The Spirituality of the Passion

Good Friday   March 29, 2024
Gen 22:1-18 Ps 22
Heb.10:1-25 John 18:1-19:37

Lectionary Link

On Good Friday, it is a good time to remind ourselves about the writing process in the coming together of the New Testament writings.

The Gospels are placed at the front of the New Testament and since they present narratives of Jesus, the logical assumption is that they were written first.  But in fact, they were written much later than the writings of St. Paul.  Paul's writings were letters with teaching, practical administrative advice to the members of his churches, and I would say that Paul established the mystical teachings of the church.  Paul did not see Jesus of Nazareth or walk or talk with him.  He was not present when Jesus was seized and crucified by the Roman authorities in Jerusalem.  He was not in the post-burial aftermath of Jesus in being privy to a post-resurrection appearance of the Risen Christ.

He did have a mystical experience of the Risen Christ, which was authoritative for him, and the mystical experience of knowing the Risen Christ through a spiritual presence became the standard experience for the early members of the Jesus Movement.

So, what was Paul's experience of the death and resurrection of Jesus?  From the Pauline writings: "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death." Also Paul wrote, I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."


The history of Jesus for St. Paul was the history of his mystical experiences of the Risen Christ. When Paul met Peter and James, who had walked with Jesus, he did not regard his experience of Christ to be inferior to those who had been eye-witnesses.


The narratives of the Passion and Death of Jesus were written long after St. Paul wrote about his mystical practice which became the normative practice of the early Jesus Movement communities.


When the Gospel genre of writing happened, decades after St. Paul's writing, there has happened within the reading of the New Testament, a tendency to separate the mystical experience of Paul with the death and resurrection of Christ, with the seeming eye-witness narratives of the death and resurrection of Christ.


The Passion and crucifixion narratives can be given preference over the mystical theology of Paul, because they seem to be "before" the Pauline writings.


On this Good Friday, I believe that we need to assert the primacy of the Pauline mysticism of the death and resurrection of Christ, to the Gospel narratives. The Gospel narratives are in fact a genre of visualization narrative to serve the event of mystical identity of person with the life of Christ known through the indwelling Holy Spirit.


I believe that treating the Passion Accounts as merely historical events divorced from the mysticism of Paul, accounts for how church cultures in our history have slipped into anti-Semitic behaviors toward the minority Jewish communities. If one divorces the narratives of the Passion from the mystical theology of Paul, which actually preceded the writing of the Passion narratives, then one can feel justified in acting out against so-called "opponents" of Jesus who killed him. This involves making all Jews of all times be stereotypically identify with figures in a visualization of the Passion of Christ. The visualization was meant for spiritual practice and not for exactness of eyewitness account. Being crucified with Christ is to be on a path of love and reconciliation with all people including Jews and Gentiles.


Let us approach the reading of the Passion again as the visualization which occurred after the mystical theology of St. Paul, when he proclaimed, "I have been crucified with Christ." If we try to do the Passion without the mystical theology of dying and rising with Christ, then we will have merely externalized Jesus events, and missed the mystical process of transformation of our lives that is intended by those who were inspired to write the writings which became a part of the New Testament.


Let us accept our identity with Christ in his death, accepting our part of the world suffering because of the genuine freedom which is in our world needed to affirm moral and spiritual authenticity.


On Good Friday, let us once again affirm our Christ-identity and with Paul confess: "I have been crucified with Christ." Amen

The Voluntary Weakness of God: The Emptying of Apparent Divine Power

Good Friday   April 7, 2023
Gen 22:1-18 Ps 22
Heb.10:1-25 John 18:1-19:37

Lectionary Link

How many times do we observe life situations and ponder whether the bad, the evil, the greedy, the haughty proud, and the tyrants are winning?  It can appear that the strongest, the wealthiest, and the smartest people are using strength, wealth, and intelligent to be bullies, economic tyrants while they purchase the best of creative intelligence to expand their power and their greed.

And it does not seem like nature has a way of correcting the situation, even the natural event of death, since when one tyrant dies another arises.

The death of Jesus illustrates how the web of evil works in our world.  The Roman Empire created condition of peace referred to as the Pax Romana, a world peace due to the ability of the Romans to crush any opposition and so impose their "enlightened" laws everywhere.  And such a peace does provide a framework of stability for government and commerce to be conducted.

But with such forced peace, what has to be tamped down is resentment; the resentment caused by memories or aspirations for more local and individual freedoms.

How do the various parties within Judaism try to fly under the radar and avoid the Roman soldiers from crushing them totally?  How do the religious leaders in Jerusalem negotiate with the Roman authorities to try to make the best out of a circumstance of an occupied country and city?  How do the Jews have freedom of religious practice while being occupied by the Romans whose most prominent religion is the cult of a divine Emperor?

On Good Friday, we read the Passion account from the Gospel of John.  If the Gospel of John has come to writing after the year 90, what can we assume about the writer and the readers of this Gospel?  We can assume that they know that Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70.  We can assume that the inhabitants of Jerusalem and environs who were from all different groups of Judaism, became scattered to the various other cities and towns of the region.  We can assume that there was blaming happening among the various groups of Jews, the Sadducees who lost the Temple for their priests to offer the sacrifices, the Pharisees, who were more adaptive to being able to live without the Temple, the Essenes in the desert, the Zealots who probably suffered great losses in the battles, the followers of John the Baptist, non-practicing Jews who had learned to do business with Romans, and the members of the Jesus Movement.  Part of the blame game was to assign providential reasons for the bad events incurred by the people of Jerusalem.  And that is what prophets of all stripes did: These bad things happened because you did not practice obedience to God in the way that God truly wanted.

What can we also assume about the community which generated John's Gospel?    They were a community which knew the frequent break down between the various Jewish parties, even to know the mutual practice of excommunication or not being welcoming to each other.  What did the Johannine community also experience?  They experienced the appeal of the Gospel being offered to non-Jews who also were not required to adhere to the ritual practices of Judaism.  They were a mixed and mongrel community, of dislocated people who were trying to forge their continuing existence in new places.  But being such nomadic people and open to befriending all people, they also became clubs of mutual support of people in transition, who did not have long local roots in the places where they had come to reside.

If the Johannine community had become welcoming to Gentile members and had become enemies with the parties in Judaism that could not embrace Jesus as their Messiah; such a situation would influence how the narrative of Jesus would be told.

The Passion Gospel of John is the latest Gospel Passion; it is quite advanced in hindsight providence.  Such a Gospel writes a narrative of about the voluntary self emptying of the divine Jesus to the point of death.  The Romans were responsible, the rival Jewish parties were seen as complicit, but what does John's Jesus say to Pilate?  "You have no power over me unless it was given to you from above."

Does it matter that the Jews and Pilate were involved in the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John?  No, they had no power over Jesus unless it was given from above.

Another factor to consider in the passion recounted by the writer of John.  The writer is quite confident about how effective the Gospel has been within the communities throughout the Roman Emperor.  The Jesus Movement is here to stay.  It is inherently winsome.  It is spirited and charismatic.  It is irresistibly converting of many, many people.  And because of the successful outcome, the message of the Cross of Jesus has to be told with the confidence of convincing providence.  "God meant it to happen."

What we can say today is that God is still being emptied into the many dire weaknesses which have and continue to inflict our lives and world.  We still have not experienced enough overcoming success to declare most of the profound suffering in our world as worthy to be called "providential."  We do not feel confident to call the evils of the past, "God's will."  We would not want to minimize suffering by proclaiming it as providential even if we have seen some redeeming outcomes.

Let us accept on Good Friday today that you and I identify with the dilemma of God.  The dilemma of God is known in the self-emptying of apparent divine power.  Why is it a dilemma?  Because the greatest gift of God is freedom.  Why is freedom great?  Because it is what make morals and ethics significant and truly valuable.  Why is it a dilemma?  Because the Great Freedom that is God shares with agents of lesser freedom and this means that Great Freedom allows the play of lesser freedoms within all the agents who are not God.  So there is the freedom for an entire array of probabilities of occurrences.

And on this day we pause at the occurrence of the Cross of Jesus.  We share the dilemma of God in God taking identity with the suffering ones who have lost the power to prevent their suffering.

Today also reveals another principle:  When unjust suffering happens, it has the invisible power and force to transform in the inner realm.  And for this reason, we can come to confess with St. Paul in identifying with God's dilemma: "I have been crucified with Christ, and I live, yet not I, but Christ lives within me."  By the time the Gospel of John was written, the cross had become the mystical power to die to the selfish self.  To this ironic power today we submit in our contemplation of the Cross of Christ.  Amen.

God as Inapparent

Good Friday   C April 15, 2022  
Gen 22:1-18        Ps 22
Heb.10:1-25        John 18:1-19:37

Lectionary Link

An invisible God does not seem to be visibly presence, but how would we know if we have never "seen" God?  If from our experience of Plentitude, we abstract a Great God, and we do, we do so because the great Plenitude is present in every particular occasion of the created order for us as human beings, and it is personal, because we are personal.  We live and move as personal beings.  We are personal because we have language the essence of relationship, and personality is born from relationship.  And because we cannot help but use language which is personal, we cannot assume that Great One is anything less than personal.

But within our personal fields of experience, we can experience things which seem contrary to enlightened relationship, personal relationship.

In human experience we can experience situation which we don't think can be associated with a God of love and a God of power.  Things which seem to break "personal" relationships.

These are the events of the inapparency of God, like in the Psalmist words which are the words of Jesus from the God: My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?  My God, why do you see so inapparent?

But God said, "I am going to present myself in human form, in Jesus, and he is going to enter into a completeness of identity with the human experience."  To make the human identity complete, Jesus came to suffering and the death of a criminal."  And so there is the cry of God's Son, who experienced the inapparency of God, in his death upon the cross.

What in human experience seems to represent the obviousness and apparentness of God?  Blessing, Goodness, Safety, Health, Justice, Love, Peace and Kindness.

When the opposite occurs, we can easily, like Jesus label such occasions as the inapparency of the presence of God.

The people of Ukraine in their suffering, seems to lack God's apparent presence.  Putin's evil maniacal atrocities seem to lack God's apparent presence.  The greedy lack of sharing of the world's good so that everyone can have enough seems to lack God's apparent presence.  The lack of justice, the practice of open lying within our country seems to lack God's apparent presence.  The mistiming of the harmful events of nature with human cycles seem to indicate the lack of God's apparent presence.

Good Friday, is the day when we commemorate how God embraces the human experience of the seeming inapparency of God.

Each person, in the cycles and transitions of life within all of the probabilities of what can happen in a world where freedom occurs, has, is, and will know the human experience of the inapparencies of God presence.

And how are we to relate these events when God presence does not seem apparent?  First we confess the validity of true freedom which is needed for true moral significance, and in the face of evil, such freedom is hard to honor.  Next, we need to be committed in our lives of faith, love and justice to cause no harm.  We don't want to be on the side of Pilate, or Caesar, or Putin in being the instruments of harm.  And when we are parts of collective groups where harm is being done in our name, we need to have the courage to speak truth to power.  And speaking truth to power, may bring us harm.  Jesus taught us that it is better to be harmed than to cause harm to others.  Next, when we see the occasions where God may not be apparent to others, we need to be in the work of caring to alleviate pain and suffering.

God gives us the gift of ministry to be relevant to people who are suffering, and we need to learn how to be the apparent presence of God to people who are experiencing conditions which seem to contradict a loving, all powerful God.  The power of God compatible with true freedom, is when we learn how to be the intervening power of care for those who need it.

When and where, we have experienced the apparent absence of God, let us remember those feelings into a profound empathy, so that as God in Jesus came to have full empathy with our human experience, we too might ever expand our ability to have empathy and compassion for the people of our world.  

Today, we say, thank you God for having empathy with us in Jesus Christ.  Let us from our events of seeming forsakenness arise to minister with compassion and empathy to the people in our world.  Amen.

Seven Last Words of Jesus from the Cross

Good Friday   A   April10, 2020       

Gen 22:1-18        Ps 22

Heb.10:1-25        John 18:1-19:37

Lectionary Link It is a tradition on Good Friday to use the Last 7 Words of Christ from the Cross as the theme for mediation on this day.  I think as we look at these words that are gleaned from the various Passion Accounts in the Four Gospel, we can find that these words represent some of the central Christian values.  These words can be transferred from the Passion Narratives into the actual events of our lives and world today. The First Words of Jesus from the Cross:  Jesus said, "Father Forgive them, for they know not what they do."  In our haste we would probably say that they knew darn well what they were doing.  And we would say, that ignorance is no excuse.  To err and to be ignorant is very human but to forgive is divine.  One of the greatest errors of being human is the sin of revenge. Human society at its worst  is caught in a web of paybacks.  Revenge creates a domino effect  that

continues to magnify revenge and the damage, UNTIL one person does not return evil for evil but stops and says, "I forgive you. I will stop the cycle of revenge."  For humanity to rise above the law of the claw, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, forgiveness must happen.  Jesus forgave, he stopped the domino effect of violence, and he asks us to do the very same difficult thing.  

The Second Word Christ from the Cross: "Jesus said to the second thief who repented: Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in  Paradise."  Many people put off repentance and conversion because they think that they are too far gone.  They think their habits are too deep to over come.  There is no hope.  But Jesus honors every turn toward the good no matter how young or old we are.  At anytime that we turn towards God's mercy; in that moment we have taken a step toward Paradise.  Paradise is to turn toward what is good and right.  And lest we minimize our own willful acts of lawlessness, we need to remember that God is the only one big enough to give someone a clean slate at any moment of life.    God has the power of clemency and pardon. 

The Third Word of Jesus from the Cross: When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, "Women, behold your Son?  And he said to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!"   The fifth commandment is Honor your father and your mother.  Jesus, in his darkest hour fulfilled this commandment.  He obeyed his father in heaven and he fulfilled his destiny.  And he entrusted the care of his mother to one of his disciples.  Caring for our aging parents is a big task in our society and it is something that we must always work at to improve the care of elderly parents.  The disciple friend of Jesus was willing to step in to take care of Mary.  We as a society need to be willing to step forward to care for needy parents and those who are made vulnerable by the aging process. 

The Fourth Word of Jesus from the Cross: And about the ninth hour, Jesus Cried with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, Lama sabachthani."  which means, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"  Have you or I ever found ourselves questioning the fate of our lives, saying, why me God? Why me? Where are you God?  Pain, evil, suffering, misfortune,

ridicule, sense of failure, loss, and grief  all of these occasions can leave us feeling forsaken.  God’s Power, God’s Love do not seem to fit the capriciousness of human affliction.  Jesus in his Passion came to doubt and uncertainty about God's plan.  Jesus understood but understanding didn't take the pain and isolation away.  Evil is unnatural, and that is why we must always cry out against evil.  When we cry out in pain, it does not mean that we lack faith, it means that we have faith in the normalcy of freedom from pain.  We must in faith protest the conditions of this world that deviate from the wonderful normalcy of health, freedom from pain and having enough to eat. 

The Fifth Word of Christ from the Cross: Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said, "I thirst."  Hunger, thirst, sickness and pain, all the bodily needs of humanity cry out with Christ on the Cross, and Christ cries out with all human need and want.  We have the opportunity to help quench the need and thirst of Christ in our world, everytime that we see someone in need and reach out to help.  Remember that the presence of Christ is found in the lives of people who are in need.   

The Sixth Word of Christ from the Cross: When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, "It is finished."  Ultimately, pain and suffering have a friend in death.  Death is a friend to those who suffer terminally.  Let us remember the terminally ill tonight, that they might have the grace to say with Christ, "It is finished."  Let us live our lives in a state of preparation so that we might be ready to be finished with life when our day comes.  

The Seventh Word of Christ from the Cross: Then Jesus crying with a loud voice, said, "Father unto thy hands, I commit my spirit." Jesus jumps into the abyss of death, but in faith he knows that his father will catch him and preserve him in an unspeakable way.  May we too, have faith to jump into the hands of a loving God at the hour of our departure, trusting in God’s ability to preserve of a way that no one else can.   

The Eighth Word is not the Word of Christ, but your word and mine as we stand today at the Cross.  As we kneel in silence, let our prayers be expression of faith that the worst of the world and of our life will be redeemed to us.  And let us offer prayers of thanksgiving for what Christ has done for us.  Amen.

The Cross As Providence and As Mystical Experience

Good Friday   C April 19, 2019     

Gen 22:1-18        Ps 22

Heb.10:1-25        John 18:1-19:37

Lectionary Link

When we survey the New Testament and the history of the Christian Church, we might ask the question, "Is Christianity about the Cross of Jesus or about the Risen Christ?"

And the obvious answer is, "Both."

But Good Friday is the day of the Cross of Jesus Christ.  We venerate the cross on this day, because that is what the practice is in church tradition  and it is also what the New Testament writers did.

Paul wrote, "May I not boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world."

The Passion Gospel of John's Gospel is the account which boasts most profoundly about the Cross of Jesus Christ.  The Gospel of John is written and attains a particular climax in the cross of Jesus.

Early in John's Gospel, Jesus told Nicodemus: "And I, if I be lifted up will draw the entire world to me."

So the cross is presented as the elevator of Jesus into the afterlife of his resurrection?

Why did the writer of John's Gospel write the Passion story with so much boasting confidence?  

John's Gospel was the last Gospel written.  The writer had lived the history of the success of the Jesus Movement.  The Gospel writer knew that the crucifixion of Jesus did not end the memory of Jesus as it was intended by the Roman authorities in Palestine.  The cross of Jesus had to be re-visited because the Risen Christ did not go away.  The Risen Christ kept re-appearing as a significant Spirit Force in the lives of so many people that the church had to proclaim the Cross of Jesus as the exalted and necessary Providence of God.

Can you imagine a person on the gallows saying to the executioners, "Guys, I'm just letting you do this to me.  If I did not want to be executed by you, I could escape.  Go, ahead and take my life because you can only do my will by doing so?"

The future re-writes the significance of  past events.  The resurrection of Christ re-wrote the understanding of the crucifixion of Jesus.

As you and I gather to venerate the Cross of Jesus today on Good Friday what meaning can we take from this day?

First, no matter how bad the present or past has been, the future will change the ultimate meanings of what has happened.  This can seem like a rather blatant trivialization of the evil that is often inflicted upon people.  It seems cruel to be so confident while evil is happening.  "Oh, this is just terrible now, but some day this will all be re-written as having been absolutely necessary for the future."  It is true that the present is an absolute link between the past and the future.  Faith because of hope about the future, does not justify the current evil.  We should resist forcefully evil in the present with all of our strength.  And when we lose to suffering, pain and death, let us not lose without a fight.  But let us have hope that in our future afterlife that God is large enough to provide us meaning for our suffering and to let us know that our suffering has been beneficial for the life of others in our world.  Today, we bring the current crosses of our lives and world and we cry out in pain for the suffering which does not yet have redemptive meaning.  And we ask for strength to resist evil and pain with all our might.

Second, and finally, we ask that we might have the mystical experience of the Cross of Jesus that St. Paul and the early Christians had.  Paul said that he was crucified with Christ and as a result of this mystical experience, Christ lived in and through him.  Paul said that in such an identity with cross of Jesus Christ, the world was crucified to him.  That is to say, he had attained the power of self-control whereby he no longer let anything in his life become a controlling idol.  He was freed from the power of addicting desire; he had an experience of a Higher Power to attain self-control.

Today as we venerate the Cross, we present with honesty all of the pain and suffering of our lives and our world.  We present all of the evil that is inflicting this world.  And we scream that we can find no good reason for such evil.  But we also offer a deep sigh of hope that the future will provide us with redemptive meanings for what now seems such a triumph of chaos.

Today, we also venerate the Cross as a request for the mystical experience of the cross of Jesus to provide us with the Higher Power to attain the self-control to resist all that is unworthy.

Come today, let us boast in the cross of Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Passion Accounts as Revisionary Providence

Good Friday   B  March 30,  2018        

Gen 22:1-18        Ps 22

Heb.10:1-25        John 18:1-19:37

 Lectionary Link

The Passion Gospel of John was the last Passion of the four Gospels to be written.  And being so late in comparison with the others, it reveals some interesting features.

What is the difference between history and providence?  History, in the modern sense, is supposed to be a non-passionate report of events that happened without any interpretation about the meaning of the events by the one who writes history.

In this definition of history, the Passion of John's Gospel is not history.  It does include some actual historic event, but it is a highly interpreted account of the crucifixion of Jesus, and it is full of the meaning that is called Providence.

The writer of the Gospel of John was saying, the cross of Jesus was terrible, and it was full of suffering, but God not only meant it to happen, God orchestrated it to happen.

Providence is when history is seen specifically as a direct action of God.  This means that Providence is significant revisionary history.  Providence is Revised history.  It is history injected with the interpretive rose glasses of faith.

How can this happen?  How can it be reported that Jesus interacted with Pilate as though Jesus was writing the script about how Pilate was supposed to judge?

The cross as the providence of God happened because of the aftermath of the death of Jesus.  Jesus reappeared.  And he kept reappearing over and over again in the lives of many people.  Jesus died out of the world but he was reborn into the lives of so many people.  So, what else could the Christians say about the cross of Jesus?  How could it be a mistake?  How could it be seen as the defeat of Jesus?  The reappearances of Christ could not have happened in the way that it did, if Jesus had not died on the Cross.  It had to be that way.  And if it had to be that way, then it was God's plan.  In fact, even though Jesus was not a priest or a sacrificial lamb, in his death on the cross, the early church came to see Jesus as a High Priest, offering himself as the final sacrificial Paschal Lamb offering for all of humanity.

The more successful the Christian Movement became, the more the providential details in the life of Jesus of God were expanded in the preaching and writing of leaders of the early church.

In the presentation of Providence of the Cross of Jesus there is an interesting switch in blame.  The New Testament writers, who were Jews, held their rival Jewish leaders more responsible for the death of Jesus than the Roman authorities who really had all the power.  This interesting switch in blame may be an indication of the sociological fact that more Romans and Gentiles had become followers of Jesus and fewer Jews were followers of Jesus. Most Jews remained in their synagogue communities and were not members of Christian churches.  Historically, this subtle switch in blame has resulted in deplorable anti-Semitic behaviors by some Christians in societies where Jews have remained a minority.  The Gospel traditions should never be used to justify any behaviors of injustice toward anyone.  Because the Jewish leaders were portrayed as being against Jesus in the Passion Gospels, this cannot be used against them,  because what did Jesus say from the cross?  "Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing."  If the cross is providential how can one blame those who seem to be responsible for it?  And how can a follower of Jesus, reject his words about forgiving those who placed him on the cross.  And further if Christians have expanded the death of Jesus to be for the sins of the world, how can anyone be certain about what side one would have been in in Jerusalem on crucifixion day.  The Providence of the Cross does not allow blame, only forgiveness.  Sadly, some Christians have forgotten this in their practice towards Jews and other opponents to their faith communities.

What is the providence of the Cross of Jesus for you and me today?  Perhaps, it is learning the meaning  of God's forgiveness in how we treat each other.  Even when there is a history of being enemies; the forgiveness of Jesus from Cross is the starting place for us to love our enemies.  Another providence of the Passion of Christ, means that God completely identifies with the freedom for really bad things to happen in this world.  We have witnessed in the history of our times, some really bad things.  Why is God so permissive?  God honors freedom so much that God allows bad things to happen, and in Jesus, God was the perfect one to whom something really bad happened.  God did not exempt the divine Son from a very bad thing.  The Providence of this for you and me is that God is identified with those who suffer; meaning that God too is suffering in their suffering.  And in our suffering, we honor the greater value of freedom as a main principle of God and of life.

And if freedom means continuous life and continuous creation and continuous time, it means that we can have future faith to make the very worst of the past, providence because of a surpassing greater future.

You and I are still holding onto to a future providence for things that are still just painful history.  And since the cross of Jesus attained the exalted status of  providence, we hold in faith that our lives will attain the future providence of "all being made well indeed, by future surpassing events of God's Grace."  Amen.

Confident Providence in a Passion Gospel

Good Friday    April 14, 2017     
Gen 22:1-18        Ps 22
Heb.10:1-25        John 18:1-19:37
Lectionary Link
Since the Gospel of John was the last Gospel written, one can expect that the theological thinking and the mood of the Gospel will represent a much more "mature" Christian Movement.  By the time the Gospel of John was written, Christians were brimming with confidence in the success of their message.  Travelers could go from city to city in the Roman Empire and network and have almost immediate friendship, even intimate with those who shared their belief.  Christian home church gatherings became almost like free airbnb throughout the Roman Empire.   Christians were accessible to each other but still flying under the radar of the authorities.

Jesus died on the Cross but the Cross became to be presented as the providential and necessary act of God.  If one has come to believe that the Cross was a pre-ordained plan of God for the salvation of the world, then the cross became presented as confident irony.

The Passion accounts in John's Gospel shares some of the main features of John's Gospel.  It seems as though the writers of John had read the Platonic Dialogues wherein the famous Socrates is accused by the Athenian authorities of perverting the youth and he was accused of being impious or insulting the gods in the ways in which the Athenian authorities understood their gods and goddesses.  To pay for his impiety, Socrates drank hemlock and died.

Jesus in the Gospel of John Passion account has a long dialogue with his interrogator, Pontius Pilate.  They have a dialogue about the political meaning of kingship, about power, and about truth.  Pilate, cynically asked, "And what is the Truth."  But of course in the Gospel of John, we already know that Christ is both the eternal Word of God and the way, the truth and the life.

And part of the truth of the life of Jesus is his death.  He denies that Pilate has power to crucify or to save him.  And Jesus tells him, "It's not your call.  The higher decision has been made for my death and you have no power except what is permitted to you by God."   One can say that in the Gospel of John, Jesus could say, "I am the way, the truth, the life, and I am death, and I am after death, and I am the afterlife, after death."

It is almost uncomfortable to read John's Passion's account in that it seems to be too casual about the entire horrendous event. 

Jesus tells Pilate that he is a puppet and it's already been arranged for the larger plan of salvation.  And Jesus is shown to be in charge even in his severe state of suffering on the cross.  In the midst of his suffering on the Cross, Jesus takes care of the custody of his mother; he commits her to the care of the mysterious disciple in John's Gospel who is referred as the one who Jesus loved.

In John's Gospel, Jesus does not say, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"  Rather he cries, "It is finished."  He seems to be a confident actor declaring his final line in a life play scripted by God.

The Gospel of John is also about Word and the written word.  Christ is called the Word of God from the Beginning.  So Christ is God becoming fully bi-lingual with human experience.  And if God wants to fully learn how to speak human language, God has to experience human death too.

In the Gospel of John it is written that we can have valid belief through reading words about Jesus and have a faith that is even more blessed than the doubting Thomas who had to have the proof of seeing Jesus.  The writer of the Gospel said that the Gospel was written so people might believe.  And where does writing occur in the Passion account of John?  "Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews," is written above the head of Jesus on the cross in three languages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin.  This means that message of the Cross of Christ can be translated and spread throughout the world into the languages available to almost anyone.  This was used by John with full irony intended.  It was written by Pilate in scorn, but for the enlightened reader it was proclaiming Jesus to be the Messiah to the entire world.

How do you and I approach the death of Jesus today on Good Friday?   We accept the death of Jesus as God's full identity with the human experience of death and God's full identity with the real conditions of freedom which exist in this world.  God created with freedom and for freedom and God too, submits to freedom and does not over-ride freedom.  That is one of the awesome messages of the cross.  This also means that to prevent events caused by the bullies of wealth and power, human beings have to exercise their freedom of resistance against oppression in our world.  The cross of Christ is a reminder that freedom in the muscles of bullies can result in severe oppression.  It is a stark call to all who are given wealth, power and knowledge to use it for the common good.

What we can also learn from the Cross of Jesus is that it is a unique event in the life of a unique person; an unrepeatable person.  There won't be one exactly like him again.  This means we cannot just assume that all death and suffering in the world will have similar outcomes to the death of Jesus.  There are not immediate three day hence resurrections for most of the tyranny in the world.  Genocide, slavery, torture, the cruel subjugation of indigenous people and women will never be redeemed in this visible world.  The absolute horrendous deaths and terrible suffering of people in the past will never be redeemed in this life.  We cannot be confident about the evil events in this world ever becoming the confident providence that has happened to the Cross of Jesus.  This is why it is easy and necessary to defer to a reconstituted spiritual regeneration which will redeem and make a harmony of freedom in another level of existence.

St. Paul used the Cross of Jesus as a transformative way to get to another level of existence so that he could tolerate and continue to live in a world where the free conditions of life permitted the apparent victory of evil in significant horrendous events.  St. Paul, himself was involved in the stoning of St. Stephen and he had to deal with the wrong use of his freedom in persecuting and bringing to death people who followed Jesus.

Today, you and I are invited to use the Cross of Jesus as a way to get to another level of existence and receive forgiveness for all of the times that we have misused the power of our freedom.  We are invited to use the cross to tolerate and give ourselves orientation to the impairment of freedom when freedom has been expressed in oppression of others.  We use of the cross of Jesus to accept our powerlessness in face of the things over which we have not control except to protest loudly.

We come to the cross of Christ with the hope that we will be able to "finish" our lives in ways that please God with sacrifice for the benefit of the common good of love and justice for all.  Amen.

Cross Inscriptions: Billboard for the Risen Christ

Good Friday    March 25, 2016         

Gen 22:1-18        Ps 22
Heb.10:1-25        John 18:1-19:37

Lectionary Link 

   In the Passion Gospel of John the Inscription that was written above the head of Jesus on the Cross by Pilate, in three different language states:  Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. It was written in the language of the Jewish Scripture, and in the lingua franca which followed the conquering of the world by Alexander the Great, a simplified version of Greek and in the up and coming lingua franca of the Western Roman Empire, Latin.

  This inscription is both ironic and is a proclamation device within the Gospel of John.  In the lead up to the cross in the Gospel of John, Jesus said, “If I be lifted up, I will draw the world unto myself.”  And what languages did the immediate world of the Gospel audience of the time speak?  Hebrew, Greek and Latin.  So the Gospel of John presents the Cross as a sort of bill board to the world for Jesus Christ.

  And this is ironic because the text was assigned by Pilate who was presented as a cynic about what kind of king Jesus was.  “You want to be a king, Jesus, okay, we’ll let you be a legend in your own mind.  We’ll preside at your death even while we mockingly make your cross a billboard for your delusion and the delusion of your followers.”

  Another characteristic of the writer of John’s Gospel was making fun of those who took words “literally.”  Pilate wrote mocking words upon on the cross about Jesus being a king and the literalist Jews said to him, “Don’t write that he is a king but that he said he was a king.  Pilate we don’t want people to take the words literally.  They won’t understand your mocking irony.”

  So Pilate believed that Jesus was a phony delusional king and he mocked Jesus with an inscription which contradicts the dead body of Jesus upon the cross.    Can such a dead man upon a cross really be a king?  Pilate and many other Roman citizens and soldiers believed that the Caesar was the king of their world and Jesus could not be a king.  The community from which the Gospel of John wrote also knew that the Caesar was the king of the world.  They knew that Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Roman army.

  Most of the Jews who remained in the synagogues and who excommunicated the followers of Jesus did not believe that Jesus was the king of the Jews.  They did not believe Jesus was like another King David because Jesus did not liberate Israel and restore its independence.

  The Gospel of John was written by writers in the last part of the first century and in the first part of the second century.  They had witnessed the Jesus effect in the cities of the Roman Empire.  Jesus was beginning to take over neighborhoods one person at a time.

  Jesus as the Risen Christ was experienced within very effective communities which were integrating new people into their gatherings.  People of diverse backgrounds were finding social identity within these religious social clubs called churches.  The informal gatherings were gaining cohesion and were already proto-institutional.

 These churches had become so successful one wondered how such successful social groups could derive from the dead body of Jesus upon the cross.  Can you get the sense of how the writer of John was completely savoring the irony of Jesus on the Cross?  The Gospel of John was written by people who were confident about the social revolution caused by people who had post-resurrection experiences of Christ.  They could go back and write with great confidence that the Cross of Jesus was the necessary plan of God in bringing about the transformation of lives within the Roman Empire.

  So Jesus on the Cross was seen by many Romans to be the delusion of Christians who did not understand what real kingly power was.  Jesus on the Cross was seen by Jews who remained in the synagogues as one who could not be confessed to by a messiah king like King David.

  But for Christians who lived in two worlds, the natural world where Caesar was the worldly king, and the spiritual kingdom of God, the Cross of Jesus was like the experience of an elevator of learning that we live in both the world of the kingdom of Caesar and the kingdom of Christ.   Christians had learned from Christ to lives as children of God and children of human families at the same time.  The Cross of Jesus was an event of dying to the limited view of being only in the world of Caesar; it provided the way for resurrection ascension into the kingdom of Christ.

  In the Gospel of John, Pilate and the Jews were treated as those who understood only the literal natural world of what could be verified by the common understanding of what a king was.  The writer of the Gospel of John lived and witnessed the lives of many people gradually coming into an internal transformation and conversion by another kind of power which was not understood by Pilate or the Jews who remained within the synagogue.

  The Passion Gospel of John was not written by people who viewed the Cross as a site of suffering defeat; it was a billboard which proclaimed with secret irony that indeed, Jesus was and was becoming the king of many, many souls.

     Just remember today on Good Friday that the Passion Gospel of John was written by people who were witnessing the power of the Risen Christ to convert the lives of people and to form them into growing and successful Christian Clubs.

  We accept the cross of Christ as glorious providence now because we think it was resolved and reconciled by the subsequent events of the resurrection appearance.

  Today we live in a world of many events of suffering, loss, pain are not yet resolved or reconciled because we do not yet know the full future.

  As we return to the Cross of Jesus, let us bring to it all of the current suffering in the world which does not yet have resolution or reconciliation.

  Let us accept that Jesus is a king because he represents God suffering with us now.  And let us in the suffering Christ, have faith to believe that in Him there will be future resolution and reconciliation of all things.   Amen.

Meanings of the Last Words of Jesus

Good Friday    April 3, 2015         

Gen 22:1-18        Ps 22

Heb.10:1-25        John 18:1-19:37

 Lectionary Link

   Ponder in our lifetime when we have had to partake of the sudden and unfortunate violent deaths of people who had an impact on the society at large.  Some of us are old enough to remember the deaths of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Because these deaths occurred we assumed that there were people in our society who did not want these people around.  The deaths of these people made us think about the stability of our society to be able to continue to function without instigating a wider break down of law and order in our society.  These deaths were profound deaths for us because we sort of  thought that we were a bit more civilized than the rest of the world.  How could such things happen in our country where we supposedly used our system of laws, our legal system and our freedom to vote to resolve any disagreements which we might have with each other?

  On this day, we ponder the death of Jesus.  We know that the death of Jesus did not have much immediate impact upon the Roman Empire.  In the reports of Roman historians, there is but a scant reference to Jesus of Nazareth.  The Jewish historian Josephus who has been highly re-edited by later readers, does tell about the life of Jesus but the death of Jesus was mainly an event which was most poignantly felt by a relatively small group of his disciples.

  One wonders how such a death which impacted such a small group of people has come to be the most commemorated death of all time.  Why do we still commemorate the death of Jesus today?

  I believe that the life of Jesus was so unique and that his impact upon people was so profound that the grief of his death created the powerful conditions for his reappearance in his post-resurrection life.  He was so profoundly unique that his death could not take Him out the lives of his followers and He has remained forever.  The Roman Empire which gave a dismissive yawn at his death was taken over by the appearances of the Risen Christ in the lives of so many in the Roman Empire that by the time Constantine ascended to be the Caesar of the Empire, he had to recognize that the Risen Christ was the King and Caesar in the hearts of most of his Empire.

  As we live in the aftermath of the success of the continuing post-resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ throughout the world and in our lives, we still cannot minimize the profundity of the death of Jesus on the Cross.  We cannot minimize the deaths of people in our lives and the profound losses which are experienced by so many people each day in our world.

  Our belief and experience of the resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ cannot give us such a resurrection pride that we lose the capacity for empathy and for deeply feeling death and loss in our lives.

  This is why Good Friday must be observed.  Death and loss cannot be minimized or trivialized.  We cannot rush to a spiritualized existence and deny the importance of how good and right and necessary it is for us to be in our bodies comprised by five senses and memories and the loving ability to attach ourselves to favorite people who are very difficult to lose accessibility to.

  We gather today to honor death and loss, because we are made to be people who deeply feel love for one another and for the beautiful earthly home.  If God so loved the world, then some of that love for our world and people in our world has been so profoundly shared, that when we lose what we love, we know a profound grief and this grief must have a Holy Day.  Good Friday is such a Holy Day; it is as it were, the Funeral of all Funerals.

  At a funeral, one tries to appreciate the meaning of the person that one has gathered to memorialize.

  All Four Gospels memorialize the suffering and the death of Jesus on the cross.  This re-visiting of his death is done differently by each Gospel community who wrote about it.  From the Gospel communities we have a collection of the seven last words of Christ.  These words which are projected upon the dying Jesus on the Cross give us an indication of the meanings of his death and life.  And so we ponder the meanings of how the writers of Passion Gospels understood the last words of Jesus.

   The First Words of Jesus from the Cross:  Jesus said, "Father Forgive them, for they do not what they are doing."  Jesus could offer forgiveness because of human ignorance.   If God is the smartest of all; everyone else is but ignorant in comparison.  And so human acts are often driven and motivated by “not knowing.”  If the citizenry knew that they were killing the son of their beloved king, would they do it?  Today as we ask for forgiveness for our ignorance, we also ask for wisdom for ourselves and for the people of this world to learn how to practice God’s love and justice.

   The second Word of Jesus from the Cross: "Jesus said to the second thief who repented: Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."   Paradise sounds like a pretty comfortable place for someone who has been convicted to die for his criminal activity.  But the point is this: Jesus was not rewarding crime; he was rewarding repentance.  Repentance creates paradise.  Repentance is evidence that our hearts are turned toward God.  And that turning of our heart is the very conditions for paradise.  Paradise is more a condition of the heart than a place.  Repentance makes each of us a place that can be called “Paradise.”

   The Third Word of Jesus from the Cross: When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, "Women, behold your Son?  And he said to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!"  One can imagine that the life of Jesus was hardest on his mother Mary.  He was called mad, crazy, demon possessed, a winebibber, a law breaker and much worse.  For his ministry, he was convicted as a criminal in the horrendous method of capital punishment.  The religious authorities approved of his death.  How could Mary be proud of her son?  How could Jesus be a responsible son, if his trouble did not allow him to stay around and take care of his mother?  From the cross we see that Jesus is proclaiming a new kind of community; one that went beyond flesh and blood.  When he asked his mother to accept his disciple friend as her son; and when he asked his disciple friend to accept Mary as his mother, he was instituting the reality of the family of the Spirit where sons and daughters were not born just of flesh and blood but of God.

    The Fourth Word of Jesus from the Cross: And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, Lama sabachthani."  which means, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"   In some of the Passion accounts, Jesus does not sound so confident and in control, like he appears to be in the writings of John’s Gospel.  In these words, Jesus is God’s Son but he feels forsaken by his Father.  Certainly there are many occasions in the history of humanity when it has seemed that God has forsaken people in events of pain, loss and tragedy.  In these times we are not so sure we really wanted God to grant such radical freedom in this world for such negative events to occur.  But these events are the consequence of the radical freedom that exists in the world.  And even God’s Son and God the Father bear the consequences of such radical freedom.  And it means God suffers with us in our suffering.

     The Fifth Word of Jesus from the Cross: Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said, "I thirst."   We need water to live.  The flogging, the bleeding and sweating, had not only made Jesus weak and anemic, it also made him dehydrated.  He desired life.  He desired to replenish his fluids.  Indeed, wanting life to the very end, is a most human impulse.  Certainly we respect the one near death, who truly wants to live.  If death and the afterlife were so inviting, why would we bother to stay here?  There must be an important value about wanting life until it is taken out of our hands.

   The Sixth Word of Jesus from the Cross: When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, "It is finished."  'No it is not finished Jesus.  You needed to stay around longer and teach us more and befriend us more.  You died before your time!  How can you say that your life work is finished at the age of 33?"   If Jesus had lived longer, his followers would have been so dependent upon his  physical divine presence, they never would have awakened to the divine presence within themselves and to their own identity as sons and daughters of God.  In this sense, Jesus knew that he was finished; he died out of this world in order to be reborn into this world and not just within one body but within the lives of everyone who wants the presence of Christ.

  The Seventh Word of Jesus from the Cross: Then Jesus crying with a loud voice, said, "Father unto thy hands, I commit my spirit."  Jesus faced the same dilemma that all will face in death.  We cannot fulfill the task of the ultimate preservation of our lives.  God the Father creator, is the One who must recreate our lives again in a new way.  Jesus had faith in the One who could recreate and preserve his life in a way that his followers could not.  Committing our spirit to God is the last act of our lives, and believing in God’s ability to preserve is our faith in the resurrection.

  As we contemplate the passion of Jesus Christ today, let us be thankful that through his death, we can value living.  And through his death we are invited to live better to finish the purpose of our lives on this earth.  Amen.