In solitude, for company

From John 13, verse 33. Jesus said, “I am with you only a little longer . . . Where I am going, you cannot come.” May I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. The summer before my junior year of high school, just the other day, I sat in the bleachers of a stadium in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The start of school was weeks away. We’d picked up our helmets and shoulder pads and we were sitting in the bleachers so the coach could tell us what to expect as we prepared for the season. “Boys,” he said. “I’ve got two rules. Rule #1: The coach is always right. Rule #2: If you think the coach is wrong, see Rule #1.“

Crucifixion was like that. If you were not a Roman citizen, Rome had two rules. Rome is in charge. And if you think Rome is not in charge, look around. Talk about a brutal advertising campaign: crucifixion killed two birds with one stone. It made a dying man a billboard.

Jesus knew that. He prepared for it by going alone to places (something we can relate to), going off by himself alone with increasing frequency as he began to attract a crowd. For him the presence of the One he called Father was most palpable when he isolated himself. Matthew tells us that Jesus withdrew “to a deserted place by himself” to absorb the shocking news that his cousin John had been beheaded. Off by himself he went to grieve the loss of the one who understood him best. Off by himself, Jesus “got his game face on.” Withdrawn in prayer, talking with the Father, ‘in solitude, for company’, to borrow a phrase from Auden, Jesus gathered strength to face the approach of his own violent death.

Before going out to meet Goliath, David picked up five stones. Before going out to meet the adversary, Jesus consecrated bread and wine with his disciples. Then after supper he said to them, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” And he left for the ultimate out-of-the-way place.

Ten years ago, at a quarter past six in the evening on Tuesday of Holy Week, a college classmate of my son Gabriel climbed the ten-foot-tall safety barrier surrounding the observation deck of the Empire State Building and jumped. Cameron had left a suicide note in his room at Berkeley, his residential college at Yale, apologizing for his plan to jump either from the George Washington Bridge or the Empire State Building. 

It was raining in New York. There were seven people on the observation deck at the time. One of them tried to talk him down. A reporter in the New York Daily News wrote, “A man named Luis Mosquea was manning the front entrance of a women’s boutique on West 34th Street across from where the young man landed, and he recalled in horror how stunned pedestrians scampered in every direction to flee the nightmarish sight. Said Mr Mosquea, ‘One guy ran over and covered the body with an umbrella.’”

At a vigil held the next night at Yale, the Berkeley Master Marvin Chun told a crowd of grieving students, “I saw Cameron as recently as yesterday, a few hours before he died. It was raining and I asked him to walk with me under my umbrella down Wall Street. He complimented my big, parachute-like umbrella with its bright red Berkeley shield. He said he didn’t know that there was a Berkeley umbrella. I said that it hadn’t been issued as Berkeley gear for a long time. And as we hit the corner I added that I could order a new batch if he really liked it. He said he did. Then we parted ways. So here’s the guilty thought that I shouldn’t have but I can’t get out of my mind. I wish I gave him that umbrella.”

You and I are “reconciled to God in Jesus’s fleshly body through his death.” I believe that. Where Jesus goes to confront the prince of darkness to do that awful work we cannot go. We follow as far as we can. But tonight, when he leaves for ‘movement to contact’, we part ways with him and listen for the cry and stillness to follow after. We may wish to help him, wish to give him the flimsy thing we carry for shelter; but there is nothing we can do to help him.  

Jesus is our champion. His combat in the darkness of Golgotha (“the place of the skull”) is his alone. Israel’s champion David smote Goliath using Goliath’s own sword to cut the giant’s head off. And winning victory on behalf of all the people of God, he took the skull to Jerusalem and buried it on a hill far away.

All we can do, confined to barracks, is shelter in place, from the bleachers, at the window, in the garden where the small birds sing. All we can do is overhear Jesus talking to the Father, in solitude, for company, taking strength for the fight from the Most High. 

And we look away. I look away. And I remember something else my coach used to say. “The will to win is not worth a nickel unless you have the will to prepare.” Jesus, our champion, had the will to prepare. He goes to the cross. And there, at Golgotha, he will take Satan’s greatest weapon, death, and run him through with it. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“It is finished.”

From John’s Gospel, “It is finished.” May I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On Christmas Day he was born and some thirty years later he died. There are two principal ways in which it is possible to tell his story. One is to tell it as the greatest, the most bitter and ironic of all human tragedies, a tragedy which sums up all tragedies. To understand what I mean, you must think your way back from Good Friday, the day he died, to Christmas, the day he was born.

Whatever you choose to make of the legends that have grown up around his birth — the angels appearing to the shepherds and singing their great hymn of joy, the magi and the star — however you want to interpret these stories, the jubilation and the mystery that the gospel writers were trying to convey by them is clear enough, and there is not one of you who in one way or another doesn’t respond to it. Think of what this church, any church, is like at Christmas — there’s an excitement, a kind of wild hopefulness and gladness in the air that makes it different from any other time of the year. 

No matter how cynical or unreligious you may think of yourself as being, you can’t escape the feeling then that something extraordinary and beautiful and glad­ is breaking into the world. You read your news with stories of international intrigue, political unrest, a virus outbreak in China, yet on the birthday of this child who died so long ago you get the feeling, despite all evidence to the contrary, that at last somehow there will be peace on earth and good will among all people.

You get a sort of intensified version of the feeling you have whenever a child is born: that here is a new life still unacquainted with grief and compromise; here perhaps is the child who will grow tall and strong and save the world because that is what we’re all waiting for — someone to save the world, someone who will bind up the wounds, who will set things straight again. And we think these things about this child because we view his birth from the perspective of his whole life, and we see him as the one who of all people might have actually had the wisdom, the gentleness and the power to do the job. And this is what he set out to do — to save the world.

But then jump from Christmas to Good Friday and think of how he died, this child — deserted by his friends, mocked by his enemies, strung up on a cross between two insurrectionists. If ever we want indication that love is powerless in a world of envy and fear, that goodness is inevitably overcome by evil, that belief in God is a tragic absurdity, then here, we are tempted to say, it is. And telling the story this way you can take his last words of all, as John reports them, the words he spoke just as he was dying, and make them the almost unbearably pathetic epilogue to the whole thing. “It is finished.”

Finished, defeated, done with, and nothing to show for it but a few broken hearts. I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that it is always possible that this is the truth of it, and I believe there is no Christian anywhere who has not had moments of fearing that it is, even Jesus himself whose last words according to Matthew and Mark were, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

And now, if you’ve been listening to me at all, you’ll expect me to tell you the other way of interpreting this story. But I would rather leave it as a question for you to answer for yourselves because in the long run it is only your own answer that you’ll really hear. If the story of Jesus of Nazareth does not mean that life is an absurd tragedy; if it is not the story of a good man who believed that he was the anointed one of God only to realize in the last moments of his life that there was no God; if this is not what the story means, then what does it mean?

“It is finished,” he said, and let me suggest just two things about those words. 

First, humankind’s work is finished. In crucifying this uniquely innocent man, someone who claimed nothing for himself but refused every chance for power that was given him, who was motivated entirely by his love for God and for us — in destroying him, we have really done our worst, and in the cross we are confronted by the ultimate expression of our folly, our self-destroying selfishness, our sin. If there is a God to judge us, then here is where God’s judgment must fall — where we took the purest ever to arise among us and killed him because his goodness was more than we could bear.

And secondly and lastly, the work of God is finished. Finished not in the sense of being ended because it is never ended, but in the sense of being complete. Here in the death of Jesus, God has spoken his final word about himself and his relationship to us, and it is a word which Jesus spoke to his disciples on the night when he was betrayed, last night: “Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you. This is my blood which is shed for you, and for many, for the forgiveness of sins.” In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Is the Lord among us, or not?

From Exodus, the 17th chapter: “Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” May I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. There’s anxiety in the air. Play, as natural as breathing, is shutting down. In isolation, the mind turns in on itself and it can get ugly in there. Throats are dry. And people are letting God have it. They want to know, “Is the Lord among us or not?” 

It’s not pestilence; not coronavirus; it’s three days in the desert without water. The Israelites are about to die of thirst at Rephidim, and they “quarrel with Moses.” 

And Moses says, “Why contend [vai·ya·rev] with me? Why do you put the Lord on trial?” His being God’s anointed, that’s what the Israelites are doing: putting God in the dock. They want a trial, they want to charge Moses with a capital offense, which is why Moses says to God, “They’re about to stone me.” 

In the Bible, when people are stoned to death it’s a judicial execution, it isn’t a mob action. So the dangerous question raised by this story is, What’s God going to do with Israel when it puts him on trial? 

And God answers that question by saying, in effect, You want a trial? I’ll give you a trial. Look at the text.

“And the Lord answered Moses, ‘Walk ahead of the people. Take some of the elders of Israel.’” 

Why elders? God’s calling a jury; the elders will assume the role of witnesses at the trial.

 “And take in your hand the staff.” 

Why a staff? The staff is a kind of gavel. In ancient Israel you could tell who the judge was in a trial by who’s holding the staff. The staff would be used, in some cases, as the implement of smiting, the judge not just hearing the evidence and pronouncing the verdict but also executing the sentence straightaway. 

Then God says, “And I will stand before you on the rock at Horeb.” With the one exception of Jesus standing before Pilate, this is the only passage in the Bible where God stands before a human being at a trial; in every other case, people stand before God’s anointed. The daughters of Zelophehad stood before Moses because they had a problem about their inheritance rights [Num 27]. Two prostitutes stood before Solomon debating about whose baby it was. [1 Kings 3]. 

So who is put on trial at Horeb? God. 

Who’s acting out the part of judge? Moses. 

Now let’s say you and I are those elders. What would we expect? Here’s God in a theophany possessing the rock. Not a little stone like a Petoskey stone. The Hebrew word [צוּר / tsur] translated ‘rock’ is used to refer to all of Mount Sinai. 

So God in the glory cloud ‘stands’ on the rock, possesses it. 

There is Moses with the staff. 

Israel, represented by her elders, witnesses the case. 

As elders, what are we to expect will happen now that we’ve had the temerity, playing the blame game, to put God on trial? We expect that God will say to Moses, “The staff you smote the Nile with and caused it to divide, lift the staff and point it at the elders, and let them have the justice they’re asking for.” 

But that’s not what happens. God confides in Moses saying, “Lift the staff. I’ll stand before you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock . . . and water will come out of it so that the people can drink.” 

Here is God’s awesome pillar of glory cloud inhabiting the rock. Moses lifts the staff and strikes the rock which bears God’s presence—and God takes the blow! And water flows out of the rock! God takes the blame that the people would receive the blessing. God takes the judgement, and Israel has a drink on the house. (Some of you are thinking you could use a drink on the house.) 

There’s anxiety in the air. You’re asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” Take that question to the One put on trial and struck at Rephidim, take it to the One put on trial and struck on the Cross, take it to the One who gives his life for you so powerfully that you become little Christ’s to one another for the life of the world. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.