Easter 3 B - Apr 22, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Easter 3 B - Sunday, April 22, 2012

Gang nach Emmaus (the road to Emmaus), 

by Robert Zünd (1826-1909), Kunstmuseum, St Gallen, Switzerland

Acts 3:12-19
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48

I am sure I have told this story before, so I ask pardon of the brethren for repeating it.  But it was, and remains, an important learning in my life.

In 1982, I accompanied our Superior, Clark Trafton, to West Africa, to visit our then-newly established monastery in Cape Coast, Ghana, and to visit our former monastery and mission at Bolahun, Liberia.  At Monrovia we were joined by Br. Laurence, who had taught science and mathematics at our school in Bolahun for many years.  He must have seen me staring out the window at the forest.  I was hoping, of course, for a jungle, with large animals and vines and if not Tarzan, at least something exciting and exotic.  I think he could see my disappointment.


It looked pretty much like any scruffy forest anywhere, sort of like the forests in central Michigan where I had gone to college, and which contained nothing exotic at all.  Nothing.  I thought.  So Laurence took me in hand, and started to point out the different kinds of trees and plants, and the kinds of ecology they represented, with the typical animals and insects, and how humans interacted with them.  My mind opened.  By the time we reached Bolahun, I was seeing the Liberian forest with completely different eyes.  It had been flat, dull, uninteresting.  Now it pulsed with energy for me.

Sometimes we think we know what we’re seeing, because we’ve seen it so many times before, or it looks like something we’ve seen somewhere else.  But when we begin to understand, bit by bit, what we are looking at, we gain a different understanding, and it comes alive.      

The portion of the vast scriptural forest we are looking at today is part of the Resurrection story in the Gospel of Luke, a story which we have heard so often, it may seem flat, even uninteresting to us.  We’re not supposed to admit that in Church, but it can happen.

Luke’s account of the Resurrection is not at all episodic, but consists of a single connected narrative, the story of the road to Emmaus, in which two disciples share an extended conversation with the resurrected Jesus, recognize him in the breaking of the bread, and then, after he disappears, rush to join the rest of the disciples back in Jerusalem, where today’s Gospel tells us Jesus appeared in the midst of them, in an encounter very much like the story of Thomas in John, but without Thomas and without the doubt.

By far the biggest tree in this forest is the statement Jesus makes about himself and the scriptures:  "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you -- that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled."  This repeats the gist of what Jesus told the two disciples as they walked toward Emmaus, in the earlier part of Luke, of which our passage today is the conclusion, and it is underscored again by Peter in the speech we just heard from the Acts of the Apostles.  It’s a statement so general we are tempted to move past it quickly.  But we shouldn’t.  It should prompt us to ask, What passages of scripture are you talking about?  What do they say?  Just what kind of tree is this?  Is this a later editor telling us to read the footnotes?  Or is it more?  There’s no secret to the answer:  When we unfold these passages and consider them whole in relation to Jesus, there is more.  Much more.

There are many, many places we might look in the Old Testament for references to Jesus, and each one will take us in fascinating directions.  But the ones that seem most appropriate in the context of the day of the Resurrection appearances might be those that explain the meaning of Jesus’ death.  And for this purpose there are no more important references in the Jewish scriptures than the songs of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah.  The early Church saw in them the principal prophecy and explanation of the Passion.  If we look at them, we will have a much better idea of Jesus’s character and the events of the crucifixion.  But we will also, and this is what I hope we can look at today, have a much better idea of what the Servant’s suffering was going to accomplish, what it was to build.  In other words, what the Resurrection victory might look like to scripture-saturated early Christians.

There are four Servant Songs in Isaiah.  The first (Isaiah 42:1ff) speaks of justice as the servant’s accomplishment: “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.”  The second (Isaiah 49:1ff)  says the Servant was called from birth, and will bring universal salvation: “The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name....I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”  The third (Isaiah 50:4ff) tells of his gracious teaching, which will be rewarded by shame and violence: “The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary....I gave my back to those who strike, and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard; I hid not my face from disgrace and spitting.”  And the fourth (Isaiah 52:13ff) tells us that by his sufferings we shall be healed:

“He was despised and rejected; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.  Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.  But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.”  (Isaiah 53:3-5)

A man who is chosen by the Spirit, called from birth, who will suffer shame and violence, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

We are all aware of the identity of Jesus from Isaiah, because these passages are so prominent in the Church’s worship and teaching.  But perhaps we are not so aware of the promises God intends though them, and which the early Christians would have known as well:

• Justice to all the nations; 
• universal salvation;
• gracious teaching;
• and healing for all.

The proclamation growing out of Isaiah is both the person of Jesus and his suffering, but also the promise of the Kingdom of God and the beginning of the building of the Church.
The fulfillment of the promise of the Resurrection begins with the disciples themselves.  We’re so busy looking at Jesus in Luke’s narrative that a closer look at how the Resurrection has begun to change the disciples is worth our time.  The two who have spent all day – all day! – listening to Jesus are moved, first, to invite him to stay with them, something very rare in Mediterranean culture, which on the whole distrusted strangers and generally related to them only in public.  Their hearts have been opened – to a stranger.  Because they have included him in their meal, that meal becomes a foretaste of the eschatological banquet: like their hearts, their eyes are opened and they recognize Him.  And as a result, their understanding of what happened on the road is transformed:  “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?”

Their next act is also to share.  They share their experience with the other disciples, and when they do, they find confirmation of their experience.  And it is in the midst of that sharing that the risen Christ comes among them.  Peace, he says: the great Shalom of God, the healing of the brokenness of the world has begun, begun with the victory in the brokenness of Jesus’ own physical body.  And what is their reaction?  Fear at first, but then joy, “joy so great that they still could not believe it”, as the Jerusalem Bible translates it.  He is not a ghost, or even an angel, and to show them, he eats what they have been eating.  He shares their life among them.  His gracious teaching opens their minds and prepares them for the work they will be given: to proclaim healing and salvation and justice to a world so needy that it can hardly name its desire, hardly knows what it needs.

This little meeting on the day after the Resurrection is the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s promises to Isaiah’s Suffering Servant.  It is the real beginning of the Church.  The fulfillment of the promises, the building of the Church, begins with listening in trust to a God-filled stranger; opening hearts in hospitality; sharing a meal as a family shares; being willing to come to new understanding; sharing the news with others instead of keeping it personal and private; finding Christ in the midst of the believing community; revaluing the suffering of Christ and in so doing, revaluing the world’s values; finding joy in Christ’s presence; and taking on the witness, the martyria, the martyrdom, of becoming the agents of the Suffering Servant of God for the transformation of the world.  So much from such a plain statement “that everything written about me ... has to be fulfilled.”  It seemed so schematic at first, but when we begin to unpack that “everything” – how wonderful! 

Are you part of Luke’s Resurrection community?  Am I?  Are we ready for the joy?  Are we ready for everything to be fulfilled?

Easter - Apr 8, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC

Easter Vigil - Sunday, April 2012

Romans 6:3-11

Mark 16:1-8

Somewhere in my adolescence I got my hands on a book called “A Harmony of the Gospels.”  It told the story of Jesus by drawing from the four Gospels and made it into one continuous flowing story with all the best parts kept and all the repetitious or embarrassing parts removed.   I quite liked it.  It made the story of Jesus move smoothly and rationally from beginning to middle to end, from conception to ascension in one satisfying narrative arc.  

The only problem, as I later came to understand, is that when it comes to Jesus, there is no one smooth narrative arc.  There is rather a number of sources, each with its own perspective, its own audience, its own emphases and metaphors, its own “take” on that sacrament of God that is Jesus Christ.   And nowhere is this more apparent than in the stories surrounding the Easter event that we celebrate today.   Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and other New Testament authors all have slightly—or not so slightly—different stories to tell as they try to communicate the central proclamation:  that the teacher Jesus who had died a dreadful, shameful death and was hurriedly buried was no longer in the grave, that he had been raised, that he was on the move and that his friends were now reporting transformative “encounters” with him...encounters that were at once intimate and mysterious and that went on for we know not how long...perhaps for years if we accept that Paul's reported encounter with the risen Jesus is on the same level as those of the original disciples. 

The account we heard this morning from the Gospel according to Mark is perhaps the strangest and most baffling of all these Easter stories.  It starts off well enough: the women who saw where Jesus had been buried go to the tomb early Sunday morning to perform the traditional burial rites delayed by Sabbath and festival.  They are surprised to find the grave open. They enter and find a young man dressed in white sitting there who tells them that Jesus has been raised, that he is not there, that he is going before them to meet them in Galilee. Please tell his apostles. And then it ends with these enigmatic words:

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to    anyone for they were afraid.

That's it.  That's where the most ancient manuscripts of this Gospel end, a fact so troubling that by the second century another ending was added and yet another by the fourth.  Surely Mark must have intended to add stories of encounters with the risen Jesus.  Perhaps the original ending was lost.  We'll probably never know.  

Obviously, however, the word did get out.  Sooner or later the women talk, else we would not have what we do have in Mark's Gospel.  But the first reaction of these faithful, frightened followers and friends of Jesus has much to teach us. 

These women react in a way that is, at least for me, at least at first blush, entirely credible.  Their reaction is one of anxiety, of confusion, of chaos, of terror unallayed by the young man's words: “Don't be alarmed.”  It is, in short, a reaction to trauma...trauma in the face of an event so overwhelming, so outside of normal expectations, that the initial response has to be one of muteness and flight.  Their response was and remains perhaps the most authentic response to the traumatic rupturing that is the resurrection of Jesus—the total, sudden reversal of all things: of our customary way of thinking about God and about ourselves, about history and its meaning, about the demands of a new and unimagined holiness and all that this implies for the living out of our lives.  Could it be that at some level these women recognized this?  And if so, is it any wonder that they fled in terror and amazement? The real wonder is that they ever spoke at all. 

We are still trying, two thousand years later, to grasp and live into this central traumatic event of our faith, an event that is simultaneously within the bounds of  time and space and yet totally transcends them, the event that has changed everything, this event we call the Resurrection.  

The Bible I use in my cell has this little footnote:

Mark's Gospel is open-ended and must be completed by the hearers and readers of the Gospel.

Too true.  The story is unfinished, incomplete, open-ended.  Christ indeed is risen.  But we his Body, the Church, the People of God, are still in process.  And the two stories are one, eternally intertwined.  An ancient homily for Holy Saturday imagines the so-called descent into hell, with Christ raising Adam from the underworld and saying:  “Arise, O man, work of my hands, arise, you who were fashioned in my image. Rise, let us go hence; for you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person.”

That is the deep truth of our baptism, as Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans just read, a reality we have ritually and verbally reaffirmed this morning.  Dying with Christ in baptism, we also rise with him. We have been grafted into him. We are now one with him, one undivided person.  And therefore one with each other.

And the work of completion goes on year after year, a work that will not be finished until all the baptized have been raised with Christ and all creation has been transformed in him.  It is a work that will continue until the end of time, when Christ returns to gather it all up and present it to the Father, and when, at last, God will be all in all.   

Like the women on that first Easter, who of us would not react to such traumatic news with “terror and amazement”?  

The Guatemalan poet Julia Esquivel puts it well:

What keeps us from sleeping 

is that

they have threatened us with resurrection.

Accompany us, then, 

on this vigil

and you will know

how marvelous it is

to live

threatened by resurrection.

Threatened by resurrection!  How marvelous!  May we live this threat daily.  May we come to know its terror and its promise:  Fullness of  life.  Authentic life.  Eternal life.  Life together.  Life with God.  Life in God.

Alleluia, Christ is risen.  Don’t be too alarmed.

Amen. 

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

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.