad art, handsome and eager young people, and brochures, which I took and read from cover to cover.

I have to say that I was rather struck by their theology. It was, first of all, a great story—lost tribes of Israel, wars in prehistoric Americas, Jesus in the Southwest. It was also tremendously optimistic. As I recall it, according to Mormon teaching we all lived in a previous sphere of life and chose to come to earth to grow and perfect ourselves. And if we played our cards right, we would become gods ourselves, masters of our own planets along with our spouse(s) and our spirit children, who would then repeat the cycle.

What struck me then is what I would now call the meta-narrative or Big Picture that this theology provides. All religions seek to provide a Big Picture, some way to fit in and make sense of our own individual stories, to place them in a larger, more encompassing, indeed an all-encompassing framework of meaning and lending them legitimacy and importance.

I thought of all this again because, as many of you know, I was in Salt Lake City last week for the very first time and got to visit Temple Square and see dioramas and handsome and eager young people very much like those I saw fifty years ago in Queens. And of course the facade—but only the facade—of the real LDS Temple. But more about that later.

Today's feast of the Annunciation invites us to reflect on the story of Jesus and, by extension, on our own stories. And it raises (at least for me) a fascinating question: where do you begin the story, whether it is the story of Jesus or of some other historical character, or our own life narrative?

We see St. Mark in his Gospel beginning with an adult Jesus being baptized by John. And that's a perfectly good way to begin a story: you dive right into the thick of things, right in the middle. And as the story is told, more details are revealed and more connections made, until a network of meaning emerges.

St. Luke in today's Gospel, pushes the story of Jesus back some decades to the achingly beautiful event of the Annunciation—of God's invitation to Mary through the angel Gabriel. We know it so well and love it so much and recall it daily as we pray the Angelus. But as if that were not quite adequate, Luke pushes the story back even further, tracing in Chapter 3 the genealogy of Jesus all the way to Adam, the “son of God.” In this he outdoes even Matthew, who takes the genealogy back—albeit for different reasons—only as far as our father Abraham.

And of course all three Synoptic Gospel writers pale in comparison to John's Gospel, which draws the story of Jesus right back to creation, indeed, back before time itself: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”

So where does the story of Jesus begin? Well, it begins beyond the mists of time and creation and history. It begins from all eternity, in the endless, timeless, loving engendering of the Son out of the Father's heart, out of the very inner nature of the Godhead, who always was and always shall be. And let's face it, as stories of beginnings go, that's a dramatic sweep that's hard to beat. As meta-narrative, it doesn't get any better than this.

But what about us? I want to suggest that while we may not be able to accept the Mormon narrative that we all preexisted and chose to be here—though I'm not sure it contradicts any Christian beliefs—we still have a claim on a grand story that spans history and creation and extends beyond the ages. And that because we are all made in God's image and likeness and through our baptismal transformation are fully identified with Christ—albeit in ways almost totally surpassing our understanding and feeling. So it is that we are now, in some sense, no longer simply identified with Christ but identical with Christ. As St. Paul says, his life has become our life. Or more accurately, our lives have become his. And so in some mysterious but profound way, you and I and, I'd venture to say, all God's people share in the great drama of eternity that is Jesus Christ. What is his is now also ours. As even some of our own theologians and teachers in the faith have been so bold to claim: “Christ became human so that we humans might become divine.” It is what theologians call theosis, the divinizing transformation of the created order. So maybe Joseph Smith wasn't too far off the mark after all.

But does this help any of us? I know it helps me. When someone asks me about my story, my life history, perhaps at the refectory table or in conversation with family or friends, or in therapy, or as I question myself in the middle of those nights when I can't sleep...I tend to have certain tapes or messages [memes] that I play about myself. Maybe it's Robert the good. Or Robert the holy. Or Robert the son of the working poor. Or Robert the scholar. Robert the administrator. Or perhaps even Robert the forgiven sinner. Or Robert the betrayed. Or Robert the betrayer. Robert the victim. Robert the helpless. (Though seldom, I might add, Robert the artist or creator or thrill seeker or adventurer.)

You know these stories, these memes, these tapes. We all have them. They are the tales we have created about ourselves, based on and spun out of the events of our lives, real and imagined. And they have some usefulness, as far as they go. We use them to define who we are. But we also misuse them to limit ourselves. To protect ourselves. To separate ourselves from others. Sometimes even to separate ourselves from our own real life possibilities, or to avoid new life, changed life, converted life. Our stories, even when they bear the marks of truth, are almost always too small, too safe, too domesticated and way too edited.

And here our faith challenges us. Because it tells us through Scripture and myth and symbol and ritual and community that we are each of us created in God's image and incorporated into Christ and thus we share in an eternal destiny, even if at the moment it may appear quite hidden to us. Our story is also always bigger than we imagine.

One week from tomorrow we will gather to begin the annual sacred Three Days, celebrating the Paschal mystery of Christ's dying and rising. It will begin with a reading from the Gospel of St. John where Christ, at the Last Supper, begins to wash his disciples' feet. And he does this, says the Gospel writer, because he knows that he had come from the Father and was going to the Father. (John 12:3) That's Jesus' meta-narrative, his Big Story. And, my friends, that is your story and my story as well. That is the universal Christian meta-narrative, the container, the discourse that frames and makes sense of all our personal stories and memes and tapes and narratives that we repeat to ourselves and each other about ourselves, sometimes ad nauseam. The deepest truth about us is that, like Jesus, we—you and I—come from the Father and are going to the Father. And if we know this, and act on this, we will be blessed.

The young woman Mary knew this full well, and because she did, she was able to say Yes: yes to God's invitation, yes to the joys and pains and glories that were uniquely hers. It is this Yes that we celebrate today.

Pray that we too may also know it and with her say Yes to all that God is doing now in our world and in our communities and in our lives and in our own hearts.

“Mary said: Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”

Yes!

Lent 5 B - Mar 22, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Will Owen, n/OHC

Lent 5 B – Sunday, March 22 2015

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Hebrews 5:5-10

John 12:20-33

The tree of life

I’ve been thinking a lot about judgment recently, particularly as it’s come up in our Lenten gospel readings. This week’s gospel text ends by telling us Now is the judgment of this world. Now the ruler of this world will be driven out. What follows after, which doesn’t make it into the section we read today, is the admonition to walk while we have the light so that the darkness will not overtake us. That light, as we know, is Jesus, who by this point in John’s gospel has turned his face toward Jerusalem and the death he will meet there. By this point in Lent, we have also turned our faces and our hearts in that direction. We notice, too, that this bit about walking while we still have the light links this passage about judgment to the one we read last week. And this is the judgment: that the light has come into the world, and people preferred darkness to light.

When we hear about judgment, it’s hard to escape the image of judgment made famous by that great 18^th century preacher Jonathan Edwards: we are sinners in the hands of an angry God, like a spider dangling over the flames of hell. And even if we reject this image out of hand as based on an antiquated and irrelevant theology, we often try to read the scriptures as if they were law codes or how-to manuals. Okay, how do I get close to Jesus? Sell all that I have and give it to the poor. Check. Okay, how do I follow Jesus? Take up my cross. Check. How do I get God’s love? Confess my sins. Check. But the gospel accounts are not law codes or how-to manuals. No, they’re poetry. And love poetry at that. They’re full of image and metaphor and story. They’re a communication from the source of all life, a love song calling us home from our self-imposed exile. And rather than give us facts and rules, they are meant to convey the incomparable and unbearable prodigality of God’s love for the world. Incomparable because we can’t make any sense of the scope of God’s love with human reason. And unbearable, because God’s love demands a death and a surrender so total that we resist it with everything that we have and are.

Seen in the context of a love poem, judgment ceases to be something fearful and terrible and becomes a supreme act of love, drawing us ever closer to the abundant life that flows from Christ Jesus. Judgment is nothing other than an honest exposition of reality, in this case the reality that God knew and loved us completely even before the creation of the universe and that God continues to do so now, despite the manifold ways that we resist and attempt to sabotage or manipulate that love. In the light of judgment all our resistance to God’s love is exposed and our death is required. We cannot stare into the face of love without dying, and our hearts cannot make space for God’s love without breaking open.

In the exposing light of God’s judgment we see our brokenness for what it is. We glimpse both the depth of God’s love for us and the reality of how often we have made ourselves and others small to escape that love. This is a painful process. When I started visiting the monastery, I would often sit down with one particular brother. As he shared his own experience, he talked a lot about the love he’d known in his life, about God’s love for him and God’s love for me, and his own love for me. My eyes filled with tears. He said to me, “it hurts to be loved.” Not a question, but a recognition. Yes, it does. It hurts to know ourselves loved without having earned it or deserved it, for no reason at all other than because we exist. The revelation of that dynamic through the light of love—that’s all judgment is.

We cannot earn God’s love, nor do we need to. God’s love for us is more fundamental than the air we breathe, closer than our heartbeat. Seeing the reality of God’s love for us and the ways we resist it allows us to take responsibility for our own broken hearts and to move more deeply into them. When we move into those broken hearts we will find Jesus there: Jesus on the Cross, on the Golgotha of our broken hearts. He has been there all along, and we never knew it. He’s been there, hurting as we hurt, loving us from the beginning to the end of all existence, inviting us to join him in his death, in our deaths, the death of all our running away, all our resistance, all our insistence on earning love, all our self-will, the annihilation of our false self, so that we may join him in the abundance of his life.

Drawing on an image reminiscent of our gospel text today, the fourth century poet and hymnodist St. Ephrem the Syrian, in one of his poems on virginity, says that the Tree of Life, in the midst of the Garden of Eden, “saw that Adam had stolen” the fruit and “sank into the virgin ground / and was hidden / —but burst forth and reappeared on Golgotha.” Seen in this way, the Cross is none other than the Tree of Life that once grew at the center of paradise. It grows up out of the ground once more to cradle the body of Christ. When that precious body touches the dead wood of the Cross, the Cross bursts forth into fruit and flower, revealed for what it truly is: that Tree of Life. Another Orthodox theologian, David the Invincible, writing two hundred years after Ephrem, picks up the theme: “Blessed are you, Holy Wood, crowned by Christ, / that grew on earth, yet spreading your arms rose / above the arches of the highest heavens, / and brought forth and carried upon yourself / the imponderable fruit! / […] You flowered in the stock of Israel / and the whole earth was filled with your fruits.”

Just as the dead wood of the Cross becomes for us the Tree of Life, so the light of God’s judgment reveals our broken hearts to be the new Golgotha, sanctified places where Christ dwells eternally within us, bearing the fruit of new and abundant life, fruit for us and fruit for the world. This is the meaning of resurrection; this is the new life God promises us; and this is the awesome power of God’s love for us and the whole creation—not that our hearts will never break, not that we will never know death, but that through our hearts breaking and through our own dying to ourselves, the very places within us that are most barren and empty will become the fertile ground of our and the world’s most abundant life. This Lent, in the light of God’s loving judgment, may we, like that grain of wheat, die and rise to bear fruit for the world.

St Joseph - Mar 19, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Roy Parker, OHC

St Joseph – Thursday, March 19, 2015

2 Samuel 7:4, 8-16

Romans 4:13-18

Luke 2:41-52

Jesus and Joseph working together

This will be in three parts.

(1) Dispelling the notion of Joseph as an impotent old man.

(2) Bernardine of Sienaʼs Testimonial.

(3) Apprenticeship as a Medium of the Silence between Joseph and Jesus.

1. Dispelling the Notion of an Impotent Joseph

Regarding what Iʼll call the Hallmark legend of St. Joseph, the art critic Waldemar Januszak emphasizes the preponderance of Josephʼs representation as an old man and sees this as the need “to explain away his impotence: indeed to symbolize it. In Guido Reniʼs Nativity, Mary is about fifteen, and he is about seventy - for the real love affair is between the Virgin Mary and us. She is young, she is perfect, she is virginal - it is Josephʼs task to stand aside and let us desire her, religiously. 

It takes a particularly old, a particularly grey, a particularly kindly and a particularly feeble man to do that. It takes a Joseph. Banished in vast numbers to the backgrounds of all those gloomy stables in all those ersatz Bethlehems, his complex iconographic task is to stand aside and let his wife be worshipped by the rest of us. He is Godʼs cuckold. And art has no choice but to point this out - while, of course, appearing not to.”

Au Contraire! Most obviously a particularly old, a particularly grey, a particularly kindly and a particularly feeble man would simply not have the chops to be the patriarch of a household, to own & operate a going carpentry enterprise, to organize everything and slip out of town by night with an expectant mother, and to avoid bandits throughout the round trip, not to mention pitching camp somewhere in Egypt. Sounds to me more like Clint Eastwood.

2. Bernardine of Sienaʼs Testimonial

The book “Celebrating the Saints” has the following testimonial to Joseph by Bernadine of Siena: “ . . . Christ cannot deny to Joseph the same intimacy, respect and high dignity which he gave him on earth, as a son to his father. We should rejoice that in heaven Christ completes and perfects all that he gave to Joseph in Nazareth.” But in Jerusalem Maryʼs verbal dope slap to her son counters this: “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you with great anxiety.” Alternately, “Son, you may have won an Emmy for your Bar-Mitzvah, but that doesnʼt excuse this stupidity.”

Bernadine of Siena thinks Joseph and Jesus had a model relationship, but the cheekiness of the precocious and gifted son is already pointing to the problems of his hormone-laden teenage years. On the other hand he might also have said to his parents, “Have I been with you these twelve years and you still couldnʼt divine where I was likely to be?”

3. Apprenticeship as a Medium of the Silence between Jesus and his Carpenter Father

Joseph, of course, is among the few blessed of whom nothing is supposedly known beyond the sparse NT record, but there has been a presumed discovery in the apocryphal Gospel of the Childhood of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Peter which testifies that Joseph was Grand Master of Local 19 of the Nazareth Carpentry and Cabinet Makersʼ Union. As such he was a master of the apprentice training technique by which candidates practiced a method of ego-disablement which connected them more immediately and effectively to their work at hand while also erasing concern about the results of the work.

This training in ego-disablement, therefore, would have been part of his young sonʼs apprenticeship in the family livelihood, incorporating significant periods of what would today be called sitting meditation combined with tool manipulation.

Hence the cultivation of non-verbal communication between master and student which might explain the curious silence between Joseph and Jesus on this occasion of the Temple Incident. 

Lent 3 B - Mar 8, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Peter Rostron, OHC

Lent 3 B – Sunday, March 8, 2015


Exodus 20:1-17

1 Corinthians 1:18-25 
John 2:13-22

The Cleansing of the Temple

In John’s gospel, the story of the cleansing of the Temple occurs at the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry, whereas in the three synoptic gospels it occurs near the end, just days before his crucifixion. Placing it there, just after the miracle at Cana - the first of Jesus’s signs of his glory - and just before his encounter with Nicodemus - in which Jesus spoke at length of being born from above, of eternal life, and of his own being as Savior - reflects John’s emphasis on Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, on the divinity of Jesus. John alone also puts Jesus in Jerusalem early and often in his gospel, in the Holy City that Jews considered to be the very center of the world and of God’s power on earth. In his gospel, John invites us to focus especially on the fully divine Jesus, Jesus as the eternal word of God.

So as we listen to John tell us about Jesus cleansing the Temple, angrily overturning the tables of the money changers and driving out the sacrificial animals and their vendors, we know that the message being delivered to us is central to Jesus’s ministry and that it is from God. God is not pleased with how the people are treating his Temple, the dwelling place that they had made for him on earth. The Temple had become a place for the rich and powerful, for those with status and influence, not a place for the poor and disenfranchised, nor for the pilgrim who might be making a long journey to celebrate a Feast in Jerusalem. The succession of courts surrounding the Holy of Holies in the center of the Temple grew increasingly restrictive as one moved from the outermost Court of the Gentiles to the innermost Court of the Priests. It was that outermost court that held the animals and the money-changers, so that most visitors would have found quiet prayer to be near impossible because of the commotion. 

Not only was the Temple symbolic of the stratification of society at the time, but it actually functioned as a sort of national bank, with money and material goods being stored there. Those who wished to pay their obligatory Temple tax had to change their money from one of the many national currencies in use to the local currency accepted by the Temple, and they had to pay a commission to do so. And those who wished to offer sacrifice had to purchase the animal at the Temple, at inflated prices. Jesus’s shocking action in the Temple reflects his desire to shatter all these profane and greedy practices that were desecrating the sanctuary of God. He was also making a statement that the act of animal sacrifice was not what God wished from his people. In this story that John gives a prominent place in his gospel, Jesus - God-made-human -  was boldly declaring an end to the Temple as people knew it and the beginning of something totally new.

This is only the first part of John’s story, however. The second part is the reaction of those who witnessed this event. This part is unique to John’s version, and it is yet another indication of his particular focus on the divinity of Jesus. The authorities demanded a sign, that is, an indication of what gave Jesus the authority to do what he had just done. The boldness of his act could mean that he was the expected Messiah, for it was understood that the Messiah would make himself known through the performance of signs and wonders. Jesus responded to them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” But, as often was the case, the authorities did not understand what Jesus was saying, that he was referring to his own body and not to a building. In that short sentence, Jesus was revealing his divine nature to the world, that he would be crucified and resurrected, and that he is to become the new Temple of God. And, by extension, that the whole world is to become God’s Temple, as members of the body of Christ.

The disciples’ reaction, on the other hand, was quite different from that of the authorities. They immediately sensed the presence of the Messiah before them in remembering a phrase from Psalm 69: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” This psalm was understood by the Jews of the day to be a reference to the Messiah, and to them the dramatic act they had just witnessed was certainly the act of one who was consumed with zeal for his father’s house. It is this phrase that really captured my attention as I prayed with this reading over the past few weeks. And, in particular, those two words - zeal and consume - struck me. I consulted Webster’s dictionary, which informed me that zeal is “eagerness and ardent interest in pursuit of something,” and that a synonym for zeal is passion. And for the word ardent Webster lists fiery, hot, shining, and glowing. 

So, indeed, this phrase from Psalm 69 seems an apt description for Jesus; he most certainly was consumed with zeal for his father’s - for his - house. But what about me, and you? Do I live my life as a Christian, and as a monk - and you, whatever your vocation - with zeal? Do we let our love of God, of Christ, consume us? Do we fully turn ourselves over to God’s love as the driving force in all that we do? These aren’t easy questions, and they are perhaps even a bit scary to imagine saying an unequivocal yes to, but they did strike me as good questions for Lent, this season when we are prompted to self-examination, to an extra measure of prayer, to repentance, and to re-establishing a right relationship with God.

That one, intriguing phrase from Psalm 69 inspired me to go and read the entire psalm, which only intensified my thoughts about how the disciples saw this man Jesus in the Temple and about how I am spending these days of Lent with him. I will read just a few verses from that psalm, and, as you listen, hear the voice of the Messiah speaking to God:

It is zeal for your house that has consumed me; the insults of those
who insult you have fallen on me.
When I humbled my soul with fasting, they insulted me for doing so.
When I made sackcloth my clothing, I became a byword to them.
I am the subject of gossip for those who sit in the gate, and the
drunkards make songs about me.
But as for me, my prayer is to you, O Lord. At an acceptable time, O
God, in the abundance of your steadfast love, answer me.

I imagined Jesus uttering those last words in his prayer at Gethsemane. And an image came to my mind of Jesus humbling his soul with fasting during his forty days in the wilderness just after his baptism and as the enormity of his mission unfolded before him. All these images - of Jesus in his zeal in the Temple, consumed by passion for his father; being driven into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit; sitting in profound humility and prayer in the garden - sprang from John’s rich telling of Jesus cleansing the Temple and from his tiny reference to a psalm. John’s words and images have enlivened my experience of Lent, helping me draw closer to Jesus in his journey to the cross. May you also find John’s words inspiring for your own Lenten journey, and, ultimately, may we all be led to share in the zeal of Christ as inhabitants and caretakers and worshipers in his new Temple.

Lent 2 B - Mar 1, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Lent 2 B – Sunday, February 22, 2015

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38

Pick up your cross and follow me

What Peter’s response was after Jesus rebuked him, Mark doesn’t tell us. But we do know that Peter had already acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah in the beginning of this chapter. Jesus had asked the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” and then he asked, “Who do you say that I am?” “You are the Messiah,” said Peter. Then Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone about him. A few verses later, Jesus tells his followers again, and more openly, that he will suffer and die, but for the first time he explains why.

He uses the image of the cross. The people of his time would have understood this reference better than we do today. Romans used the cross for execution. Crucifixion was terrifying and humiliating---a control freak’s nightmare: stretched out, bound, and naked, unable to care for our own basic needs, hours in unrelieved pain, people mocking, all the while knowing that you’re dying. It emphasized every aspect of our vulnerability as a human being. In 6CE the Romans crucified two thousand insurrectionists in Galilee, where Jesus grew up. Imagine the impression that two thousand crucified men must have made on the young Jesus. The people knew exactly what it meant to take up the cross. When Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem, he knows that this is what it will come to. He chooses this vulnerability. He chooses obedience and courage and tells the disciples that if they’re to follow him, they must choose this too. 

We often refer to the cross as something we personally carry in life---a sickness, a difficulty, a problem, or even a person. This isn’t what Jesus is talking about here. What he’s talking about is discipleship. He is laying out the cost of discipleship. He reminds us that “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose it will save it.” If we are serious, really serious, about being Jesus’ disciples, then we will lose our lives, as we know them. He isn’t saying we might lose it, but we will lose it. Life will be different. We won’t fit into the world in the same way. 

The idea of a vulnerable, suffering God is as unacceptable to us as it was to Peter. Peter saw the Messiah as an invincible war hero who would lead the Jewish people to freedom and protect their vulnerability. The Church itself, once it was part of the Roman establishment, was embarrassed by the powerless One, Jesus. They had to make his obvious defeat into a victorious triumph by gilding the cross and covering his wounds with imperial robes, just like the emperor’s. 

Aren’t we all like Peter in our own way? We want a Messiah who will save us from all that threatens us, including those parts of ourselves we would like to do without---a tame Messiah who will come when we call, and keep the bad things at bay. Who wants to be like Jesus on the cross, the very icon of powerlessness? Our human tendency is to remake Christ in our own image, rather than letting ourselves be transformed into his image. We want to be winners, not losers, we want to be powerful and on top. Our impulse to dictate these terms comes from our shadow self.  Blinded by our prejudices, presuppositions, and preconceptions of the way things must be, we arrogantly assume that we know what must be done. Those on the margins of the social and economic success systems we create represent that which we fear and most deny within ourselves.  We make them the enemy, which is why we must learn to love the enemy, if we are ever to be whole. 

The image of losing our lives isn’t only physical, though many of our sisters and brothers around the world pay the price with their blood as martyrs. One day we will all confront physical death, but there are many smaller deaths awaiting us on this road of transformation and conversion.  Most of us will be the “white martyrs” of early monasticism in the daily faithfulness to our small deaths in our continued conversion. We will face the death of our pride, of our comfortable ideas of who God is, of what God is calling us to be and to do.

Richard Rohr recently posted a meditation in which he wrote that no doctrine or dogma has ever converted anyone. He wrote, “We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living; we live ourselves into a new way of thinking.” One of the most transformative experiences is entering into some kind of solidarity with the powerless. I found that in my years of work with our youth in South Africa. A year and a half after returning, it still serves as a catalyst for conversion for me. This gospel lesson is full of truth that is hard for us to hear. High hopes are dashed with the prediction of defeat, arrest, execution, and loss.

It had immediate relevance for Mark’s community, which was persecuted and powerless. For them the message was clear: the way to salvation, to wholeness, is through faithful endurance not avoidance. Denying oneself has significance even when not undergoing persecution. At its most basic level it means removing oneself from the center of one’s concerns, relinquishing status and power in favor of transformation and service to others. Discipleship is costly, and the urge to take Jesus aside and rebuke him as Peter did, can make more and more sense to us. Of course we don’t rebuke Jesus with our words. Our rebukes are of a kinder, gentler nature. We respond with benign neglect or insipid indifference to him and to those who are most vulnerable.

As long as self reigns, we will forever seek cheap, painless shortcuts to the kingdom. We will try to substitute another way for the way of the cross. But only when we deny self and take up the cross can we follow Jesus. All of our attempts to save our lives are futile. All our efforts to make another way are a denial of the One who showed us the way. True discipleship is when we are finally willing to accept Jesus for who he is, the Vulnerable and Suffering One who lays down his life for others. Only then can we understand who we are to be. As God came to be fully human in Jesus, so we too, understand what it means to be fully human through Jesus. The cross reminds us that faith is not certainty, hope is not optimism, and love is not painless. 

+Amen.