Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
The Rev. Janet Vincent
Good Friday - April 15, 2022
Showing posts with label Good Friday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Good Friday. Show all posts
Saturday, April 16, 2022
Saturday, April 3, 2021
Good Friday - April 2, 2021
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC
Good Friday - Friday, April , 2021
It is not at his birth, not in his teaching and preaching, not through the miracles he performs, not at his resurrection that Jesus is the most human and most identified with us, but in his perfect sacrifice, in his suffering and dying in solidarity with all who suffer. Through Jesus on the cross God enters that vulnerable place of the fears, loneliness and brokenness we hold secret; where we are afraid to be known and yet afraid not to be known. Through Jesus on the cross, who in the despair of abandonment cries “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, God is revealed, not as powerful, almighty and conqueror, but as Richard Kearney puts it, as the “vulnerable and powerless one who suffers with us” (in "Anatheism: Returning to God After God"). Through Jesus on the cross, who from the goodness of the heart pleads “Forgiven them”, God is revealed as loving, compassionate and faithful.
It is from the Cross that Love echoes the sorrow, suffering and emptiness of the brokenhearted, the sick, the marginalized; the very people that the powerful of this world oppress and exploit through greed and wealth. But it is also from the Cross that Love echoes the triumph of the human spirit through Grace.
I want to share a story about one of these voices of triumph read by our beloved Br. Andrew on this day years ago. It came from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in 1996. The Commission brought an elderly black woman face to face with the white man, Mr. Van de Broek, who had confessed to the savage torture and murder of her son and her husband a few years earlier. The woman had been made to witness her husband’s death. The last words her husband spoke were “Father, forgive them.”
One of the members of the commission turned to her and asked, “How do you believe justice should be done to this man who has inflicted such suffering on you and so brutally destroyed your family?”
The old woman replied, “I want three things. I want first to be taken to the place where my husband’s body was burned so that I can gather up the dust and give his remains a decent burial.” She stopped, collected herself, and then went on. “My husband and son were my only family. I want, secondly, therefore, for Mr. Van de Broek to become my son. I would like for him to come twice a month to the location and spend a day with me so that I can pour out to him whatever love I have still remaining in me.
And finally, I want a third thing. I would like Mr. Van de Broek to know that I offer him my forgiveness because Jesus died to forgive. This was also the wish of my husband. And so, I would kindly ask someone to come to my side and lead me across the courtroom so that I can take Mr. Van de Broek in my arms, embrace him and let him know that he is truly forgiven.
The assistants came to help the old woman across the room. Mr. Van de Broek, overwhelmed by what he had just heard, fainted. And as he did, those in the courtroom—friends, family, neighbors, all victims of decades of oppression and injustice—began to sing “Amazing Grace.”
Never had the message of the cross been clearer to me than when I heard this story. The fear, the hunger for power, the rejection of truth, and the sin that led to Jesus’ crucifixion are as present today as they were then. But the message of the cross teaches us how we are to respond. What the cross reveals is not just information or news. The invitation of the cross demands our participation in a new reality and a new way of being. It invites us to move from brokenness to wholeness and life triumphant through love.
Demos gracias a Dios.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Good Friday - April 10, 2020
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Good Friday - April 10, 2020
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42
No audio recording is available for this sermon.
Most visual art aspires to create something for the viewer who is the other. The art is for the viewer. We look at a painting, for example, and enter into the world it presents to us from the safe and objective distance of outside. The boundaries of time and space are fixed and familiar because I know as a viewer I am not in the presence of the actual Mona Lisa, I am not really among Monet’s water lilies or gazing at Van Gogh’s starry night. I look at their beauty, but I can only look and imagine.
The photo below, Christ on the Living Cross, 1420-30, by the Master of Saint Veronica, is doing something quite different. This depiction is one of many of a similar motif of Christian art that changes the nature of observer and observed, transcending the categories of time and space, and makes the event, the crucifixion, of a different category than historical memory.
We are not just looking into this scene. For the artist the cross is a present reality, and thereby explicitly Eucharistic. The chalice is the one chalice that receives from the side of Christ the one flow of blood and water that with the bread of Christ’s flesh makes the Church. The crucifixion is an eternal now, which is exactly what the Church says about the Holy Eucharist. Christ is risen, yet ever crucified.
The artist is shifting the artistic relationship from for to with. It is good and right to say that Jesus died for us. He is subject and we are object. His death is a gracious self-offering and atonement on our behalf. But Jesus also dies with us. With is about relationship, presence. With makes us participants in the action. With is the preposition of empathy, of being on the same side, of close association. With is about joining in, being together. The painting places the dying Jesus with us and we with him at a particular moment in the story.
John alone among the Gospels recounts the piercing with the sword and the flow of blood and water. This is John doing what John does – lifting the ordinary physical to the level of cosmic metaphor. This mere blood and water are no ordinary blood and water. In both the Matins and Vespers hymn for Lent B in our Breviary, reference is made to the sword-pierced side. The lyrics evocatively state what is birthed in that moment:
Christ does not just tell us about life, but his very life is poured out onto our lives. In the trampling down of death by death, Jesus’ very flesh itself is the answer to the question, “is hope lost?” In John, the cross is the glory, the apocalypse, the exaltation, the undeniable truth of the presence of life. Crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are one glorifying, simultaneous moment in which dying is also always rising and ascending, and rising and ascending are also by the one who ever bears the marks of the nails and the scar of the sword. Life arises out of this blood and water, out of the absolutely certain sign of death. A life of self-giving love gives in its last gift the seal and promise of eternal life. This free flow, which flows still, is the source of all life.
Behold his broken body and his spilt blood! Do not think it is over there, away from you, long ago, that you are safe from it, that you can hide. No, the Lord draws, drags all things, even us, to himself on the cross. His shattered arms stretch East to West, his limp body North to South.
The days of Holy Week have coincided with the greatest number of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic. Physical, financial, and spiritual suffering has become very real for very many. Our distance from family, friends, and guests is felt in an absence and silence thrust upon us – less retreat and more vacuum. Today we as a community have decided to refrain from receiving Communion from the Reserved Sacrament in a break from our custom and in remembrance of the sick and dying and those who mourn and in solidarity with those who are not able to receive communion right now. We are praying for you. To our guests, we miss you. We await our joyful reunion. We need, we call upon Jesus who is with us and suffers with the suffering and dying in these days.
Receiving Communion has been such an unquestioningly central part of our lives that in its very regularity I too often take it for granted or allow the lukewarm boredom of repetition to creep in. While our daily liturgical rhythm has not much changed until today, may the absence of Communion be more than a blank space in the liturgy, but awaken us and enliven us to its mystery and change our hearts so that we may desire and receive its gift of grace ever more deeply – with ever more gratitude, wonder, commitment. In whatever way God begins to direct the evil of this virus toward the good - within us, our community, the larger church - however God prompts us to participate in and witness to what transformation may come, may we know Jesus with us and watch close to the wounded, torn, broken side from which comes our life and keep the Crucified One ever before our eyes. Amen.
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Good Friday - April 10, 2020
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42
No audio recording is available for this sermon.
The photo below, Christ on the Living Cross, 1420-30, by the Master of Saint Veronica, is doing something quite different. This depiction is one of many of a similar motif of Christian art that changes the nature of observer and observed, transcending the categories of time and space, and makes the event, the crucifixion, of a different category than historical memory.
 |
| Christ on the Living Cross (ca.1420-30) |
We are not just looking into this scene. For the artist the cross is a present reality, and thereby explicitly Eucharistic. The chalice is the one chalice that receives from the side of Christ the one flow of blood and water that with the bread of Christ’s flesh makes the Church. The crucifixion is an eternal now, which is exactly what the Church says about the Holy Eucharist. Christ is risen, yet ever crucified.
The artist is shifting the artistic relationship from for to with. It is good and right to say that Jesus died for us. He is subject and we are object. His death is a gracious self-offering and atonement on our behalf. But Jesus also dies with us. With is about relationship, presence. With makes us participants in the action. With is the preposition of empathy, of being on the same side, of close association. With is about joining in, being together. The painting places the dying Jesus with us and we with him at a particular moment in the story.
John alone among the Gospels recounts the piercing with the sword and the flow of blood and water. This is John doing what John does – lifting the ordinary physical to the level of cosmic metaphor. This mere blood and water are no ordinary blood and water. In both the Matins and Vespers hymn for Lent B in our Breviary, reference is made to the sword-pierced side. The lyrics evocatively state what is birthed in that moment:
He endured the nails, the spitting, vinegar and spear and reed;Is it surprising that the whole cosmos shudders at this mystery? Golgotha is the second Big Bang of creation. Behold the majesty of God’s greatness. The uttermost evil and cruelty that could be inflicted on flesh and muscle and nerve becomes the occasion and revelation of God’s greatest glory. The event of deepest sorrow and pain gives life and light and movement to all things. The cross is the foundation and fountain of the world. It holds the stars in their courses, moves every heartbeat. The word became flesh, one of us, while retaining his divinity, with the same weariness in his bones, the same hunger in his gut, the same thirst in his throat, the same craving for oxygen in his lungs, with the same affliction of mind such as ours, with the same awareness that his continued embodied existence is beyond his control. At Vespers we sing:
From that holy body broken blood and water forth proceed;
Earth and stars and sky and ocean by that flood from stain are freed.
Where from that wound deep in his side, by cruel lance torn open wideBaptism now joins into the dance of images. From the depth of the desolation and despair of the cross break forth the springs of eternal life in Baptism and Eucharist. This blood and water continuously flow. All the water of baptism comes from the side of Christ. All the blood of the Eucharist comes from the side of Christ. Christ gave compassion and mercy, he gave wisdom and judgment, he gave of himself to all, and yet he gives more.
Both blood and water, flowing free, have washed away iniquity.
Christ does not just tell us about life, but his very life is poured out onto our lives. In the trampling down of death by death, Jesus’ very flesh itself is the answer to the question, “is hope lost?” In John, the cross is the glory, the apocalypse, the exaltation, the undeniable truth of the presence of life. Crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are one glorifying, simultaneous moment in which dying is also always rising and ascending, and rising and ascending are also by the one who ever bears the marks of the nails and the scar of the sword. Life arises out of this blood and water, out of the absolutely certain sign of death. A life of self-giving love gives in its last gift the seal and promise of eternal life. This free flow, which flows still, is the source of all life.
Behold his broken body and his spilt blood! Do not think it is over there, away from you, long ago, that you are safe from it, that you can hide. No, the Lord draws, drags all things, even us, to himself on the cross. His shattered arms stretch East to West, his limp body North to South.
The days of Holy Week have coincided with the greatest number of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic. Physical, financial, and spiritual suffering has become very real for very many. Our distance from family, friends, and guests is felt in an absence and silence thrust upon us – less retreat and more vacuum. Today we as a community have decided to refrain from receiving Communion from the Reserved Sacrament in a break from our custom and in remembrance of the sick and dying and those who mourn and in solidarity with those who are not able to receive communion right now. We are praying for you. To our guests, we miss you. We await our joyful reunion. We need, we call upon Jesus who is with us and suffers with the suffering and dying in these days.
Receiving Communion has been such an unquestioningly central part of our lives that in its very regularity I too often take it for granted or allow the lukewarm boredom of repetition to creep in. While our daily liturgical rhythm has not much changed until today, may the absence of Communion be more than a blank space in the liturgy, but awaken us and enliven us to its mystery and change our hearts so that we may desire and receive its gift of grace ever more deeply – with ever more gratitude, wonder, commitment. In whatever way God begins to direct the evil of this virus toward the good - within us, our community, the larger church - however God prompts us to participate in and witness to what transformation may come, may we know Jesus with us and watch close to the wounded, torn, broken side from which comes our life and keep the Crucified One ever before our eyes. Amen.
Saturday, April 20, 2019
Good Friday - Friday, April 19, 2019
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Rev. Matthew Wright, CRC
Good Friday - Friday, April 19, 2019
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42
Click here for an audio version of the sermon.
Good Friday - Friday, April 19, 2019
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42
Click here for an audio version of the sermon.
“It is finished.” These are Jesus’ final words in John’s account of the Passion that we’ve just heard. In Latin, this is Consummatum est—It is consummated. Today, Good Friday, is the consummation of the marriage of heaven and earth; the consummation of the union Jesus has been living into, and out of, throughout his ministry. Today, Jesus’ laboring on the Cross is his final great act of lovemaking with the world.
And we, the Church, have created some truly horrible theologies around this final act—that it was payment to a wrathful god; that Jesus took the beating we deserve. John Dominic Crossan says that most of our so-called “atonement theology” amounts to little more than “cosmic child-abuse.” But we only stray down those dead-end roads when fail to miss the note of cosmic love in which Jesus’ whole life is sung and offered; when we fail to recognize the God of Love he reveals in his living, and today, in the consummation of his life, in his dying.
In this final great act of lovemaking, in Jesus’ dying, he quickens a new kind of human life, a new possibility. Bred into all of us, as our evolutionary baggage, is a survival-of-the-fittest instinct or tendency; we all come into the world with deeply programmed fight-or-flight responses. And this programming, helpful as it has been in our evolutionary history, leads us to all manner of division, separation, and tribalism within the human family today. It’s our essential tendency to “other”—to make of someone else an object of competition; an enemy. It’s a way of seeing the world governed by our primitive hindbrain—what scientists often call our “reptilian” or “lizard brain.”
And while we can thank this “lizard brain” for bringing us this far in humanity’s unfolding, we nevertheless see in Jesus an effort at every turn to overcome this kneejerk tendency to “other” and to replace it instead with a different possibility: upholding the Samaritan (heretic) as a model of godliness; finding great faith in a (pagan) Roman centurion; looking and loving outside of the lines and beyond the boundaries; pushing his disciples to see not from fear and separation, but from our essential unity.
Last night, Maundy Thursday—knowing that he’s about to die—Jesus prayed to the Father, “May they all be one, as you and I are one.” May they all make this leap beyond fear and division. And he then bears that seeing from oneness all the way down to his dying breath. Perhaps this is what we really mean when we speak of “the Atonement”—which, of course, etymologically simply means “at-one-ment”: making one.
Can love, can seeing from oneness, be held even into our moments of greatest fear, greatest contraction—held down into the world’s deepest darkness and suffering? Can all of it be included in love? Or will even Jesus retreat at the last (as we most likely would) into his primitive fear-centers and curse those who would kill him? We could understand it if he did. We would probably even forgive it. In fact, we might be comforted by it. But then the new possibility, the new life he brings, would not have been consummated—would not have been quickened in the heart of the world.
Jesus’ path all along has been a path of self-emptying, outpoured love; of what St. Paul calls kenosis. Can Jesus hold true to that path, even today, betrayed, suffering, and crucified? Luke tells us that among his dying words were these, spoken for his murderers: “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Every act of fear, hate, betrayal, of selfishness, of othering, Jesus sees is simply an act of ignorance—because when we truly know… as Jesus did—when we truly know that we’re not separate, all that’s left is love.
Jesus holds true to the path; he does not judge or blame or other. He holds the seeing; he stays rooted and grounded and dies in love. This is Atonement, at-one-ment. I don’t think anyone has ever better understood or expressed the meaning of this reality than Julian of Norwich, that great 14th century mystic, who following her visions of the Crucified Christ wrote:
“Here saw I a great one-ing between Christ and us, to mine understanding: for when He was in pain, we were in pain. And all creatures that might suffer pain, suffered with Him. The love of God creates in us such a oneing that when it is truly seen, no person can separate themselves from another. In the sight of God, we are all oned, and one person is all people and all people are one person.”Jesus looks with these eyes, with this seeing, as he dies. It is consummated; his lovemaking is complete. He dies and the seed of his life falls into the ground. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a seed, a grain of wheat, falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).
Today, with this Consummatum est, the seed of heaven falls into the womb of the earth, and something new is conceived. A new kind of life. A new kind of human being. A human being who refuses to give in to fear or hatred or othering. In fully consummating this possibility, Jesus opens it for all of us.
That great Christian mystic of recent years, Beatrice Bruteau, wrote that “Christ is the ‘first mutant,’ who passes his ‘genes’ or form of life to those who come after him.” Kenosis lived to the hilt, self-emptying in unjudging love, seeing from unity down to one’s dying breath, is now planted as a fully consummated, fully realized possibility within the DNA of the human family.
Some of you may know the writings of Caryll Houselander, a Roman Catholic mystic, author, poet who died in the 1950s. She captures the mystery beautifully:
“[When Christ died] the whole world was sown with the seed of Christ’s life; that which happened thirty years ago in the womb of the Virgin Mother was happening now, but now it was happening yet more secretly, yet more mysteriously, in the womb of the whole world. Christ had already told those who flocked to hear Him preach that the seed must fall into the earth, or else remain by itself alone. Now the seed of His life was hidden in darkness in order that His life should quicken in countless hearts, over and over again for all time. His [death], which seemed to be the end, was the beginning. It was the beginning of Christ-life in multitudes of souls.”This is what is happening in the darkness of Good Friday. Look past the fear and the hatred and the ignorance charging through and around the events of this day. They’re all a distraction from what’s really going on. Jesus isn’t paying-off an angry god, or offering himself in order to make you feel bad about yourself. Rather, in the words of Cynthia Bourgeault,
“Jesus’ real purpose in this sacrifice was to wager his own life against his core conviction that love is stronger than death, and that the laying down of self which is the essence of this love leads not to death, but to life. . . . [The Paschal Mystery reminds] us that it is not only possible but imperative to fall through fear into love because that is the only way we will ever truly know what it means to be alive.”Consummatum est. Today, Good Friday, it is consummated. On the Cross Jesus draws all the world to himself in one great and final act of lovemaking. A new pattern is completed and a new humanity conceived. And so, may the mutation continue! May this love, sown today in the womb of the world, be quickened in all our hearts.
The last words I give to Lady Julian:
“Would you know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold fast to this and you will know and understand more of the same; but you will never understand or know from it anything else, for all eternity.”Amen.
Friday, April 6, 2012
Good Friday - Apr 6, 2012
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Good Friday - Friday, April 6, 2012
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25 or
John 18:1-19:42
We have just heard and experienced a profound expression of the Passion story and I feel like the gild on the lily standing up to preach as if I could say it better. But needs must…
It was the Triduum and the Great Vigil of Easter that clinched my journey into the Catholic tradition. So much of what had been my faith experience had fed my head quite beautifully and fully but mystery tantalized me and drew me beyond my understanding.
That journey has continued: it continues today. In this mystery God draws us beyond what our minds can fathom to a depth that can’t be uttered. It leads to a place within us where we stand with deep longing; a place where we fear to be known and yet fear that we are not known. God has entered that place in the Incarnation and knows these very fears and loneliness and silence that we hold secret.
Each utterance of Jesus from the Cross is a human cry – from the goodness of the heart comes the cry of “Forgiven them”; from the emptiness of the forgotten ones comes the despair of abandonment. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
In this liturgy, we are not celebrating only a transcendent Godhead wonderful in the heavens. We are enraptured by the incarnate love of God in a human, suffering soul. Glory is to come but on this day God echoes the cries of the broken and lonely hearts spurned and mocked by greed, power and wealth. These cries speak of sorrow, suffering and emptiness. But they speak, too, of the triumph of the human spirit through Grace.
I want to read a story about one of these voices of triumph. It came from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and it’s only one of hundreds such stories.
The Commission brought an elderly black woman face to face with the white man, Mr. Van de Broek, who had confessed to the savage torture and murder of her son and her husband a few years earlier. The old woman had been made to witness her husband’s death. The last words her husband spoke were “Father, forgive them.”
One of the members of the commission turned to her and asked, “How do you believe justice should be done to this man who has inflicted such suffering on you and so brutally destroyed your family?”
The old woman replied, “I want three things. I want first to be taken to the place where my husband’s body was burned so that I can gather up the dust and give his remains a decent burial.” She stopped, collected herself, and then went on. “My husband and son were my only family. I want, secondly, therefore, for Mr. Van de Broek to become my son. I would like for him to come twice a month to the location and spend a day with me so that I can pour out to him whatever love I have still remaining in me.
And finally, I want a third thing. I would like Mr. Van de Broek to know that I offer him my forgiveness because Jesus died to forgive. This was also the wish of my husband. And so, I would kindly ask someone to come to my side and lead me across the courtroom so that I can take Mr. Van de Broek in my arms, embrace him and let him know that he is truly forgiven.
The assistants came to help the old woman across the room. Mr. Van de Broek, overwhelmed by what he had just heard, fainted. And as he did, those in the courtroom—friends, family, neighbors, all victims of decades of oppression and injustice—began to sing “Amazing Grace.”
Life triumphant through love. Transformation of tragedy to victory. Wholeness coming from brokenness… that’s what today means. This is a GOOD Friday – Good and amazing. Thanks be to God.
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Good Friday - Friday, April 6, 2012
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25 or
John 18:1-19:42
Christ of St John of the Cross, by Salvador Dali, 1951
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
inspired by a St John of the Cross sketch - voted as Scotland's favorite painting in 2006
We have just heard and experienced a profound expression of the Passion story and I feel like the gild on the lily standing up to preach as if I could say it better. But needs must…
It was the Triduum and the Great Vigil of Easter that clinched my journey into the Catholic tradition. So much of what had been my faith experience had fed my head quite beautifully and fully but mystery tantalized me and drew me beyond my understanding.
That journey has continued: it continues today. In this mystery God draws us beyond what our minds can fathom to a depth that can’t be uttered. It leads to a place within us where we stand with deep longing; a place where we fear to be known and yet fear that we are not known. God has entered that place in the Incarnation and knows these very fears and loneliness and silence that we hold secret.
Each utterance of Jesus from the Cross is a human cry – from the goodness of the heart comes the cry of “Forgiven them”; from the emptiness of the forgotten ones comes the despair of abandonment. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
In this liturgy, we are not celebrating only a transcendent Godhead wonderful in the heavens. We are enraptured by the incarnate love of God in a human, suffering soul. Glory is to come but on this day God echoes the cries of the broken and lonely hearts spurned and mocked by greed, power and wealth. These cries speak of sorrow, suffering and emptiness. But they speak, too, of the triumph of the human spirit through Grace.
I want to read a story about one of these voices of triumph. It came from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and it’s only one of hundreds such stories.
The Commission brought an elderly black woman face to face with the white man, Mr. Van de Broek, who had confessed to the savage torture and murder of her son and her husband a few years earlier. The old woman had been made to witness her husband’s death. The last words her husband spoke were “Father, forgive them.”
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996
One of the members of the commission turned to her and asked, “How do you believe justice should be done to this man who has inflicted such suffering on you and so brutally destroyed your family?”
The old woman replied, “I want three things. I want first to be taken to the place where my husband’s body was burned so that I can gather up the dust and give his remains a decent burial.” She stopped, collected herself, and then went on. “My husband and son were my only family. I want, secondly, therefore, for Mr. Van de Broek to become my son. I would like for him to come twice a month to the location and spend a day with me so that I can pour out to him whatever love I have still remaining in me.
And finally, I want a third thing. I would like Mr. Van de Broek to know that I offer him my forgiveness because Jesus died to forgive. This was also the wish of my husband. And so, I would kindly ask someone to come to my side and lead me across the courtroom so that I can take Mr. Van de Broek in my arms, embrace him and let him know that he is truly forgiven.
The assistants came to help the old woman across the room. Mr. Van de Broek, overwhelmed by what he had just heard, fainted. And as he did, those in the courtroom—friends, family, neighbors, all victims of decades of oppression and injustice—began to sing “Amazing Grace.”
Life triumphant through love. Transformation of tragedy to victory. Wholeness coming from brokenness… that’s what today means. This is a GOOD Friday – Good and amazing. Thanks be to God.
Friday, April 2, 2010
RCL - Good Friday - 02 Apr 2010
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
RCL - Good Friday - Friday 02 April 2010
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25 or
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:42
It’s not so very long ago that we gathered here with the place decorated, all of us smiling and expectant, singing carols and ready for a feast. Incarnation, Christmas… then into Epiphany with all that mysterious time can bring… kings bowing down, lavishing gifts on a destitute child; Jesus’ baptism and the water transformed into wine. Visions of God everywhere.
Then Lent. There’s really quite a bit of comfort in Lent – some space to think, get in touch with our humanity, our neediness; an opportunity to swallow a bit of humble pie and, in some contrary way, to find a little pride in having been pretty good for these six weeks.
Now the Triduum – three days – the altar is stripped down – a bit barren – but we’ll get through because we know the BIG DAY is coming.
But, my brothers and sisters, if that’s what we’re feeling, we’ve got it wrong. This is the Big Day. All that has gone before, all that will come after, depend on this day. Crucifixion and Incarnation are one.
The Child is born for this day. Somewhere in the human heart, we know this - always have. Even in the Octave of Christmas we celebrate the first martyr and the Holy Innocents. And listen to the mediaeval carols – underneath, always, the sorrow of the mother, the knowledge that this Child, this Infant Holy, Infant Lowly, is born for this day… the journey from the Bethlehem stable leads to the hill of Calvary. The first stumbling steps of the Child learning to walk are completed in Jesus’ falling on the Way of the Cross.
It’s not what we would like, that idea. We don’t like it that the Man the Child becomes is not the man we think he is. We know what we want Jesus to be. Perfect, wonder working, clearing life’s struggles out of the way. We don’t really want more than that. We sing that we want to be like Jesus and what we mean is that we want to be nice like Jesus. We want to do good; we want to heal, we want to feed the hungry; we want to be obedient but we don’t really want to be like Jesus. We want to be respectable. We want to have faith. We want to know and have a guarantee that we are forgiven for our sins whatever they may be. We would like to trust and be certain of our discipleship. We want to feel that at the end, we’ll be among the saved singing the endless praises in heaven.
We want all that but we don’t want to be like Jesus.
Jürgen Moltmann wrote a book called The Crucified God – a most moving and provoking book. In it he says: “God did not become man according to the measure of our conceptions of being a man. He became the kind of man we do not want to be: an outcast, accursed crucified.”
Somewhere, sometime, somehow we have forgotten that the Crucified One is God. Not a being apart from the Trinity but of the Trinity. God did not hand over another person to the Cross – God gave God’s self. The Lamb is God.
We are so desperate to have things made right; we want the sacrifice to clear everything up. Sweep all the dirt away. Wash me. Make me different so that you can love me. We demand the sacrifice.
But the cross is not the result of our indifference to the Incarnation; it is the point of the Incarnation. We didn’t force God’s hand by being who we are. The Cross of the outcast and forsaken Christ is the reality of the world. If God has taken upon himself death on the Cross it is because he has taken on himself all of life – real life.
The Crucified God is one with every desperate, broken longing of the human heart. There is no depth to which humanity can sink that the Cross has not reached. There is no emptiness in our hearts that God does not know.
Jesus is the lover of the addict mugging the pensioner for a fix; Jesus desires the hooker with HIV whom no system will help because she’s “promiscuous.” Jesus shares the terror of the child who waits in the dark for the pain that the perpetrator brings and Jesus bears the shame. Jesus stands in the place of the people in Haiti and Africa and Iraq and Afghanistan who had nothing and now don’t even have hope.
Jesus accuses God of abandoning him and his anguish is the cry of Rachel weeping for her children for they are no more. It’s the cry of the people who can’t see God. The people the Church demeans or ignores…all the gay people, the poor people, the throw-away people.
Jesus – crucified – is the emptiness of existence known by God and sheltered in the Sacred Heart.
So we don’t want to be like Jesus. None of us could bear it. None of us is so loving. Thanks be to God in Christ that we don’t carry such a burden. Our burden is to let that love take us into this poor broken world where God is alive.
Oh God, make us to be like Jesus!
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
RCL - Good Friday - Friday 02 April 2010
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25 or
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:42
It’s not so very long ago that we gathered here with the place decorated, all of us smiling and expectant, singing carols and ready for a feast. Incarnation, Christmas… then into Epiphany with all that mysterious time can bring… kings bowing down, lavishing gifts on a destitute child; Jesus’ baptism and the water transformed into wine. Visions of God everywhere.
Then Lent. There’s really quite a bit of comfort in Lent – some space to think, get in touch with our humanity, our neediness; an opportunity to swallow a bit of humble pie and, in some contrary way, to find a little pride in having been pretty good for these six weeks.
Now the Triduum – three days – the altar is stripped down – a bit barren – but we’ll get through because we know the BIG DAY is coming.
But, my brothers and sisters, if that’s what we’re feeling, we’ve got it wrong. This is the Big Day. All that has gone before, all that will come after, depend on this day. Crucifixion and Incarnation are one.
The Child is born for this day. Somewhere in the human heart, we know this - always have. Even in the Octave of Christmas we celebrate the first martyr and the Holy Innocents. And listen to the mediaeval carols – underneath, always, the sorrow of the mother, the knowledge that this Child, this Infant Holy, Infant Lowly, is born for this day… the journey from the Bethlehem stable leads to the hill of Calvary. The first stumbling steps of the Child learning to walk are completed in Jesus’ falling on the Way of the Cross.
It’s not what we would like, that idea. We don’t like it that the Man the Child becomes is not the man we think he is. We know what we want Jesus to be. Perfect, wonder working, clearing life’s struggles out of the way. We don’t really want more than that. We sing that we want to be like Jesus and what we mean is that we want to be nice like Jesus. We want to do good; we want to heal, we want to feed the hungry; we want to be obedient but we don’t really want to be like Jesus. We want to be respectable. We want to have faith. We want to know and have a guarantee that we are forgiven for our sins whatever they may be. We would like to trust and be certain of our discipleship. We want to feel that at the end, we’ll be among the saved singing the endless praises in heaven.
We want all that but we don’t want to be like Jesus.
Jürgen Moltmann wrote a book called The Crucified God – a most moving and provoking book. In it he says: “God did not become man according to the measure of our conceptions of being a man. He became the kind of man we do not want to be: an outcast, accursed crucified.”
Somewhere, sometime, somehow we have forgotten that the Crucified One is God. Not a being apart from the Trinity but of the Trinity. God did not hand over another person to the Cross – God gave God’s self. The Lamb is God.
We are so desperate to have things made right; we want the sacrifice to clear everything up. Sweep all the dirt away. Wash me. Make me different so that you can love me. We demand the sacrifice.
But the cross is not the result of our indifference to the Incarnation; it is the point of the Incarnation. We didn’t force God’s hand by being who we are. The Cross of the outcast and forsaken Christ is the reality of the world. If God has taken upon himself death on the Cross it is because he has taken on himself all of life – real life.
The Crucified God is one with every desperate, broken longing of the human heart. There is no depth to which humanity can sink that the Cross has not reached. There is no emptiness in our hearts that God does not know.
Jesus is the lover of the addict mugging the pensioner for a fix; Jesus desires the hooker with HIV whom no system will help because she’s “promiscuous.” Jesus shares the terror of the child who waits in the dark for the pain that the perpetrator brings and Jesus bears the shame. Jesus stands in the place of the people in Haiti and Africa and Iraq and Afghanistan who had nothing and now don’t even have hope.
Jesus accuses God of abandoning him and his anguish is the cry of Rachel weeping for her children for they are no more. It’s the cry of the people who can’t see God. The people the Church demeans or ignores…all the gay people, the poor people, the throw-away people.
Jesus – crucified – is the emptiness of existence known by God and sheltered in the Sacred Heart.
So we don’t want to be like Jesus. None of us could bear it. None of us is so loving. Thanks be to God in Christ that we don’t carry such a burden. Our burden is to let that love take us into this poor broken world where God is alive.
Oh God, make us to be like Jesus!
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