Parish Of Opawa St Martins Blog

Now, once again we stand together at the beginning of Holy Week, the week that for Christians is the most important week of the year. There are two journeys before us today. The first journey is the journey of Christ into Jerusalem where he is welcomed as a Messiah, the Son of David. The second journey is Christ’s journey to the place of crucifixion. The first journey is marked by the royal date palm tree; the second by a tree that is dripping with blood and scarred with nails. This is the journey we are all called to make.

For today and all through this week, we take part in the Passion story ourselves. Our Holy Week services are not just a commemoration. Through them we enact out faith. We go to the cross and die with him so that we might be raised by God with him into eternal life. That’s why the church has always baptised at Easter; Jessica and Pippa will be coming up out of the water at the very moment we celebrate Jesus coming up out of the tomb.

We do this because in Christ’s crucifixion and redemption we enter into a reality that is taking place every day. We may be living centuries after Jesus life and death on earth, but we all play roles in the story. Over the last year there will have been times when we have been a Judas figure betraying others. At times we have been Pilate, more concerned with holding on to power than doing what is right. Or we have been Peter, too weak to be associated with a brother or sister in strife and so we have pretended not to know. Some of us have been the figure of Mary or of Joseph of Arimathaea, laying our loved one in the tomb with tears and with weeping. Some of us come with hurt and pain because we have been betrayed, suffered injustice, or been mowed down and crushed by people more powerful than us. We come today with the bumps and bruises of life together with our failings and we will lay them at the foot of the cross on Good Friday.

Today we have heard Luke’s account of the passion of Jesus. All through Luke’s gospel, a major theme is that those who turn out to be the most welcome in the Kingdom are those who have the least right to expect a welcome or a hearing. In the opening chapters it is the shepherds who first hear the good news of Jesus’ birth. These people were not regarded as productive contributors to their social world, yet they slot into central roles in the story. In the parable of the great feast, those who are welcomed in from the highways and byways are the helpless; those who expect nothing and those who can take no initiative for themselves. In the trial of Jesus today Jesus is asked by the council to tell them if he is the Messiah. He responds, “If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I question you, you will not answer.” In other words Jesus is saying: I have nothing to say that you will be able to hear or to which you will be able to respond because I come with a much larger perspective and a larger world than yours; one that includes the powerless and voiceless. In other words Jesus has placed himself with the outsiders, with those whose language cannot be heard, with those on the margins, with those who are treated as discarded by our society. He speaks from the perspective of those who are constantly excluded.

In the story of Jesus’ passion, Luke’s insight is that God positions himself with the outsider; in those who are strangers to us and in the ones who are “left over” and those whose place is not guaranteed. God is present in those who do not have a voice, in those who have no power to affect their world, and with those believed to have lost any rights they may have had.

Today, the gospel perspective is that God comes to us as one who reminds us of our limits, our incompleteness, our limited understanding. This is what Jesus means when he says, “If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I question you, you will not answer.” Jesus is coming from a larger world and a larger perspective than the one his captors are willing to see. We are therefore being called to grow and expand from our place of security into something larger; to come to the point where we can acknowledge our insecurity and powerlessness and be at home with it. For example: Most of us who are parents have probably been in the situation where we are faced with a crying baby who seems unable to be comforted. The infant is unable to speak to us and tell us what’s wrong. After this has gone on for hours, feelings of frustration, helplessness, and being out of control arise. It’s at this point that a few parents, desperate to regain some sense of control, lash out and hurt the child. Another example: We may have met with a severely disabled person who is unable to communicate something important to us because they have lost the ability to remember or speak. As we sit with them the same feelings of frustration, of anger, of being out of control will surface. We know what needs to happen to keep this disabled person safe but we can’t make them understand. The stranger here: the crying child or the severely disabled, confront us with our limitations. What is happening is that they are bringing us to the limit of our humanity, to the point where I know that I have some growing to do so that that person and I can share the same world together.

Jesus came to show us that we are most in danger when we deny our own poverty and neediness. Luke is telling us that this is why Jesus is beaten and flogged, because he puts the powerful in touch with their own powerlessness and refuses to compete with his captors for their space. In the trial of Jesus, it is not really Jesus who is on trial, but us. We are being cross-examined on our readiness to face our own powerlessness, the exclusion we fear, the extent to which we withdraw from others and inadvertently exclude them. The gospel confronts us with the need to see in ourselves the tax collector, the leper, the blind or the lame person, woman in Simon’s house, and the lost sons in the parable of the prodigal. Jesus asks us to befriend that person and welcome them, rather than run away from them or flog them or crucify them.

The gospel calls all of us to journey with Jesus through Holy Week. I will be making that journey; will you come with me? Will journey with our baptism candidates, Jessica and Pippa, and pray for them and support them with your love? As you make this journey, take time to nurture your inner being. Ask God to show you your own inner regions of helplessness and speechlessness, the inner silences you fear and the weaknesses you don’t want to acknowledge. When Jesus’ captors were in the presence of Jesus, all they could see was the need to dominate and use the full force of their power. By contrast can we acknowledge our own our frailty, our poverty, our neediness, the gaps in our competencies, the mistakes of our youth? Can we learn, with God’s help, to be at home with these? In your prayer this week ask God to help you see these parts of your soul and ask God to help you be reconciled to the stranger within.

Lent is the season for us all to hear the gospel afresh. The parable of the forgiving Father today is often called the gospel within a gospel. It is Luke’s summary of the good news. It deals with all the major issues: sin, repentance, forgiveness, and above all, the love offered to us by God at great cost.

The parable of the prodigal son is like a three act play. The first act of the parable depicts the tragic fall of the younger son from grace. It’s as if the younger son is in a hurry for his father to die; so makes a request for his inheritance. Even though such a request would have been legal, it was certainly inappropriate. There is no doubt that the Father would have been extremely hurt by this request because by demanding this, younger son is rejecting the love that the Father has been giving him all his life. But that is not all. The son really blows it in the way he squanders the money. According to property law of Jesus’ day, possession of the inheritance did not give him the right to dispose of it. In a society with no social welfare system to protect the aged, retention of capital within the family circle was regarded as essential. So when the son demands his share before his father has died, and then spends it all, he is acting as if his father were already dead; he is shattering the covenant between him and his family. To rub salt into the wound, he then joins himself to a gentile and takes up an unclean occupation; taking care of pigs. The end result for the first century Jewish listener is a picture of a living death. The son, in fact, dies as well, for he has severed his relationship with his father, with his community of faith, and hence with God.

We know that the Pharisees were constantly critical of Jesus. It is clear in the gospels that they used to Jesus, “You doesn’t understand sin” (because you eat with sinners). So as they listen to act one of this parable, they would have been nodding their heads in approval. “This is exactly how we understand sin – this young Rabbi, Jesus, is finally on our wave length.”

Now for Act Two. Act two tells the story of the return of the younger son. As a child I was taught that the moment of repentance was when the son came to himself, made up the wee speech and decided to return home. Many interpreters now think differently. When the son comes to himself and makes up his wee speech, he is sort of repenting, but he is motivated by self-interest. We notice that his primary need is for something to eat, at least as much as his father’s servants. He thinks that if he goes back to his father and becomes a hired servant, then he will be able to save up his wages for years to come, and finally restore himself to the community by paying back the capital he has squandered. So he makes up a speech that is designed to evoke his father’s sympathy. We can note two more points here. First, we note that this speech has an uncanny similarity to the one made by Pharaoh when he changed his mind and released the Hebrews from Egypt. We all know what happened next in that story. Secondly, the son’s return will be at a huge risk. He will have to run the gauntlet of the village. Villagers in Middle Eastern culture had a custom. When a person like this first lost son, had mistreated a respected member of the village like the Father, they could enact a ritual that involved breaking an earthenware pot over his head to symbolise the breaking of the covenant the son had brought about. This was usually a fatal blow; enough to kill.

The third point here: The Pharisees listening to this story continue to approve. This Rabbi Jesus, not only shares our understanding of sin, they say. He also understands what we mean by repentance. They taught that repentance was (1) a decision to return to God; (2) to make payment or compensation to God for all the sins you have committed; (3) demonstrate sincerity by changing your life; (4) then when you have repented, you will be admitted back into the community of the redeemed. This repentance reflects the Pharisees’ teaching. So far they approve of the story.

The shock comes when the Pharisee’s view of repentance is blown out of the water. The Father, aware of the hostile reaction of the village, has been waiting and watching for the son’s return. When he sees him, he runs to greet him. Now, men of status simply did not run in those days. It was bad form for a man to show his legs (women have no shame!). Men did not even uncover their feet. For a man to uncover his feet was regarded as a gross insult. Yet the Father abandons all decorum. In front of his servants and the neighbours; he runs to greet his son. This is an act of foolish, joyful, love! He sees him coming from far off, he has compassion, he runs, he embraces and kisses.

The younger son is simply not ready for this. Imagine the son coming back, rehearsing his speech; it’s a good wee speech too, he’s rehearsed many times with the pigs. Well his father is in no mood to sober up and listen. He is not interested in a discussion about who is worthy and neither is he interested in being paid back; he stops his son midway and never hears his request to treat him as a hired servant. No way! The Father is already stirring up the servants for a royal welcome; a robe, a ring, shoes, kill the fatted calf! This is a homecoming! These gifts evoke deeper meanings as well, the robe, a symbol of authority; the ring is a signet ring so that the son can act with his father’s authority, shoes worn only by free people. This, brothers and sisters, is the moment of real repentance. When the Father greets his son, the son is transformed. It’s like a bomb going off in his heart! His life will never be the same again. The son is unexpectedly accepted as he is. We know that the takes a great risk to do this. The villagers have been lining up to smash an earthenware pot over this wayward son’s head. The fact is, that the Father could well have copped it himself. Hence the risk and the cost to the Father. This is a demonstration of costly love, of unexpected love. But this is the moment that the Son is restored. Indeed, he is restored to a position greater than the one he had when he left with his share of the property. Notice how Jesus has turned our ideas of repentance upside down. Repentance in this story is the act of being found by God, of being loved and restored by God. It’s like, I thought I was lost, unlovable, useless. But God searched me out, found me, and restored me, and brought me home. Now I can’t imagine being anywhere else but at home with God.

That figure of the Father running in welcome is the essence of the God revealed in Christ. God is revealed in this parable as forgiveness. He longs to welcome us home, to forgive, to restore, to heal. We may wander away from God or simply find that our lives are in chaos, just as the lost son did. But God is longing to welcome us home, to make us whole; God is longing to restore his image in us. Like the younger son we may feel alone, cut off from life, undeserving of God’s grace. But the parable tells us what God sees; that we are a loved child that he can’t wait to welcome home. God is infinite compassion; God is generous, faithful and loving. God will always receive us no matter what state we think our lives are in. The first son in the story experiences God’s goodness and grace today. But God’s grace is not to be taken for granted. His task now is to respond in faith and to pass on that love and forgiveness to others.

Now we come to the second lost son. Act three is about the older brother who is also lost. He represents the Pharisees who are lost too. We know this, because in accordance with Middle Eastern custom, he should have been there at the beginning defending his Father when the younger son takes his share of the estate. By not doing so, he has treated his Father as if he were dead as well. He too, is lost. He enters the story, annoyed that this newcomer, this outcast, is welcomed into the family. The second son represents that part of us that strives to do the will of God; that sees God as a negotiator, someone that will give us a good deal if we do enough favours for God. He is the part of us demanding a special relationship with God because we believe we’ve been more faithful than anybody else. The older son’s relationship with God is a contractual view of relating which says, “If I adhere to this list of obligations God, then I will be more acceptable to you.” The fact is: the older son has become the slave in the story; he is enslaved to the obligations he has set for himself.

So God becomes a servant for the second son too. Jesus is saying that our relationship with God is not to be like that. If we try to make ourselves measure up to God’s standards, if all we do is work harder and lay ever increasing burdens upon ourselves, in the end we are like lost slaves. We will never know what it is to be loved and forgiven. Instead we end up grumpy and depleted, sitting grumpily outside the feasting of the kingdom, just like the elder son. Well, all of us are welcomed into the feasting of the kingdom because of God’s grace; not because of any special effort of our own. We don’t need to prove ourselves to God. We don’t need to burden ourselves with unachievable demands to please God. God loves and accepts us as we are; a simple message yet so hard to believe; so hard in fact, that we are not sure whether the second son accepts the Father’s invitation into the meal of he kingdom.

Like the father in the parable, God is forgiveness. He is one who loves us unconditionally as we are. Forgiveness is not something we should take for granted. We are called to forgive as we have been forgiven; to love as we have been loved. Forgiveness does not mean denying pain, or dismissing our hurt feelings. Forgiveness is a willingness to let go, to stop ourselves storing up grudges so that they become like hardened cement around our hearts. Forgiveness is about speaking truthfully while remaining open to a relationship. It is an openness to be reconciled.

God forgave both of lost sons and loved them unconditionally. The challenge for us today, is to open our hearts to receive this grace filled love from God, and then to pass it on and forgive as we are forgiven.

Today the gospel reading is about ways we respond to painful situations in our world. There is something about human nature that we feel the need to blame victims for their circumstances. It is not unusual, for instance, to hear people blaming those who are on the dole for their plight. We sometimes call them dole bludgers. It is said that the reason they are there is because they are lazy free loaders who don’t really want to work. In some cases that may be true, but it is also true that we make comments like that when we don’t want to face the painful possibility that there are not enough jobs to go around. We blame victims or “the outsider” when we don’t want to face a painful truth, or when we need to feel better about ourselves.

There is another thing we sometimes do in the face of our own pain. From time to time, we say that the reason for the predicament we are in is that we must be useless human beings. So we blame ourselves. It is also a human reaction to think that God is punishing us or doing something to teach us a lesson. Or we think the reason we are where we are, is because it’s our fault and that we are not good enough. If we put this into religious language, we are in effect, suggesting that sin and suffering are linked. In other words, if someone is suffering, this is the result of God’s punishment. Luckily, in the text before us today, Jesus kicks this view into touch, well and truly.

The people who came to Jesus in today’s gospel held to the popular opinion that suffering was brought about by God’s judgement. They asked Jesus about to two recent disasters in the city of Jerusalem. Innocent worshippers who had come to the temple to offer sacrifices had been caught in the crossfire of a riot. They were killed by Pilate’s military police. And in a separate incident, a construction accident had killed eighteen people in Siloam. The people who came to Jesus were saying, “Is this the result of their sin? Is it because they were worse sinners than us? Had they brought suffering upon themselves?”

Typically, Jesus does not answer their question with an explanation. Instead, as he often does, he puts the question back to those who approach him. “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the others, because they suffered thus? I tell you, no!” This is good news. As he does on many other occasions, Jesus declares that fatal accidents, or physical deformities or illnesses for that matter, are not visited on us by a retributive God meeting out punishment for sin. This is an issue that the book of Job deals with extensively; perhaps even suggesting that the idea of an angry God raining down punishment on us is a human projection onto God. So if you have been through such a crisis, or if you are living with one, please note that all through the gospels it is clear that Jesus refused to proclaim a God of retributive judgement. He rejects that idea in the case of the man born blind, and again when the disciples wanted Jesus to call down fire and brimstone on the Samaritans. So, we can and should put that idea right out of our heads. As one of my spiritual directors once said, the voice suggesting God is like this needs to be taken into a back room of our minds and shut away where it can no longer be heard.

The idea that suffering is caused by our sin, however, is as old as human existence. Much of the Old Testament deals with this question, especially in relation to the exile into Babylon. There was a dominant party in ancient Israel who believed the exile was God’s punishment for years of poor leadership offered by bad kings. The book of Job and many of the psalms question this theological position. “What if suffering is undeserved?” they ask. “What if the people have been faithful to God, like Job, and still suffer?”

The idea that all suffering is the result of God’s punishment is questioned by Job, and by Christ. Even so, it is human nature to believe it. The language of our secular culture puts this in terms of the right to punitive action when other people hurt us, and we see that being played out in discourse about law and order in this country. Jonathan Sacks, the chief Rabbi in the UK, points out that part of the reason for this need for retribution stems from the way our culture is turning key relationships into a commodity. We now have therapists and counsellors telling us how to run our lives, fulfilling the role that once would have been filled over a cup of tea with our elders and mentors. As a church leader, I am aware of the need for these services for those in responsibility, don’t get me wrong, they do an important job. Sacks’ point, however, is that because of the commodification of relationships, when disaster strikes we find ourselves no longer in control of our destiny. Other’s control it. The result is the intensification of despair. That’s when it becomes too easy to say, “I am not good enough. I am useless. Someone has to be blamed.”

Today Jesus is saying that this is not the way Christians should act or think or view the world. We are to be motivated out of our experience of God’s grace and compassion. That’s what should drive our thoughts and our actions. Already, we know that Jesus has resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem. We know that Jesus will suffer and will lay down his life as a costly demonstration of God’s love. The call to repent that Jesus’ issues in this text is an indication that Jesus knows that time is short. The time for giving and receiving God’s love is now. If you refuse to adopt the way of love and compassion, there will be a natural consequence; the need for revenge, to strike back, will turn bitter and toxic. This is this kind of living death that God wants to save us from.

So Jesus plainly rejects the notion that calamities come as a result of sin. Jesus’ point is that all of us are frail human beings and all of us are equally vulnerable. He is saying that suffering is often arbitrary, that there is no explanation, and there aren’t easy platitudinous words that can make it all better. St Paul will go on to say that Jesus becomes an embodied image of what we are. He takes upon himself the same trials and suffering that we experience so that he can take all that into God. Having brought our pain and suffering to God he prays for us with sighs and moans too deep for words, that we might be healed, restored, forgiven, raised up to offer praise to God. In our prayer this Lent, our task is to ask God to show us a repentance that enables us love and forgive as Christ taught, even while we cry for justice and for our pain to be heard and acknowledged.

Our gospel reading concludes with a parable about the fig tree, the of the parable being that God gives us time to heal, time to love, time to repent. The first reading today reminds us of another important plant in the history of salvation, the burning bush. By the time of Jesus it was generally accepted that the burning bush was a thorn bush, and it was from this lowly bush that God spoke to Moses to reveal nothing less than his name, and to begin the process of liberating his people from Egypt. God enlightening Moses in the midst of thorns. This has tremendous resonance all through the bible. When Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden of Eden, one of the consequences was that thorns would cover the ground. The thorn bush appears again when Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac; the saving victim, a ram, appears among thorns. The thorn bush, an unlikely plant, is involved at crucial moments; moments of judgement, revelation, salvation and sacrifice.

For Christians, in this season of Lent, thorns come to mind again. “And soldiers, platting a crown of thorns, put it on his head.” Like the burning bush, the thorniness of our humanity is joined to Jesus, and his humanity is joined to the fire of his divinity. In his dying he speaks words of comfort to the thief, words of hope to his mother and a disciple, words of love and obedience to God the Father. But the thorns are not the end of the story. As the wood of the cross becomes the tree of life, so the crown of thorns becomes the crown of glory at the resurrection. God raises Jesus and crowns him with glory and honour. A crown of glory awaits us too, as it has been given to those who have gone before us. In the meantime, much of life has the harshness of thorns, but it is here that God comes to us bringing healing and salvation. God gives us time: time to repent, time to receive healing, time to accept forgiveness, and time to live with compassion.