Lectionary Readings: Year A, Holy Week, Good Friday In 1883, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared “God is Dead.” You’ve probably heard the phrase thrown about when discussing atheism, because Nietzsche is saying that God is just a social construct used to justify all sorts of evil and violence. If you read his work, you…
This morning, we celebrate the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. This is the story we heard at the beginning of the service, in which Jesus rides into the city on a donkey, while people lay down palms before him, and shout “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”
And now, we are about to read the passion of Jesus, broken into parts for a more dramatic reading. You yourselves have the parts, at times, of the soldiers, the crowds, or the bystanders. There are actually two readings that we can choose for the passion reading – and one of them is a little over twice the size of what we will be reading. We are reading just a portion of the larger reading.
I know everyone is familiar with Superman, and his alter ego, Clark Kent. One of the late night television shows did a spoof on this once. Clark Kent is sitting at his desk at the Daily Planet, and he takes his glasses off to rub his eyes, and someone yells out, “Superman! Wow! When did you get here!” And Clark puts his glasses back on to look around for Superman, and the person goes, “Huh? Where did he go? He was just here!” Clark gets wise, and pulls his glasses off again, and the person yells, “Oh! There you are!” What follows is Clark Kent taking his glasses off and on, with people seeing Superman, and then suddenly blinded to his presence the moment Clark puts his glasses back on. They thought Clark kind of looked like that Superman guy, but obviously, Superman didn’t need glasses, so it couldn’t possibly be him. They doubted what was right in front of them, and so they were blinded to reality.
But, before we can continue with this storyline, we need to talk about the disciples, who come back at the most awkward moment. They’d been buying food, you see, and now when they show up, they have the shock of their lives. Just like the woman was shocked that Jesus would speak to her, the disciples are equally shocked. What on earth is Jesus doing, talking to this woman?
Now, I know you might be wondering why I’m talking about sausages and phrases that started out in the 1600s but evolved into something else over time. After all, isn’t the Gospel today about this famous conversation with Nicodemus about being “born again?” Doesn’t it include the famous line, “For God so loved the world?” What’s this about pudding?
Imagine for a moment that you are in a desert. Not just what we experience outside of this town we live in, but an emotional and spiritual desert in which you feel isolated from others. Where you feel that you are alone, with no one to talk to, and nothing that feeds your soul with freshness or joy. Imagine that you are in this place, and now think of what would be your biggest desire.
For most of us, it would likely be that we would want to be anywhere else but that desolate space. We would believe that what we are experiencing now is not what we should be experiencing. That anyplace other than this desolate wilderness is better than where we are now.
Lectionary Readings: Year A, Ash Wednesday Just recently I ran across a comment by a priest on an internet forum, who said that the one day that has almost as high an attendance as Christmas and Easter is Ash Wednesday. He found it ironic that this scripture, which repeats the line “and your Father who…
And so, back to today’s passage: Jesus is standing here with Moses and Elijah. A cloud comes down from heaven, and this cloud overshadows them and a voice from the cloud says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” And the disciples got scared and fell to the ground. Three terrified men on a mountain. When they finally looked up, Moses and Elijah were gone. Only Jesus remained.
New. And revolutionary. In today’s Gospel, Jesus comes along and says, “I’m not here being avant-garde. I don’t have anything new to give you. Instead, I’m here to fulfill the law and the prophets, not get rid of them.”
Jesus preached hope, compassion, and living simply and generously. The fact that some people want to reject these words of Christ and try to rewrite them into something they find more acceptable should make all of us question what is going on with the state of our union as followers of Christ.