Lent 5b.06                                                         April 2, 2006

This 5th Sunday of Lent brings us
        to the brink of Holy Week,
        our annual reliving of the Passion Story.
The bare, undisputed facts are stark and few.
Jesus of Nazareth was crucified in Jerusalem
        by the Roman Procurator on a charge of sedition,
        with some complicity of the Temple rulers.

In the interpretation of those simple facts
        lies a whole religion

        – for Christians interpret those events as
                the key to our salvation.

How that works though isn’t clear.
How does the execution of Jesus matter for us?

There’s an answer we’ve all heard,

       – the one in which God requires all sin to be punished;
       but the person punished doesn’t have to be the sinner.
Under that model, Jesus suffers so we don’t have to.
It’s what I learned in Sunday School.
Maybe you did too.

That interpretation, however, is relatively new.
You won’t find it in the teachings of the Early Church.
It isn’t in any of the Gospels.
You can find hints of it in Paul;
       but it isn’t Paul’s main interpretation either.
In fact, it contradicts Paul’s main line of theology.

In his book, The Molten Soul,
       Fr. Grey Temple argues that this interpretation
               is one of the chief culprits that turn
               our initial Christian experiences of life and joy
               into narrow-minded, rigid, judgmental religion.
I think it makes for a pretty poor image of God.
It makes our ethics and spirituality irrelevant;
        and it doesn’t make sense of our own suffering.

There are a dozen or so mainline interpretations
        of the Passion Story

        – all of which make it the key to our salvation.
Sometimes one makes more sense to me;
        other times, another has more appeal.
The bottom line is our salvation through the
        life, death, and resurrection of Christ
        is something we accept on faith,
        but we can’t really get our minds around it.
That’s why we call it the Paschal Mystery.

John’s Gospel gives us an interpretation
        far richer ethically, spiritually, and existentially
                than the one we usually hear.
It works like this:
The Son reveals the Father.
Jesus says, “Whoever has seen me,
        has seen the Father.”
Jesus shows us God most perfectly on the cross.
God is sacrificially self-giving,
        pouring Godself out into the creation.
Bishop Arthur Vogel says in his book,
        Radical Christianity and the Flesh of Jesus,
        the distinctive thing about our faith is that
        it doesn’t sacrifice human beings to God,
                 but sacrifices God to humanity.

If we want to see what God is like,
        we don’t look at a powerful king or warrior;
        we look at a man on a cross giving his life away.

This life of compassionate self-giving
        is holy, is the divine life, is life eternal
        not in length only, but in depth and value.
So Jesus doesn’t die instead of us.
He dies to give us his life, his divine life,
        and to show us what to do with it.

He intends for us to join him on the cross.
He says “When I am lifted up from the earth,
        I will draw all people to myself.”
He says, “Take up your cross and follow me...
        Where I am, there will my servant also be.”

The way of the cross is the way to a kind of death,
        but it’s the kind of death that is the gate to resurrection.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,
        it remains just a single grain;
        but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

That’s what God does.
That’s what Jesus does,
        and that’s what he calls us to do as well.

How do we do that?
There are several levels of it.
One is by facing our physical mortality.
The thing that turns living faith into lifeless concrete dogma,
        Grey Temple says, is trying to use it to avoid death.

Jesus says that whoever clings to his worldly life loses it,
        but whoever lets go of his worldly life
                 gains eternal life
So, giving up the denial of death, being willing to die,
        to move on when the time comes,
        sets us free to live at this deeper level of eternity.

The second way of taking up the cross
        is serving Christ in one another.
The Proper Preface for Lent says,

        “By his grace we are able ...
                to live no longer for ourselves alone,
                but for him who died for us and rose again.”

In today’s text, he invites us be his servants,
        so that we may be where he is,
        which is on the cross and then in paradise.

Finally, we can turn our lives over to God through contemplation.
Contemplation is simply losing oneself in God.
It’s what we do each Sunday afternoon at 4:15 in the Lower Room.
We sit still, do nothing,
        and place ourselves at God’s disposal.
In contemplation we lay ourselves open
        to whatever God may have in store for us,
                 however, daunting or trivial.

So there are three ways:
        existentially, we dare to live and dare to die;
        ethically, we give ourselves away by serving others;
        spiritually, we surrender to God in contemplation.

These three ways are intimately connected.
Practice in one will help us to do the others too.
Contemplation helps us face death,
        and facing death sets us free to serve.

In Jesus, God takes on a body so that
        his blood can be poured out for us,
                 and divine life may flow in our veins.
Divine life is self-giving life.
It is shaped like the Celtic Cross behind our altar

        – that means self-giving life has a cross in the center of it

        – but a resurrection into glory all around.

                                                      Amen.