Is.45:21-25 Ps. 22:1-11
Phil. 2:5-11 Matthew 26:36-27:66
Lectionary Link
Christianity is based upon the belief that Jesus Christ is the example of a person who is completely bilingual in divinity and humanity.
What would the Divine have to do to be completely identified with human experience?First, the Divine would have to live a human life. And the Divine would have to die as a human being to identify with one of the crucial qualifications of human experience.
The Christological hymn in the letter to the Philippians is a poem about the emptying of the divine into human experience, the funneling of the largesse of the divine through a specific human being. And in this poem, the person became obedient to death, and not just a natural death, but the horrific death of the mode of capital punishment of the Romans, death on a cross.
This death of Jesus on the cross became within the Christian communities, a glorified death. The death of a human being who was divine has become a glorified symbol for the entire Christian movement.
But what we can't do with the glorified death of Jesus is to remove the actual horror of his death. What we can't do with the glorified death of Jesus is to remove or minimize the actual hurt and loss of those who are going through dying, and the loved ones who are with the dying at their ends and who survive their deaths.
It could be that the liturgy of the church gives the death of Christ two days of observance for good reason, Passion Sunday and Good Friday, when the event stands alone without the resurrection being added as the resolutions of that death. As much as we want to be optimistic in life, it is more realistic to be brutally honest about death for the person and their loved ones.
In the immediate aftermath of death, we in the church call the Requiem a celebration of the resurrection of Christ, but in so doing we can often shove the resurrection in the faces of those who have suffered the loss of their loved ones, perhaps too forcefully, and perhaps too quickly. The loved ones who has lost their best friend or family members are not going to have post-death appearances of their deceased loved ones three days after their deaths or for the rest of their lives.
The resurrection of Jesus in his appearances after he died, were just after a few days. So his death and his re-appearances are totally unique to him and such experiences do not happen for us in having such access to our faithful departed loved ones in such a short time after their deaths.
St. Paul used the death and resurrection of Christ as the mystical explanation for spiritual process. Such identity with the death and resurrection of Christ was to be a power that directs the inward spiritual transformation of our lives.
The writers of the Passion accounts in the Gospels cannot hide the fact that they adhere to the subsequent events to the death of Jesus. Yet, they also emphasize the identity of Jesus with the sheer torture and agony of death.
On Passion Sunday and on Good Friday, we try to forget the resurrection of Jesus so as not to minimize the horror of death, and not minimize the profound value of human living.
We cannot minimize death of people in our world today, the many deaths of gun violence, those who have died early from many different diseases and afflictions, and those who have died in the Ukrainian war. The crying loneliness of those who have suffered loss of loved ones is put on a "Freeze Frame" today in being coupled with the death of God in human form. That God is with us in death indicates to us that God tolerates divine weakness when it comes to honoring the freedom of some of the worst things to happen in human experience.
Resurrection has its Sunday. Today, we pause in horror at the death of Jesus and the horror of death itself. On Passion Sunday, we pause to give death its day because we are honest to human experience. And again we cry with all the dying, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken us." Amen.
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