Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Lent 2 C - March 13, 2022
His focus is on the cosmic unfolding of God’s redemption of the world. He sees across the span of Israel’s history, how often they have failed to heed the call to amend their ways, and laments what has been and what is coming. His people’s suffering is a greater cause of sorrow than his own. Two saying fragments are brought together in this reading - the response to Herod and the lament over Jerusalem. They may appear at first glance unrelated and awkwardly connected, but the contrast, the turn that happens in this short reading is very important, especially for our understanding of a holy Lent. We do well to note carefully our Lord’s near approach to Jerusalem, to Holy Week, so that his mind becomes our mind, his concerns our concerns.
Much of the language I internalized and still hear about Lenten discipline is individualized - the giving up or taking on of something as the practice for the forty days. I remember years when Lent for me was little more than a project of my will, a contest against my flesh, the enemy, in the battle with its sinful desires and passions. As good Americans steeped in the ways of individualism and capitalist need-fulfillment, we invariably hear in the invitation to a holy Lent the insistence to try harder. I recently led a Zoom session on prayer for a diocese where participants were asked to share their desires about their prayer practice. Words like “deeper”, “refocus”, “more”, “better”, and “closer” appeared repeatedly. The observation is in no way to demean the sincerity of the desire to pray wholeheartedly. But the distortion in such descriptors is in how prayer is interpreted - the self-criticism of not doing enough becomes the solution of praying more and better prayers to measure up the holiness. It is as if what God desires is always just out of reach, beyond my grasp, and so I must strain farther. Having thus filled myself with piety I will be a better person and Christian. In this view a holy Lent is a measurable and achievable goal of accumulated good works. What if the repentance God invites in Lent is neither achievable nor measurable? What if my individual good work is not the point at all?
Our Lord here in this text is reorienting our individualism, widening our horizons into the realm of the communal and systemic. The theological words relevant here are “principalities and powers” from Ephesians 6. The Baptismal liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer asks the candidates if they “renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God” and if they “renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” A holy Lent concerns more than just me as if in a vacuum. I exist within systems of thought, language, and behavior that act upon me and shape the ways I see myself and the world in profound ways. Jesus names Herod Antipas, but Herod is a symbol for spiritual forces and evil powers. Jesus names Jerusalem, but Jerusalem symbolizes all of Israel, all of its history of violence towards the prophets and those sent to it. Between the violence of oppression and the violence of corrupt hard-heartedness stands Jesus answering both, exposing both, grieving the suffering of both, keenly aware of the end result of the grasp for power and control. The Romans and their co-conspirators believed that violence was the ultimate power and the fear it instilled the ultimate justice. Violence was necessary in the service of the greater good of order. The temple establishment believed that the preservation of customs and rituals exempted them from the prophetic correction. Violence was necessary in the service of the greater good of purity. Jesus will not be swayed by Herod’s threats or deceived by the temple system’s entitlement. By exposing the evil danger of these forces, he can then offer us a way of true community and peace.
A holy Lent, indeed God’s very mission for the Church, is contained in the alternative to both of these suicidal models of community. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…”. That’s it. That’s Lent. And God’s mission for us. So much of what so many churches and ministries do is so important and needed. I know many Episcopalians who welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, comfort the lonely. We are serious about the dignity of every person, the call to justice, the care of God’s creation. May God give us the means and grace to sustain all of that and share the good news with all people. But here, in these words, our Lord’s desire is not for a food drive or a march or a meeting. He is asking us to allow ourselves to be gathered close to him for love’s sake - because he wants us together and close to him. The temple establishment dutifully kept the laws and traditions, carefully observed the sacrifices and festivals and sabbath, were serious about purity and cleanliness. Yet when the prophets declared God’s judgment, they scoffed and when the Messiah - the very Messiah for whom they have waited and hoped these many centuries appeared - they mocked him as he hung on a cross. In their quest to get the outer goodness right, they neglected the purpose of the covenant life, the heart of God’s faithfulness and mercy. They would not be gathered to Jesus because they made the project of holiness their own and believed they could manage it themselves. They succumb to the spiritual forces of self-sufficiency and a spirituality of measurements.
In consenting to be gathered - not based on our own merit or goodness, but in the wonder and poverty of our inherent sacredness as the beloved children of the Lord, we are faced with the loss of our masks of success, the anguish of our pride, the lament for our satisfaction with ourselves in our own eyes. We may finally be given the freedom for our deepest desire - the abandonment of our attachment to our exterior self and the peace of complete surrender, of rest in the wings of Christ. There kept close and loved in the perfection of Christ’s love and the emptiness of our selves, we encounter God’s mercy without condition and without explanation. We love Christ by letting Christ love us, gather us to himself. Doing good works for Christ is not a substitute for being gathered to Christ.
During Lent, it is good to hear a word from St. John of the Cross, so I conclude with this passage from the Dark Night:
“Therefore, O spiritual soul, when you see your desire obscured, your affections arid and constrained, and your faculties bereft of their capacity for any interior exercise, be not afflicted by this, but rather consider it a great happiness, since God is freeing you from yourself and taking the work from your hands. For with those hands, how’s lever well they may serve you, you would never labor so effectively, so perfectly and so securely (because of their clumsiness and uncleanness) as now, when God takes your hand and guides you in the darkness, as though you were blind, to an end and by a way which you know not nor could ever hope to travel with the aid of your own eyes and feet, how so ever good you may be as a walker.”
Amen.
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