Tonight, in the Old Testament
stories about God’s rescuing of the Israelite people, how Moses led them out of
Egypt, we see a God who goes to great lengths to demonstrate his abiding love
to his people. The same God who sent Moses to rescue the Israelites from
slavery in Egypt sent his Son into the world to save all people through
the power of love.
In St. John’s gospel, in Chapter
12, Jesus enters Jerusalem for the last time, riding a borrowed donkey. Palm Sunday is the commemoration of
that triumphal entry, when the people thronged the streets to see the great
teacher, shouting “Hosanna!” His followers must have exulted at the prospect
that their beloved Lord would finally take the reins of political leadership,
but that was not what Jesus—or the Father--had in mind. Later that day, Jesus says to his
disciples, “Very truly, I tell you, 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.” Jesus explains the necessity
of his approaching death. His
disciples, who refused to believe he would die, didn’t get it.
Like the disciples, we may not
fully understand or accept why every human life, at some time or another,
endures the darkness of pain, suffering, fear, or grief, but we know such agony
is unavoidable. Now, two millennia after the life of the carpenter from
Nazareth, maybe we can agree that what Jesus said about his death bearing
fruit was extraordinarily accurate: Today, according to the Pew Research
Center, there are 2 BILLION, 180 MILLION Christians in the world. Why are so
many still attracted to the Christian way?
In the name of radical love, Jesus
died a cruel death so that his followers would have assurance that death is
not the final human reality. Christ’s resurrection promises the ultimate salvation. His
beloved followers, even the majority who were not present with Him near the
cross, had their fears and doubts removed by their encounters with the resurrected
Jesus. Thanks to Mary Magdalene and the other women who first saw the risen
Lord, the disciples were called into action and founded the early church. They
finally understood the power of Christ’s love to bear fruit. The church rests
on a love that denies the self for the greater good of others.
The words LOVE and CHURCH both imply community. It takes at
least two people—the one who loves and the beloved—for love to happen. Church
is a fellowship of Christians, and the church universal is one very
large family. The church is called the “bride of Christ” to suggest the ideal
closeness borne of Christian love. Father Edmond Browning, former Presiding Bishop of the
Episcopal Church, has this to say about community: “There is nothing more
important than community. We are in community from the moment of conception,
dependent upon our mother, our bodies sustained by her heartbeat. The
mysterious doctrine of the Trinity is really all about this fact: Even God
has never been alone. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that
incomprehensible three–in-one that has always been and will always be—God is
a relationship.” Isn’t that
a wonderful thing to ponder?
This Holy Week I’ve been especially
conscious of Jesus as a member of that special kind of relationship we call a
family. March 25th is always celebrated in the church as
Annunciation Day, the day when the angel appeared to Mary and told her that she
would bear the son of God. This year,
Annunciation Day fell on the Monday of Holy Week, and it was a good reminder of
how Mary was with her son from beginning to end. From Bethlehem to Golgotha, Mary was a constant in Jesus’s
life. She was one of the few gathered beneath the cross. We can only try to imagine how much
pain she suffered watching her son die in that terrible way. Let’s go a step
further and try to imagine God’s anguish over the pain his son endured. As did Jesus, God knew this pain was
necessary and would bear fruit.
Knowing that didn’t make it less painful.
So here we are at last to the
fulfillment of the promise: Easter morning is upon us, and the Lord Jesus will
rise to new life. Jesus’s experience on the cross, his entering into the
darkness of death, is the revelation of God’s covenant with us. God KNOWS how
much we hurt, and God chooses to be with us, to comfort us, in all our
suffering. That Trinity, which Bishop Browning called a relationship? We are invited to join it. In fact, we are already members of the
body of Christ whether we choose to be or not. The promise of eternal love is always extended in our
direction, in this life and the next. That is why when we turn our hearts
toward God, we find God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit already there, awaiting us.
Maybe they are saying, “What took you so long?”
Allelujah! Amen.
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