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Lent VB: April 6, 2003
H O M I L
Y G R I T S
The
Fifth Sunday in Lent
Year B - April 6 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and
affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command
and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of
the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be
found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and
the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Jeremiah 31: 31-34 I will make a new covenant
Psalm 51 Miserere mei, Deus or 51:11-16 Create in me a clean heart, O God
Hebrews 5:(1-4) 5-10 He learned obedience through what he suffered
John 12: 20-33 Sentence is now being passed on this world; its ruler will
be expelled.
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
Jeremiah 31:31-34 as above
Psalm 51:1-12 as above, or Psalm 119:9-16 In quo corrigit?
Hebrews 5:5-10 as above
John 12:20-33
In many of the parish churches of England and in some of the older ones
in the USA one can find over the Holy Table, or near the Font, large
stone or wooden tablets upon which are incised or painted the Ten
Coimmandments and the Apostles Creed. It was hoped that by seeing the
code of morals and the code of faith spelled out in large letters each
time they came to the church, the people would more easily learn them,
remember them, take them to heart. The 1928 Prayer Book (most of us have
forgotten long ago) required that the decalogue be "rehearsed", that is
recited, once in the month at least at the service of Holy Communion.
The requirement was removed, and like the tablets of the Law, laid away
in the Church's liturgical attic, to be a source of`embarrassment to
liturgical engineers, and amusement to more up-to-date worshippers. We
hadn't kept the rules anyway, and some of them we blushed to say out loud
in of all places the church in the presence of children and our serial
spouses.
It was not the first time it happened in the history of Gods people. The
prophecy of Jeremiah tells us that God remembered the covenant, even
'though the people had forgotten it. "Behold the days are coming says
Yahweh when I will make a new covenant, not like the one I made when I
took them by the hand out of Egypt but the new covenant I will make will
not be written on stone tablets. I will put ,my Law within them, and I
will write it upon their hearts." No one will have to pull his
neighbor's coat and say, "Let me tell you about the Lord"-- special
individual catechesis won't be necessary, because all of them from the
most illiterate to the highly educated, from the poorest to the richest,
from the least to the greatest--they shall all know me, says Yahweh. I
will forgive their being traitors to me, and I will remember their sins
no more." I will forget that they put horns on me and committed
adultery. Instead of the Ten Commandments on the walls of the church,
over the Font or the Holy Table, they will be written in the heart of
everyone who comes in the door. They won't be memorized, but will be
instinctively in scripted there. Instead of the Decalogue once a month
or on the Sundays of Lent, as I did when I was first ordained, God
promises the inscription of the Torah, the Law, into our insides. And
that did not mean merely that each person would have memorized the Ten
Commandments, but that somehow each person -- and the whole culture --
was to be programmed to understand and live the Torah.
If all the books I have at Casa Ave Maria, hundreds of volumes, were put
onto floppy disks for my computer, I'm not sure I'd be any smarter than I
need to be, but my library would be easier to find my way around in and
I'd probably more quickly find a text I needed. Suppose now that my
brain could work as well as my desk top computer, and that all the ideas
and science and art in all my books could be written in my head and in my
heart, and also instantly available, fully retrievable at any moment.
Wow! I'd have a leg up on homily preparation. God promises that the New
Covenant we have been given is to be something like that: all of Torah,
God's "law and order" Bible, is to become a "love and order Bible" in our
lives, fully recorded, instantly ours, immediately brought to life. The
letter to the Hebrews tells us that this was done in the life of one
person. It tells how Jesus was "programmed" as we would say, in
computerese, his hard disk written, with the love of God. He was hard
wired with God's genes in him. In one of the most striking sentences in
all of the Greek scriptures, the writer to the Hebrews says that Jesus
"learned obedience by the things that he suffered." The immediate
interpretation that comes to mind for this sentence (that Jesus learned
by what he suffered) is to say something pious about the crucifixion. To
say that because of the Cross Jesus qualified for eternal priesthood,
like that of Melchizidek. But that was only the crown of his learning,
the end of his troubles and his tuition. Jesus suffered, and he is like
us in that, when we look at him. We see the suffering of all the ages
focused there on Calvary. But look closer. It is not in our suffering
that we are unlike the Saviour , but in our refusal to suffer, and in our
failure to listen to our suffering. Obedience, the word obedience, comes
from the Latin word for "hearing." People therefore, one might say, who
are dis-obedient, are in the spiritual sense "hard of hearing." Jesus
listened to the voice of God speaking in his suffering and it is in this
way that he learned form his suffering. He is therefore able to be our
high priest, because he has been where each of has been or shall be in
our lifetimes, and the only real difference is that Jesus always
listened. He was always attentive, he was always "audient" -- obedient.
None of us I hope shall end up on a cross to complete our learning. It
is not the way the Empire executes its victims in our time--you will have
to consult with George Bush about the details of exquisitely sadistic
capitalist punishment now, for he is an expert at it, having slaughtered
150 or so fellow citizens that way Crucifixion was a form of capitalist
punishment as late as the 16th century, for the Christian missionaries
who offended the Japanese Emperor. We need to listen to "preemptive
strike" as a form of capitalist punishment for those who can't resist our
might, and hear whom it is we are killing in this way, and what color
they are, and what class they come from. US television knows only one
Iraqi--"Sodom Hussein" as they call him--and never say the name of
another Iraqi person, and rarely the name of Allah God. They have now
added President Hussein's name to their list of those "Wanted, Living or
Dead" headed by Osama Bin Laden. But what people are in fact killed by
the young U.S. army volunteers of the capitalist punishment system--the
youth of Arab world, Iraqi youth in Mosul and Baghdad, dissenters from a
hundred lands, the women in abortion mills, the young gay man hung on a
fence in Wyoming by macho wimps. In 1980, the Archbishop of San Salvador
was murdered in his cathedral while celebrating Eucharist. A few days
later a C.I.A. operative was paid off for the job. That money came
directly from your income tax return, and you need to get it back. Think
of that kind of suffering when you think of Jesus, too. Like Blessed
Oscar Romero, Jesus lived in a country run by rich and powerful
outsiders. (You in the U.S.A. live in a country run by rich and powerful
insiders. They behave the same way, for they all went to the same U.S.
schools.) He had his Pontious Pilate in the military junta imposed by
the U.S. there. He had his high priest in the Pope's legate, who sided
with the fascist government against them. He had his crucifixion on the
altar next to the cross of Jesus there. Few of us will be called upon
for that kind of heroic death, but all of us are called upon a little at
a time, it seems, for heroic living, and the dying of a hundred little
mortifications. We take up crosses, and our nails are sometimes thumb
tacks and sometimes spikes (no pun to offend the master of ceremonies!).
When the letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus learned by what he
suffered, we think of that cross as Jesus did: "I, if I be lifted up,
shall draw all humanity to myself" he said.
It was the presence of aliens and outsiders, as it were strangers, at a
church meeting, that provoked his vision and prophecy. Some Greeks had
come to the city for Passover (were they Greek speaking Jews from the
Diaspora? Were they like Philip from a Greek speaking area of
Palestine? They were not pure straight-up Jews whatever they were.)
"Sir, we would see Jesus", they had said to Philip and Andrew, and Jesus
had answered up by speaking of his being "lifted up". Too often we have
other things to show strangers: our budget, our pipe organ, our cursillo
program. It isn't until the life of Jesus is lifted up--crucified and
resurrected--that he becomes universally available, available even to the
alien, the stranger, the outsider, the Greeks at the feast. (He has long
been available to Muslims as prophet and messiah, to Hindus as a man of
peace.) Until then, all his life and all his suffering was hidden,
localized, inscribed as it were on the tablet of his flesh only visible
in the Syrian countryside.
Jesus learned obedience from the suffering he underwent all his life.
The rumors that his mother had fathered him by a Roman soldier and
out-of-wedlock, that he was born in "sin"-- if it were untrue, would he
and his blessed mother suffer the less from the talk?--What of his own
childhood? What of the folks who claim now that he had no brothers and
sisters, to cover up their own embarrassment with their divine Man
doctrines--though the Bible says he did have siblings--doesn't it hurt
him (and his sisters and brothers) now, as they are alive to God and have
joined us too as their family? What of the horror of infanticide, the
Empire's search-and-destruction of children (the tale is there in the
gospel) in the Holy Innocents of then and now, the murder of Palestinian
children in the West Bank, now of Iraqi children in their ancient cradle
of civilization, the Iraqi women who are even now aborting themselves so
they will not bring babies into U.S. tyranny? .
What of his own childhood as a refugee, were there early memories of
fleeing into exile? What of the suffering of living in occupied
territory, hostile troops from the Roman legions everywhere, demanding
favors and tribute? What of his horror when his beloved cousin John was
murdered by the government? His own struggle with the temptation to take
up violence himself to avenge it? "The kingdom of heaven cometh by
violence, and the violent bear it away." Look at the teaching he gave us
in the "Blesseds", which were all written in his life and in his
anguished choices. Was Jesus never angry with his brothers and his
sisters, before he taught us all that it was murderous to be so? Did he
not ever feel resentment when the soldiers leered at his sisters, when
they forced him or any other Jewish male to carry their luggage a mile,
as required by law? Did they call him "boy"? Was he never slapped
across the face by such a "dog" (as the people spoke of the Roman
soldiers)? Did he not joke with the Syro-Phoenician woman about throwing
the children's bread to the Gentile dogs? Was there not a seed of scorn
there? Did Jesus not ever suffer sexual temptation, erotic stirring in
he presence of others? How did he learn to identify lust with the
pollution of relationships that the Torah called "adultery"? Wasn't
there suffering in his own homelessness, and being asked to leave one
place after another, and being accused of devil-worship, or heresy, and
perversion? Didn't he weep over the abuse given to the women who
travelled with him and provided him with food? Didn't he suffer when his
beloved Lazarus died alone in his sickness and his sisters bitterly
accused him of not caring.
Jesus learned obedience by the things that he suffered. He listened for
the voice of God in all his sufferings.And all suffering people do that,
and many never filter out the pain. He learned from fisherfolk, farmers
and laboring people about loss and failure and terror and drowning. He
learned from women about unfaithfulness and poverty and powerlessness,
and he learned from churchfolk about hypocrisy and the sacrilege of holy
things, and in all of it he knew that the crucifix was coming. It was
bound to be in an occupied territory the consummation of all his
revolutionary suffering, and of all his learning and listening to the God
of the people. In the lifting up of his learning, through suffering, God
would somehow be given glory, and the whole suffering world would be
drawn to his witness. The time had come to plant the seed of his
witness, which must fall into the earth and die before it could bring
forth much fruit.
Now what can we learn from Jesus. Or can we?
As we U.S.ers of the world search, destroy, and maim the people of Iraq,
a vast majority of our people vote in the polls to back them up. We have
abandoned our religion and our democracy. How did we learn to do this
from Jesus, the Prince of Peace?
Vachel Lindsay asks us now,"Where is the Real Non-Resistant?"
Who can surrender to Christ, dividing his best with the stranger,
Giving to each what he asks, braving the uttermost danger
All for the enemy MAN? Who can surrender till death
His words and his works, his house and his lands,
His eyes and his heart and his breath?
Who can surrender to Christ? Many have yearned toward it daily
Yet they surrender to passion, wildly or grimly or gaily;
Yet they surrender to pride, counting her precious and queenly;
Yet they surrender to knowledge, preening their feathers serenely,
Who can surrender to Christ? Where is the man so transcendent,
So heated with love of his kind, so filled with the spirit resplendent
That all the hours of his day his song is thrilling and tender,
And all of his thoughts to our white cause of peace
Surrender, surrender, surrender? *
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 2nd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
* Vachel Lindsay, Collected Poems. The Macmillan Company. The Story of
Jesus in the World's Literature. Edited by Edward Wagenknecht. New
York: Creative Age Press, Inc. 1949,