Living a New Story.

Luke 24.13-35

April 26 MMXX

I.

There is a sense in which our whole existence is a journey with a God whom we do not recognize.  Each Sunday we make an affirmation that comes from the Orthodox liturgy, proclaiming that “Christ is in the midst of us!” and that “He is and ever shall be!”  At the end of Matthew’s gospel Jesus assures his disciples: “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”  The continued living Presence of Jesus Christ with us is something we talk about and say we trust in; but it is not readily apparent to us all the time, or even most of the time.  Because most of our days on this journey we do not recognize him.  Usually he appears to us as a stranger, an other.

If Christ is a stranger, someone whom we do not realize is God’s Presence in the midst of us, we can find ourselves in the confused, crestfallen, concerned attitude of these two disciples.  Things happen, but we don’t understand what they mean.  We don’t know what to believe.  It is hard to sort truth from propaganda and lies.  We yo-yo from high hopes to despondency and depression.  We are jerked around by the machinations of political leaders and forces that do as they please, exerting whatever cynical violence they want in order to protect their own position and carry out their own agendas.  

Without recognizing the living Presence of the Lord in the midst of us, a lot of our life seems fruitless.  Prayer, worship, meditation, spiritual practices and disciplines… they may feel like wastes of our time.  At best we imagine we are deriving some physical or psychological benefit from them.  We are making contacts, fulfilling obligations, covering our bases, burnishing an image.

And the best we can do to make sense of our lives is to try and piece together a coherent story based on the facts as we understand them.  That’s what’s going on  with these disciples, walking slowly home from Jerusalem, seven miles, to the town of Emmaus, on the afternoon of the first day of the week during Passover.  They are disappointed, despondent, depressed, and discouraged.

Back in seminary I learned that we are a story we tell ourselves about ourselves.  That story is our identity.  If we keep telling ourselves something then that is what we will be.  If it’s a negative story of loss, failure, defeat, victimization, and disability, that is what we will continually live into.  Our life will only make sense to us when we frame it in these terms.  Things that happen that don’t fit into this narrative will be invisible, unrecognizable, incoherent, and dismissed as anomalies.

In one church I served there was a young woman with anorexia.  No matter how much weight she lost, no matter how thin, gaunt, and skeletal she became, she would still see an overweight person in the mirror.  Because mere facts and empirical observations were not powerful enough to counteract her interior personal narrative about who she was.

The narrative of these disciples includes great, tragic, and traumatic loss.  Their hoped-for redeemer had been murdered in a public act of unspeakable terror and violence.  

But there are also these odd anomalies, things that don’t quite fit into the story: the missing body and the women who say they encountered angels saying that Jesus is alive.  None of which makes any sense.  It doesn’t fit into the normal story of human existence.

II.

And they meet this apparently clueless stranger on the road.  He doesn’t appear to know this story.  Doesn’t he watch cable news?  Isn’t he on Facebook?  What podcasts does he listen to?  How can anyone not know what happened in Jerusalem this weekend?  How can anyone ignore the sad facts that reinforce again the standard narrative about human existence, that the world chews up and spits out anything good, true, beautiful, and wise?  That there is no redemption, no salvation, no liberation in this life?  The rich get richer, the strong stay in power by violence, and there is no hope. 

That’s the story we are fed by our own egos and by the ruling Empire of every age in order to get us to keep working.  If you want to get ahead in this life you have to take, grab, keep, and steal, and even kill.  Your life is measured by how much you have.  Other people are competitors for scarce resources, or enemies to be feared.  The planet is yours to do what you want with.  Wealth, power, and fame are what you should strive for.  And the end you fear but never talk about is death.  Extinction.  Annihilation.

But this stranger on the road appears to know about some other story.  The story he knows is not an unfamiliar story to these Jews, especially at Passover.  They are aware of this other story; they can even recite it in detail.  God liberates the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  God shapes a complaining, ignorant, ungrateful, volatile mob into a holy people, by giving them a Law, a way to live in peace and justice together and even be an example to the world. 

The people keep falling and God keeps saving and redeeming them.  God sends them prophets for correction and encouragement.  Even after the near destruction of exile in Babylon, God again miraculously redeems, delivers, restores, and saves the people.

The story the stranger tells has to do with a lamb who is slain to save the people from death; a goat who is sacrificed to forgive and sanctify them, and another one who bears the sins of the people away; a servant who takes on the people’s wrongdoing and its consequences.  In every case the revealed truth is that God is bringing light into our darkness, goodness out of our evil, and life from our death.  This is even true from the very beginning when the Creator God speaks into being the beautiful and good universe, overcoming a formless, chaotic void.

The conclusion being that of course the Anointed One, the Messiah and Savior of Israel, would have to suffer, even taking on our death, in order to fulfill the divine vocation of deliverance, redemption, and liberation.  Indeed, it is something that Jesus tells them several times during his ministry with them.  It would even have been the centerpiece of his teaching, enacted in his healing of the sick and his inclusion of the outcast.  This radical reversal, snatching victory from defeat, is God’s whole MO.

III.

These disciples know all this.  But there is a big difference between knowing something cognitively and having something shape our whole life and behavior.  Knowing a story is not living a story.  A story has to get out of our brains and into our bodies.  It has to become the story we live by, according to  which we make our decisions.  It is the difference between reading a book about how to dance, or play the guitar, or speak Chinese, and actually learning to do these things.  It is the difference between talking the talk, and walking the walk.  

It is the difference between talking about how Christ is in the midst of us, and living with and in his Presence together.  For Christ invites us not just to think and talk about him, but to follow him and even become him.

How does that happen?  In the story, the disciples reach their village.  The stranger intends to keep walking on.  They could have just let him go on his way.  He would have become an interesting anecdote about this weird guy they met and engaged them in an interesting theological conversation.  Remember that guy?

But the disciples actively and strongly invite the stranger to stay with them.  He’s still just a stranger.  But they show him hospitality.  They welcome him, even cajole him, to remain with them.  They want him to join them.  

We have first of all to want to have this other story, this counter-narrative, this alternative way of seeing things enter into our lives.  We have to want to change.  We have to desire personal and even social and global transformation.  

That transformation can start when we open ourselves to something new.  We have to open our doors and our hearts to this stranger with a different story.  That means letting go of our normal, reasonable fear of the other, and allowing a new and somewhat unknown influence into our home, into our heart.  It means putting down our defenses and permitting this foreigner to invade us and permeate us.  We have to feed him, share our table with him, offer him our bread, our sustenance.  We have to cultivate his story and warm it over among ourselves, reflecting on it, letting it grow in us.

The stranger joins them at their dinner table.  He takes some of the matzoh (for it is still Passover).  He blesses it: "Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha olam, ha motzi lechem min ha aretz”.  He breaks it.  And he gives it to them.

This is a series of actions so characteristic of the Lord that they recognize him immediately.  And it is the characteristic movement of real discipleship.  We take, receive, accept, welcome, and lift up our life in God’s creation; we bless and offer heartfelt thanksgiving for all that we receive as a divine gift; then we break by losing it, letting it go, giving it up, and dying to the impulses that want to keep and hoard this for ourselves alone; and finally we give it by distributing what we have and sharing with all.  It is the very action of sacrifice, and of love.

At that moment, we are told, their eyes are opened.  They recognize him at last.  And he immediately vanishes from their sight.  He disppears because he is no longer separate from them and therefore visible to their mortal eyes.  

To truly recognize him is to understand that he is always here and always has been, within them, in their midst.  Indeed, he is always everywhere, for Christ is the imprint, the signature, the resonant echo of God’s Voice, the Word though whom all things are made, reverberating through all Creation.  

IV.  

The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, this ceremonial act of taking, blessing, breaking, and giving the bread and wine representing and becoming for us the Body and Blood of the Lord, is the enactment of this other story, the true story, of everything.  

When we eat his Body and drink his Blood, we are inviting him into us, our bodies, our lives, our world.  It is an expression of our desire to become him.  It means he lives in us now, and we in him.  By this activity, his story — the story of the redemptive love at the heart of Creation — becomes our story. 

That story is that in him no one is ever lost, no one is ever separated, no one is “other,” but all are one.  There are no enemies.  There is no “us” and “them.”  There are no distinct nations, races, classes, sides, families, or even religions.  All of that separation, opposition, hostility, and fear has been immolated and exhausted on the cross and washed away in our baptism.  We now proceed into the world with a new story, as new people, as the Presence of Christ, truly human and truly God, for healing and reconciliation, sharing and forgiveness, justice and peace, hope and love, gratitude, wonder, and joy.

+++++++    

In the Midst of Us.

John 20:19-31

April 19 MMXX

I.

This story of the first appearance of the risen Lord to his disciples begins in both a time of increasing darkness, and behind securely locked doors.  They are as it were sheltering in place due to their fear.  Their defenses are up.  They are in hiding.  Night is falling.  Things are bad.  

Not only does this describe our situation in this pandemic — with it still likely to get worse before getting better, with our doubt about whether we are ever going to get back to anything like “normal" — but it also represents the condition of defeated, demoralized, disillusioned, depressed, despairing souls.

The disciples are wracked with guilt, sadness, grief, confusion, and terror.  It would not be at all unusual for the authorities to round them all up for crucifixion as associates of Jesus.  Jesus’ body is apparently missing, whatever that could mean.  And Mary has been annoyingly going on about somehow seeing him alive that morning: talk about denial and wishful-thinking.  Everything they imagined and hoped about how their careers would turn out, has been demolished.  They lost their best friend and teacher.  And almost all of them abandoned him at his time of greatest need, electing to save themselves.  They gave up everything for this adventure; now it had all turned to ash.

Sometimes we land in these dark, claustrophobic, inescapable spaces and they are horrible.  Like being buried alive in a coffin.  Everything has collapsed in on you.  Outwardly it can be a terrible disease, a failed marriage, your children in danger, an addiction, or getting fired.  Or if you were living from paycheck to paycheck in this economy, and the paychecks have stopped but the bills haven’t, and getting food is becoming a problem….  And you’ve got this weird cough but no health insurance.

Like you were so proud of yourself and hopeful because you were sober for three years… and then that all gets wiped away in one weekend and you find yourself back at the beginning.  Starting over, only now with less confidence, and more bitter awareness of the grip this particular demon has on you.

So things are bad for the disciples, and most of us can relate.  At these times we don’t feel particularly open to new spiritual experiences.  If anything we’ve become pretty cynical about the effectiveness of messiahs and missions and even prayer.  I mean, why bother?  Right?  Three years on the road witnessing miracles gets completely drained and denied by three days hiding in a room with a bunch of other defeated people, having watched the Romans do to Jesus what they always do.  

It was evening, darkness was increasing, another bad night was beginning, and the doors of the house were locked because of fear.  If it can get this bad it can probably get worse.  Where is the bottom?  When can we just go back home and return to fishing, pretend this all never happened.  The smug neighbors will get over shaking their heads and saying “I told you so” after a few weeks.  But we’ll always be those guys who followed a false “messiah” all the way to Jerusalem and had to come back with their tails between their legs.  Whatever.

II.

If they have nothing else at this point, the disciples have memories and they have community.  They have each other.  And they probably do what we all do when someone close to us dies: they remember.  They share stories.  They recall the experiences they had together.  They bring to the table Jesus’ words, teachings, actions.  

Because it just doesn’t really compute, that the man who does the amazing things they witness — like healing someone born blind, or even raising Lazarus from the dead — perhaps Lazarus is even there with them in that room! — and how it makes no sense that Jesus, of all people, would die, especially like that….  

Unless it does.  Does Jesus not say that he would be “lifted up”?  And he was certainly lifted up on that horrible cross.  Does he not also say our pain will turn into joy, and that in a little while we would not see him, and then again in a little while we would see him, that he would would go away but not leave us orphaned, and that some “Advocate” would come?  Doesn’t he predict that we would leave him alone, but we should be at peace about that?  Doesn’t he say he would come again and take us to himself?  Doesn’t he say, the night before he dies, right when Judas took off to rat on him, that he is thereby “glorified” and has “conquered the world”?

Maybe the disciples had to remember what Passover itself is about: How God is in the very business of snatching victory from defeat, bringing life into death, and overcoming the darkness with light.

Maybe they had to remember that this whole experience is about love.  Maybe that’s what they are to take with them into the darkness: living in his love which gives life for one’s friends, that the world would know us by our love, and that the love with which God loves him will be in us and even that he will himself be in us?

Maybe they remember what happens in this same room, a few nights before, when Jesus washes their feet.  He performs this amazing act of selfless service, demonstrating to them the essence of his life and ministry as this self-emptying love for others, and for all, which is now to be the guiding principle of their life and mission together.  

After three days of these ruminations, and after the puzzling mysteries of that morning when Peter and John find no dead body in Jesus’ tomb, and Mary says she actually meets Jesus himself….  Jesus comes and stands among them, in the middle of them all, and says “Peace be with you!”

Darkness, walls, and fear are no barrier to the risen Lord, who appears right there in their midst, with a word of peace.

III.

I wonder if the secret to healing and transformation isn’t the memory and community shaped, informed, flavored, and defined by Jesus Christ, which is to say memory and community in tune with the Way, the Truth, and the Life he embodies and gives to us.

What leaves people in despair sometimes to the point of suicide is dwelling on bad memories, stewing in bad stories, wallowing in bad thoughts, and having either no community or being stuck in systems based on judgment, condemnation, retribution, blame, exploitation, and carelessness.  Bad memories and bad community exist in opposition and contradiction to Jesus Christ, and therefore to the will of the Creator. 

This is what ego and Empire desire and foist upon people, then and now: the corrosive idea that whatever happens to you is your own damn fault, that your value is determined by how much wealth you make for your employers, that your happiness is measured by how much you are able to take for yourself, and your security is based on violence and threats of violence.  It says that we do not and should not care about each other, support each other, help each other, or organize ourselves to assist each other in times of crisis.  It asks why I should pay for someone else’s health care, for instance.  And it blindly puts me, my family, my race, my nation, my species first, sacrificing all else, including the planet, to my immediate self-gratification.

It is the mindset that is willing to let, or even in effect force, others to die for “the economy.”  The world that leaves us alone and vulnerable, under vast pressure to keep working and producing so we can overpay for what we need, which is still unavailable when we need it most, that world is not real.  Powerful people invented it and forced it on us for their benefit.  

In his final prayer with his disciples Jesus describes these attitudes as “the world.”  The world is the regime of the Evil One; neither Jesus nor his disciples “belong to” the world, but they are nevertheless “sent” into the world for the purpose of witnessing within it to the Truth of God’s saving love, revealed in Jesus.  They are sent into the world to form an alternative community, a gathering based on compassion, generosity, inclusion, forgiveness, non-violence, and love.

That’s what has to be communicated to people, cowering in the increasing darkness with their doors locked.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  Indeed, it isn’t this way at all, really; this is not the world God creates, redeems, and sustains.  Not only is this not the only possible world, but we will show you a different one.  We will show you a world based on love.  

That is what Jesus empowers the disciples to do and be when he breathes on them the Holy Spirit, his own life-giving, comforting holy breath, his living presence with and within them, their Advocate wedding them to him and empowering them to love one another with his love.  It is not for some return to “normalcy” that he gives them the Spirit.  It is for the overcoming of the world in his name, with his peace.

IV.

With this Spirit within them, they may now represent Jesus Christ as his agents in releasing people’s sins, and even in his work of taking others’ sins on themselves, retaining them, absorbing them, processing them, and defusing them, so they can do no more harm to anyone.  That is the work of this new community, that is the work of love in Jesus’ Name; to first of all forgive sins, which is to say, to let go of what separates people from God and their true nature, and secondly when necessary to retain others’ sins, which is to say, take on ourselves the consequences of people’s wrong-headed actions, making ourselves a living sacrifice after Jesus’ example.

In no case do we leave people alienated, alone, isolated, to fend for themselves.  In no case do we shrug off another’s pain, hunger, fear, disease, and degradation.  But in every case we find a way to say, as Jesus does in his final prayer, we are One.  We are one with God, with each other, with all creation.  No one is separated.  No one is lost.  No one is forgotten.

Christ is in the midst of us.

He is and ever shall be!

+++++++             

Wait and See!

Matthew 28:1-10

April 12 MMXX

I.

The familiar story is that the women go to Jesus’ tomb early on Sunday morning with spices to embalm Jesus’ body.  But Matthew’s account doesn’t mention the spices.  He also may have them going to the tomb much earlier, perhaps even shortly after sundown, which is when the Sabbath officially ended and “the third day” would begin, in spite of the way English translations often clean this up. 

It makes me wonder if maybe the women don’t go to the tomb so much to tend to a dead body, as to wait and see what, if anything, is going to happen.  They still have a fragile spark of hope.

So they go to see.  They show up at the tomb in the dark expecting to see something.  

How much of life is just showing up?  Just opening our eyes and looking at what is happening around us is important.  As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”  Yogi had the wisdom to realize that most of the time we are not “watching,” that is, we are not present, we are not paying attention to the things that may be happening in front of us, in our field of vision.  Things are visible, but we are not really observing them, we do not understanding their meaning.    

The first part of showing up is actually hearing the promise.  The whole promise.  Earlier in the gospel, while they are all still up in Galilee, Jesus tells the disciples that “he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”  The male disciples do not get it.  Peter even rebuked Jesus for being too negative.  That doesn’t go well for him; Jesus calls him “Satan.”  Other times, Matthew just says they didn’t understand.  Probably they were afraid to ask, after Peter’s experience.

But here in the final chapter we discover that some among the disciples actually are paying attention.  Some are hearing his words and mulling them over, perhaps among themselves, separately, out of earshot of the men, who wouldn’t have cared what they were talking about anyway.  They are watching all along.  Maybe while they are doing the daily, hourly work of attending to the needs of the group of disciples, as they provide for Jesus, as Matthew describes it, they are also listening, observing, processing, warming and stirring all this experience over in their hearts and minds.  

By now the women realize that the first part of Jesus’ prediction, about his suffering and death, has come true.  They are eye-witnesses to those events actually horribly occurring just as Jesus says.  It happened three days before.  Indeed, they will never forget any detail of it.  Anything we know about Jesus’ crucifixion, we know because the women are there and remember it. 

But Jesus also says he would “on the third day be raised.”  That part had not yet happened.  So perhaps the women go to the tomb in which Jesus had been hastily laid on Friday evening, to see whether and how those words of Jesus might come true as well.  As soon as the sun sets on Saturday, it becomes “the third day.”  So they go to the tomb.

II.

Another aspect of showing up is going to the right location.  We have to put ourselves in the right place at the right time.  The women have to have the courage to go to Jesus’ tomb.  It is a place, obviously, of death, loss, pain, grief, and incredible, unbearable sadness for them.  No doubt anger, bargaining, denial and the other stages of grief are beginning to set in as well. 

It’s not always about a physical location, of course; sometimes it’s about going to difficult interior, mental, emotional, spiritual “places.”  Sometimes it’s about facing bad memories.

Who wants to go back to the place of our worst experience?  Who wants to remember the worst day of our lives?  We all know how just being back in certain locales — a neighborhood, a house, a room, a school, a hospital, even an article of clothing — can bring back bad memories.  Many of us have “rooms” in our minds that we know better than to ever reenter; they bring us back to bad, bad places.

I mean, Jesus’ tomb was only a couple of hundred feet from Golgotha, where he was crucified.  (Today they are both within the same building in Jerusalem.)  The women would have been able to see the place where Jesus had been publicly tortured to death, only days before, from the site of the tomb.  They would have to relive all that horrible day.

Sometimes, when we experience a trauma, we choose for the sake of our own sanity to repress and forget it, but its effects continue to echo through our lives and influence our decisions and relationships.  Sometimes the only way to get our lives back to manageability is to revisit those places.  

We need the assistance and guidance of a community, or a professional, to do this.  Simply “going there” on our own can unleash all kinds of thoughts and feelings we may not know what to do with.  

What makes the difference for these women when they go to the tomb is that they also remember the odd, tantalizing last words of Jesus’ prophecy, that after his death he would “on the third day be raised.”  The Lord elsewhere refers to this as “the sign of Jonah,” the prophet who emerges after three days in the belly of a whale.

Maybe the women realize that Jesus is saying that out of his worst day will emerge his best day.  Maybe they are beginning to understand that the time of the greatest loss, deepest pain, worst humiliation, and absolute defeat, will turn and be transfigured into an amazing victory beyond all imagination.  

III.

Surely they remember that other Mary from the Bible, Moses’ sister, Miriam, whose spontaneous praise-song celebrating the miraculous deliverance of the escaped Israelite slaves at the Red Sea becomes the very seed from which the whole Jewish (and Christian) tradition grows.  She too witnesses victory emerge from catastrophe, as the people safely pass through the divided waters of the sea, which then return to demolish the pursuing enemy army.

Maybe they remember how, 800 years after Moses, the people were again delivered from exile in Babylon, victory again emerging from utter defeat.  Maybe they realize that theirs is a God who is about bringing good out of evil, light into darkness, and life from death.  Maybe they remember that God births the whole creation out of nothing at the beginning, and infuses nature with cycles in which nothing is ever lost and life always triumphs and grows.  

Maybe they remember how Jesus makes a point of including… people like them!  He liberates Mary Magdalene from the possession of demons!  He welcomes the outcasts and the marginalized, heals the sick, and even raises people from death!  These are things they have seen with their own eyes, involving people they know personally.

Maybe they realize that bringing life out of death is in God’s wheelhouse, as we say, meaning that nothing is more easy, natural, and characteristic of God than acts of amazing deliverance, redemption, salvation, enlightenment, and liberation.   

Maybe they go to the tomb to see what will happen, even expecting something amazing.  They don’t know what it will be, specifically.  But it will be described by Jesus’ words “be raised,” and it could be very good.

Imagine what God can bring out of our bad places.  Imagine how God can turn our defeats and losses into spectacular victories.  Imagine what God can make grow in the dark soil fed by the compost of our grief, pain, humiliation, failure, and defeat.  Imagine what light God is even now ready to shine into our darkness.

They are ready to see something.  And what they see is first an angel, a messenger of God who shows them that the tomb is really empty.  That place of greatest darkness and fear?  There is nothing there.  It is not real.  It is not to be feared.  

The angel tells them that Jesus has been raised.  He is not a decaying dead body; he is not an inert and malleable historical figure; he is not “here” in the sense of still subject to the police, laws, courts, soldiers, judges, nails, spears, and graves by which the Empire keeps us enslaved in terror.

“He has been raised,” the angel says, and he is “going ahead of you.”  Always ahead of us, so we may follow him in lives characterized by his love and justice, his compassion and peace, his healing and joy, his humility and grace, his welcome and inclusion, his eternal life and oneness with God and all.  

IV.

Which means he is also always with us.  For the Lord then appears to the women, and tells them not to be afraid.  In the end it is our fear that kills us and keeps us dead.  Our fear of going to the dark places in our soul, our fear of failure, loss, pain, and death, our fear of rejection, abandonment, or just the consequences of our decisions.  

These days it is our fear of getting or spreading this infection.  We may fear losing our parents or grandparents who are already infirm.  Some fear running out of food or other consequences of being out of work.  Some fear just having to be locked in with family, for various reasons.   

The women in the story have to not let themselves be dominated and throttled by fear.  In that they remind me of health-care workers today.  They do still carry some fear; we never totally get rid of it in this existence.  But it is controlled and overcome by their calling to care for others. 

That is our calling as well.  Maybe as we show up together in some of our darkest places, we will find that the true light will shine even there.  In some ways this experience is actually bringing us together in mutual support.  We even see signs of the earth healing.  

Maybe if we show up and pay attention, we will see the Risen Christ emerge in our own hearts, in our own neighborhoods, in our whole world.  Maybe when this is over we will find ourselves in a new environment, a new place, where we provide for all in a new community united in gratitude, service, praise, and joy.  

+++++++      

Service and Solidarity (Good Friday)

Mark 15:37-39

April 10 MMXX

I.

Can we imagine what this centurion is thinking?  He’s an officer in the Roman army who has just overseen yet another gruesome execution, carried out by his unit at Pilate’s orders.  He stands there watching sternly as his soldiers do what they do regularly, taking these hapless Jews who somehow offended Rome, marching them through the city, which was particularly crowded for their Passover holiday, out to the dump outside the wall, forcing them on their backs, spreading out their arms and nailing their wrists to  wooden planks, and hoisting them up on to upright posts, into which they drove another nail through their feet, leaving them there to suffocate, each agonizing breath pushing their bloody feet against the bottom nail, ripping through their flesh.  

Why would he even think, let alone say out loud, that one of these men was God’s Son, of all things?  What would it mean for him to utter anything quite that ridiculous?  Is he really admitting that he just killed God?  The person he was professionally bound to proclaim as “God’s Son,” was his ultimate boss: Caesar, the Emperor in Rome.  Now he is saying that this guy, with his crime, “King of the Jews” ironically nailed on a plate above this head, is God’s Son? 

Some interpreters suggest that there really should be a question-mark at the end of the centurion’s comment, as if he is scoffing about how anyone could ever consider this loser to be God’s Son.  As if what he really said was, “Seriously?  This man was God’s Son?  So much for that.”  The original Greek text has no punctuation, so it is technically a possible reading.  Maybe he is observing the undignified, hideous cry of pain as proof that there is no way this wretched, pathetic reject could possibly be God’s Son.  The idea was preposterous.

Remember that this is the same centurion who reports to Pilate later the same day, in verse 45, that Jesus is indeed dead.  He’s still doing his duty; what he saw did not change his life in the least.

But someone who was there, probably one of the women disciples, heard and remembered the words of the centurion.  And the followers of Jesus preserved those words and have always taken them as a kind of confession of their faith.  God uses words that were perhaps spoken in one way to reveal a deeper truth when taken a different way.  

The church has ever since heard in his words a confession that the true Son of God is there on the cross giving his life for the life of the world, and the tyranny of other leaders claiming to be Son of God — like Caesar — is over.  Their power — the centurion’s power, the power to kill, threaten, coerce, extort, deter, punish, and torture — is exhausted.  Their reign of terror is doomed. 

II. 

In the middle of this spectacle, Mark gives us this observation about something that happens simultaneously, about a thousand yards away, in the Temple.  He says that the veil of the Temple, the heavy curtain that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the sanctuary, was “torn in two, from top to bottom.”

The veil was intended to function as an interface between heaven and earth.  It was supposed to be like a connecting membrane, mediating God’s saving Presence into the world.  In a sense, situated at the heart of the Temple, it represented the established religious institution of the time.  

Jesus’ critique  of the established religion is that it had degraded and degenerated into a barrier, blocking and obstructing that Presence, keeping God’s Light from shining.  The veil had become like a wall between God and creation.  It therefore has to go.

The rending of the veil happening at the same moment as the death of Jesus means that the barrier between God and creation is now removed and there is a new Mediator, and it is not in the spectacular gleaming white edifice on the hill, but he is bleeding outside the walls, in the dump, a victim of Caesar’s brutality.  The Way to God is revealed as self-offering, giving one’s life for others, as a ransom for many.

The pierced and torn flesh of Jesus’ body becomes as it were the “crack in everything” which is how Leonard Cohen says “the Light gets in.”  The light of God’s new life begins now to pour through the One who offers himself in love for the life of the world.

The Temple, the place where we meet God, is no longer a building.  Indeed, that rending of the curtain is just a foretaste of the day, 35 or so years later, when the Temple and the whole city would be destroyed by a Roman army.  Now the true Temple is revealed to be a person, a person who became flesh to dwell among us, who embodies compassion, healing, humility, wisdom, and love, who breathes his Spirit into us, who feeds us with his Body and Blood, who thereby becomes us, empowering us to be his people and continue his mission.  Therefore, we are now Christ in the world, to the extent that his life — that is, his work of self-offering in love — is taken on by us.  Christ within us makes us, even our bodies, the true temples.  God’s Presence in the creation emerges now in our actions.

Now we live in him and he in us.  And we follow him in resistance against the institutionalized tyranny of our own fear, anger, desire, selfishness, and ego, spawning the violence, injustice, and terror that throttles the world.  We follow him by living in service and solidarity with its victims, as he does.    

III.

Service and solidarity with the broken of this world is the way the Light gets in.  It is the way of Jesus Christ.  It is the way the world is remade according to the will of the Creator.  It is what transforms our the hard-hearted cynicism of our duty, into a full-hearted affirmation of the saving Presence of God, emerging in and through our broken places.

Today it is the people doing the dangerous work of healing those afflicted with the coronavirus who are embodying Christ in the world.  It is those who are making personal sacrifices to make sure others are fed and cared for, that connections are maintained, and that we stay safe, who express his life in self-offering.  These are the folks whose actions witness to the tearing of the veil that separates us from each other, continuing to do Jesus’ work of solidarity with and service to others. 

Which bring us to the people who served as witnesses of Jesus death on the cross: the women whom Mark mentions at the end, watching from a distance.  It may be the most subversive and radical element of the story, to remember how it was the women who stayed with Jesus as witnesses.  

These disciples who followed Jesus from Galilee are the ones who provide the continuity through all this.  They are the ones who hear the last words of Jesus, and remember, and interpret the words of the centurion.  They will be the ones who go to the tomb on Sunday, intent on giving Jesus a proper, decent, respectful burial.  

And then, just as does Miriam in her celebratory, exultant song at God’s victory over Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea, these women will be the ones who knit and knead together the story of all these events as the deepest good news of Jesus’ resurrection.  They see beyond and within the facts, the truth of God’s victory over the power of death itself.

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