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
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| 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 18th
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.
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