God's Friday

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen

     Lent in general, and Holy Week in particular, are paradoxical mixes of celebration and mourning, of reflection on the past and anticipation of the future. Orthodox Christians have a phrase that brings these two streams of feeling together. Lent (with Holy Week) is the season of "bright sadness." Bright because we anticipate the Resurrection, sadness because we know what the path to the Resurrection requires. And, of course, on Good Friday, God's Friday, the feelings are entirely of sadness, as they should be.
     All through Lent, and especially in Holy Week, we are reminded of the reality of the dark side of human nature. It is entirely possible that we could have found ourselves with those who demanded the crucifixion of Jesus, with those disciples who could not stay awake in the Garden, with those who denied him. We could easily have fled in fear, or could have said or done anything to avoid association with Jesus and the grisly destiny which was his. We could easily have lost any confidence, any trust in what Jesus did and taught, when we saw where his work was heading.
     It is from that very darkness in human nature that Jesus sought to rescue us. In his Letter to the Colossians, the Apostle says that Jesus "has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his Son." The "power of darkness" is the power of all those fears, limitations, and idolatries that prevent us from becoming what we at our best want to be, what God wants us to be. The Apostle had in mind the old Law with all its restrictions, and what he called the "principalities and powers," supernatural entities, demons and gods and idols, that people in the time of Jesus and Paul believed had power over them. We can understand the principalities and powers as all those godlike entities of our time, corporations, governments, ideologies, addictions, obsessions, fantasies, money, possessions, and on and on, to which we ascribe power in our time. These things can have power over us, dark power, just as the gods and demons and idols had power in the world of Jesus and Paul.
     It is from that dark power that Jesus frees us by his death. Paul goes so far as to say that Jesus triumphs over the powers by his death. This is a stark and paradoxical statement, difficult to understand, never mind believe. Paul says in the Letter to the Colossians, that Jesus "disarmed the principalities and powers, making a public example of them, triumphing over them." This triumph needs explanation.
     Christ triumphs in his death by his complete rejection of all temptation to give in to the principalities and powers, to the gods and demons and idols. The only authority which Jesus accepts is that of the Father. By accepting the authority of the Father, the authority of the principalities and powers evaporates. Their authority, in other words, is not real. By showing the unreality of their authority, Jesus freed himself, and us, from it.
     And the last power that Jesus refused to submit to, is the power of the self. By letting that go, in the most complete way possible, Jesus shows us what his true nature, and what our true nature, really are. Jesus shows us that self-giving is the way to become like God. God is endlessly giving of the divine nature, to sustain the creation and to bring us and creation into union with that nature.
     Christ's death on the Cross is a saving action, because we take it into our lives in faith. His victory is our victory when we accept the Cross into our lives in our rejection of the principalities and powers, the gods and demons and idols of our world. In our self-giving we become like Jesus in his victory over self.
     We, the Body of Christ, carry his victory into the world. This is the task of the Church, to continue Jesus's self-giving, his rejection of the ultimately unreal gods and demons and idols of the world, in obedience to the Father who wishes to reconcile the world to himself. In the actual world that we know, the world of climate change and war and inequality and oppression and so on, the work of bringing that world to God must go on. And we do that by proclaiming, as Jesus did in his saving death, freedom from all the gods and demons and idols which so torment the world today. There is much more to do, beyond mere proclamation of course, but that is where we begin, when we say along with Paul, that "we preach Christ crucified." Let us thank God,  who, in the saving death of Jesus, as Paul wrote, "has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his beloved Son."

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
    

The man born blind. (John 9)

“Do you believe in the Son of Man?” From the Gospel for the fourth Sunday in Lent, from the Gospel of John the 9^th chapter.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

     Since we’ve just heard a rather long Gospel reading, the entire ninth chapter in fact, I promise to keep my remarks brief. The chapter is rich in things to talk about, but I will keep the number down to a few.

     “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And of course, Jesus answers, “Neither…he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Jesus, in other words, wastes no time in disposing of the very ancient idea, which is still around, that illness, or indeed, any misfortune, is punishment for misdeeds, our own or our ancestors’. God’s work in this story is the giving of physical sight to the blind man. It is the counterpart, as it were, to the spiritual sight which he already has. And God’s work is revealed in all of us, as we mature physically and spiritually.

     When we think about it, we realize that we are all born blind. We have physical sight, most of us, at birth, but spiritual sight is acquired gradually, and, in fact, we learn how to use physical sight gradually too. By experiment and example, by teaching and repetition, by trial and error, we learn to see. And so it is with spiritual sight. But the remarkable thing about the newly-sighted man in today’s story, is that he already has spiritual sight, which becomes apparent by the end of the story. His physical condition did not prevent him from acquiring spiritual sight long before he received physical sight. This reminds us of the notable blind and deaf woman Helen Keller, in the 20^th century, a famous example of a physically limited but spiritually very advanced person.

    Jesus does not have to do much to strengthen the formerly blind man’s spiritual vision. The physical details are irrelevant to the main point of the story, even though the Pharisees make much of them. The Pharisees in fact want to distract themselves and everyone else from seeing the light, by concentrating on the technique and timing of the healing.

     The behavior of the Pharisees is a step-by-step demonstration in How To Miss The Point. They ask how the blind man received his sight. How. They express no gratitude or appreciation or even interest in the fact of his being sighted. You would think the wonder of it would impress them, but no, they’re interested only in technique. Next, they talk about when he received his sight. When. The timing concerns them, not, again, the fact of his being sighted. Then, it turns out that they do not believe that he was ever blind at all. We call this denial. They reluctantly get around to accepting the reality only when the testimony of a lot of people leaves them no other conclusion. So, dithering about technique and timing, and evading the fact right in front of them, lead the Pharisees to abuse the newly-sighted man, and they send him away. “Drove him out,” the text says, presumably out of the synagogue. The Pharisees refuse to allow physical and spiritual reality to get in their way. Their way is nothing more than mindless upholding of traditional rules, without regard for spiritual reality, or even physical reality.

     “Jesus heard that they had driven him out,” the text says, so Jesus went looking for him. And he went looking for him, the newly-sighted man, to test his spiritual sight. And he tests it in the classical way of every genuine spiritual teacher: he asks the man a question. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” “Lord, I believe,” he said. The newly-sighted man sees spiritual reality before him, the reality in which he believed before he received his sight, and which he defended before the Pharisees. It is almost as though he received physical sight as a result of his spiritual sight. His spiritual sight was the condition that made his physical sight possible. In other words, his perception of spiritual reality came before his physical perception, and enabled him to see reality whole, as spiritual and physical together, in the person of Jesus. Jesus, the incarnate Lord, human and divine.

     Who are we in this story? Do we evade spiritual reality, like the Pharisees, by fussing about irrelevant questions of detail and technique and timing? Do we lose sight of the main point by hanging on to traditional ways of seeing things? Do we avoid the spiritual reality in front of us, whatever the physical situation may be?

     Or do we, like the blind man, see, as it were, the physical world in spiritual terms? Do we have the faith that makes that combined vision possible? How do we answer the question, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.