Radical hospitality and the cross...

NOTE: Here are my weekly worship notes for Sunday, April 5th - Palm Sunday - in which I look at the paradoxical wisdom of the Cross in light of the healing it brings to us in community. I am deeply indebted to the writings of Rene Girrard and Douglas John Hall for shaping my emerging alternative theology re: the atonement. As I often say: if you are in town at 10:30 am on Sunday, please stop by. The table of Christ always has room for you as an honored guest. Be well.

Palm Sunday is a mixed-up celebration: one minute we’re rejoicing and the next we’re in tears. We start the day with blessings and shouts of joy only to conclude with lamentation and sadness. We join ourselves to the ancient crowd in Jerusalem chanting “Hosanna,” and before you know it we’re part of the mob screaming, “Crucify, crucify!” No wonder this liturgy often reminds us of Judith Viorst’s children’s book: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Everything is upside down – bewildering and beyond our control – and of course that is the point.

+ More than most of our high holy days, this week – Holy Week – invites to wrestle with the mystery of God’s love in the world.

+ It s all about paradox – the upside down wisdom of God in the Cross – the counter-cultural truths exposed by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Now let’s be clear: all of our deepest Christian celebrations are paradoxical. Christmas is all about the incarnation – the word and idea of God becoming true flesh and blood. Epiphany points to how the covenant of Israel was shared with those beyond the tribe in the story of the Magi coming to bring gifts to our infant king. Even the idea of a powerless baby as Messiah is paradoxical, yes?

And so it goes: Easter and the resurrection, Pentecost and the body of Christ alive within you and me, the light in the darkness, Christ’s presence in Holy Communion, forgiveness and sin and all the rest. How baffling – incomprehensible – genuinely mysterious. And all the more so during Holy Week – Palm Sunday included – for now we are confronted with the reality of the Cross and what it holds for each and all of us by faith.

Without denigrating any of the other complex and nuanced insights about the Cross that scholars and saints have shared with us over the years, let me suggest to you that for our generation the Cross must show us something of God’s grace or we will lose heart. Unless we can begin to grasp that the Cross is a sign of God’s unconditional love for the world – a love that sin and death cannot extinguish – we will be a part of the problem rather than Christ’s solution.

Bible scholar and pastor, Brian Stoffregen, tells us that Mark’s gospel makes this point clearly in his description of the first disciples. Luke and John note that before Judas could betray Jesus the devil – Satan – had to enter and corrupt him “so it wasn’t really his fault.” Matthew tells us that the betrayal was rooted in greed – Christ’s opponents offered Judas 30 pieces of silver – so one of the seven deadly sins was the root cause of this catastrophe. Only Mark observes that before the devil and sin, before the conspiracy and all the various temptations, Judas chose to betray the one he loved.

“It was an inside job,” Stoffregen writes: inside the heart of Judas, inside the first faith community, inside the unfolding of events in the real world. And the picture is equally bleak for the other disciples, too:

+ Peter swears his allegiance but before the cock crows twice denies and betrays the healer of his soul. “I would have thought that the first crowing,” says Stoffregen, “would have served as a warning and reminder to Peter – but it doesn’t!”

+ The other disciples, in the garden, are lazy and ignorant: they flee and jump ship – argue and collapse – during the hour of trial. They are individually and collectively a mess.

And God still loves them – never abandons or betrays them – and brings back into life a love that will not let us go. Jesus knows the emptiness, Jesus cries out in agony and Jesus takes onto himself all the pain that betrayal has to offer – and responds with grace and love. The first mystery the Cross exposes to us this day is that God will not let us go no matter how great the sin or onerous the offense.

And the second is equally paradoxical and hope filled: namely, that by taking on the sins of the world – literally exposing us to what happens when we are ruled by fear and hatred – the Cross invites us into a new way of living. Now that we see the horror that we ourselves can create on the Cross – the mangled bodies of war, the burnt flesh of executions, the wasted lives of malnutrition and disease – we are asked to change our direction. Literally we are invited to repent – metanoeo – change our direction in life so that we, like the Magi of Christmas, go home another way. A better way. A way that does not make scapegoats out of anyone – especially those we don’t understand.

Richard Rohr at the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico puts it like this: “The crucifixion is our standing icon of both the problem and the solution to violence and evil in the world.” It shows the problem clearly: this is what happens to the scapegoat – torture and death – and the scapegoat may be Jesus or Jews or heretics or homosexuals or witches or the poor or those who are simply not like us. Without a change of direction, our fear drives us into violence.

But the solution is exposed on the Cross, too. “Jesus offers us another way of overcoming evil and violence – by absorbing it in God – the true meaning of his suffering body. Instead of attacking, Jesus absorbs the evil and gives it to God… and this is the most counter-intuitive” – dare I say paradoxical – truth of the whole Bible?

+ Jesus absorbs evil – he embodies forgiveness – he shares grace unconditionally. And not just once on a lonely hill two millennia ago in Palestine – but here and now and every time we join him in practicing God’s alternative.

+ Forgiveness – grace – transforms evil in a way that brings healing rather than hatred to birth. No wonder it is said that “The cross dramatically reveals the paradoxical wisdom of God: it exposes both the horror of our darkest selves while promising to inoculate us against doing what we hate.”

How did St. Paul put it in Romans 7? Left to ourselves we know what is good and true and holy… but we can’t – and if Mark’s description of the disciples is true – won’t do it.

I need something more! For if I know the law but still can't keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I realize that I don't have what it takes. I can will it, but I can't do it. I decide to do good, but I don't really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don't result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.

Then Paul nails it when he confesses: “It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up! I truly delight in God’s commands, but it is pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight.”

Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge. I've tried everything and nothing helps. I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question? The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.

Not magically – not without our change of direction either – but honestly, compassionately and without reservation – and that is the paradox the Cross exposes for us on Palm Sunday. It confronts us clearly with God’s grace and judgment and asks, “What needs to be sacrificed within me – among us – in order to forgive?”

This is how we participate in the journey of Holy Week: a journey into fear and shame and sin as well as grace, forgiveness and new life. What needs to be sacrificed in me so that God’s grace is strengthened? It is always there as light within the darkness and hope right alongside despair – but now we are invited to embrace it and make it our own.

Such is the bewildering but simultaneously good news for today: so let those who have ears to hear, hear.

NOTE: There is perhaps no better musical expression of all of this than Jeff Buckley's version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." And so it goes...