Mark 11:1-11

Jerusalem. The feast of Passover. Thousands of pilgrims crowding into the city to sacrifice the lamb, to remember that God delivered them from slavery in Egypt, to tell the great story of plagues of frogs and the angel of death, of a hurried escape under cover of darkness, of Moses and Pharaoh and the charioteers, of walls of water to left and right, the dry seabed at the bottom, and new life on the other side. 

Excitement runs high in the city during this feast of freedom. Some people use it as an occasion to stir up the age-old expectation that maybe this festival, this year, the liberating God will do again what God did long ago. Maybe at this festival, this year, the messiah will appear; or maybe at this festival, this year, an insurrection will finally get rid of the Romans… 

Jesus’ disciples are thinking like that too—maybe at this festival the Teacher will show his true colors; maybe at this festival he’ll install the kingdom of God; maybe the mysterious ‘hour’ he keeps talking about is now. 

They begin a victory chant. They get the crowds to hail Jesus as messiah and king. And once they start shouting, there’s no stopping them. But it would go a lot better for Jesus if they kept still. The louder the crowds, the bigger the trouble.

The Romans don’t care about the festivals of the Jews. What they care about is order. When crowds run riot, they have a no-nonsense way of dealing with it—crucifixion. It’s showy, it’s brutal, it works. As soon as the commotion begins, eyebrows shoot up at headquarters. The rabbi is losing control of his people. Get a cross ready, just in case. 

Beneath all the joyful street theatre, an undercurrent of violence is crackling. Every joyous wave of the palm heightens the tension. Jesus rides into the city to shouts of joy, but everyone’s looking over their shoulders. 

Soon Jesus arrives at the Temple. If we were reading the gospels of Matthew or Luke today, this is when Jesus causes yet another disturbance, trashing the money-changers’ stalls. But in Mark’s story, the version we heard just now, that provocation doesn’t occur today. It happens tomorrow, the next day.  

In this story, it’s quiet at the Temple. Not much going on, nobody there, really. Jesus just looks around. Doesn’t do a thing. Then, the story says, “because it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.” 

Because it was already late. Maybe too late. The authorities have taken note.  

Jesus walks the two miles to Bethany with his friends. To Bethany, the closest thing he has to a real home, the house of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. To Bethany, the safe house, the refuge and rest. Jesus walks to Bethany. He’s home before bedtime.

Here’s what I wonder: 

What went on that night in Bethany after all the hubbub and danger in the city? 

Did Jesus sleep soundly, or did he lie awake? 

Once he had some space to think about the day, did he toss and turn, worrying that the crowds were so big? That they’d hung their hopes on him? Called him messiah and king? 

Does he fret over what might come next? Imagine the forces of order matter-of-factly dispensing with him? Crushing him in the machine of stability? 

Jesus got home before bedtime. I wonder what kind of night he had. 

Did he stay up, talking with his friends? Had they calmed down, come to their senses? Do they realize what they’ve done in stirring things up? 

Does Martha beg him not to go back the next day? Does Lazarus, recently restored to life by Jesus, tell him he should value his life and not foolishly risk it? Do the disciples suggest that he stay out of sight, or issue a conciliatory statement, take a more gradualist approach and defuse the anxiety of the authorities, be prudent and patient and wise? 

Does he wrestle with it, pray about it, finally tell them he won’t back off? Won’t hide? Won’t stop teaching, healing, being who he is? Won’t do anything except what he’s always done, which is to trust in God?  The God who brought the people out from slavery, led them through the sea, through suffering to freedom, from death to milk and honey on the other side? 

And did he explain to them that the next day is not really all that different from any other day—because every day is the day you are called to risk everything for the sake of the world’s healing? 

Did they stand and pray with him before going to bed? Promise God and each other that no matter what happened, they would always be his friends, always stand up for him, heart of each other’s heart; and that when the time came, they would wash his body for the grave?

The ancient rabbis used to say that the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea was not that God parted the sea; it was that one fleeing Hebrew, the first in line, dared to step out and go down deep onto that exposed sea bed, a huge threatening wall of water to his right, another to his left. 

It’s not news that God wills life and freedom for us. It’s big news, good news, when somebody trusts God enough to risk a step towards claiming it. God always parts the waters for us. Whether we dare walk through them, that’s the hanging question.

God opened a way for Jesus, parted the waters. The exposed seabed beckoned him back to Jerusalem the next day, leading him eventually to a place called the Skull. By going down deep into that mysterious beckoning, Jesus will find life. Indestructible life will rise from his grave. And he will share it with us. 

God parts the sea for Jesus and called him to step out. What we fail to consider sufficiently is that he could have chosen not to go. He could have stayed in Bethany. 

We know by heart every detail of what happens after he gets out of bed the next morning, says his prayers, breaks his fast, and makes the trek back to the city. 

We know every sordid, sad detail of what happens after he makes the choice between buckling under to order, stability, power, and resolutely embracing our human hope for freedom, mercy, and justice. Hope that won’t calm down, be quiet, or go away just because somebody needs it to, just because somebody tells it to, just because someone believes it’s better for harmony, better for the rest of us, to kill all challenge and crucify all question. 

Three years earlier, in other waters, Jesus had undergone a baptism; he’d been immersed in a bath of preparation. Did he know right then everything he was preparing for, commit all at once to it all? Or like us, did he have to keep committing and re-committing one day and the next day, saying yes to God again and again, as the way was revealed step by step, and the consequences of each previous choice unfolded?

If that day three years before was his baptism, this night in Bethany is his confirmation. This night he embraces again and with more clarity who he is and what he is called to do.

The next morning, he gets up and he goes deep. He walks the dry seabed into the city, a path lit only by God’s faithfulness and love for his people, and for us. 

And ever since that night in Bethany he has been especially present and vivid in all the faith-choosing and faith-confirming moments of our own lives. He’s been especially present and vivid in every daily ‘yes’ we say to God, even when prudence tells us to stay home, when common sense commands us to be afraid, when we know no one would blame us for not risking our lives.

Through all our own long nights in our own Bethanies, those places in us where fear wrestles with faith, where safety struggles with trust, he is with us. In every conversation and discernment, every imagination and dread, every deeper and stronger resolve, he is there. 

And every morning that we leave some safe house and go back, back to our own looming Jerusalems, back to God knows what, we will know him. As we walk the seabed, making our way down to the bottom of the things that matter most in this life, the few things that are worth every sacrifice, we will look up and see great walls of threatening water on our left and on our right, and we will see him too, behind us, ahead of us, within us, above us, beside us. Always. Come what may. 

“…For dust you are and to dust you will return.”—Genesis 3:19

Halfway through the line I almost lost it. Until that moment I’d been in a ritual groove, looking my parishioners in the eye, dusting them with ashes, calmly delivering the ancient admonition, “Remember, you are dust and to dust you will return.” One by one they came, listened, received. But halfway through I faltered.

It wasn’t that I suddenly realized the gravity of what I was telling them, that they were breathtakingly fragile, that at any moment they could dissolve into elemental bits, that someday they would. I’d been feeling the heft of that truth all evening.

So no, it wasn’t that I was giving them fatal news. It was that they wanted to hear it. It was that they’d lined up to hear it of their own free will. They knew exactly what the message was going to be, and still they inched their way towards the messenger.

My knees went wobbly as water. I wanted to wave them off, tell them they didn’t have to come, they could go sit down. But I knew no one would. That was the most stunning thing: even if I’d said it, I knew no one would.

So I regrouped, kept tracing charred crosses, kept saying the old words. And they kept coming, one after another, offering me their foreheads with the trust of a child.

And when I told them they would die, some nodded. Some said amen. Some even smiled; they said thank you, as if instead of sentencing them to death, I’d showered them with stars.

Prayer

Holy One, may I live this Lent in bare truth, total trust, and knowing joy; for in life and in death I belong to you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You will not turn away, O God, from a broken and contrite heart.”—Psalm 51:17

The psalmist says that God will not spurn a contrite heart, but he might just as truthfully say that God cannot turn from such a heart. There’s something about a heart that’s been shattered, opened, rendered contrite and pliable by failure, that God cannot resist.

If that’s true, it makes me think it’d be a good thing to adopt contrition as a way of life, not just an occasional shamed response to a particular sin committed. The best heart to have would be an always contrite heart.

Not a heart always wallowing in guilt, mind you. Not a perpetually self-abasing or gloomily self-loathing heart. No wailing, breast-beating, or sackcloth and ashes. Just a heart that isn’t shocked by its own mistakes, but assumes them as a baseline human fact. A heart that, in a mysterious way of speaking, welcomes frailty as a God-magnet. A heart that knows failure is one of the best friends the soul could have.

Sr. Joan Chittister says we would do well to embrace the “sanctifying character of our mistakes.” To resist is to miss a mystery, and a biblical truth—our sins may make us holier than our virtues ever will.

An aware heart always on its knees, always truthful about its lack, always surrendered to what Mark Heim calls ‘the vast accomplished grace around us,’ and therefore always intimately accompanied by the Mercy within mercy inside mercy who is God—that’s the joyous life the penitent psalmist prays for. It’s the life I pray for too.

And you?

Prayer

Break my heart with your great mercy, O God, and be always near my always broken heart.

 

 

“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your cataracts…” —Psalm 42: 7

 

God loves the deep.

God loves abysses, caverns, valleys that lie between heights, bedrock at the bottom of the sea, profundity, and graves. If it’s deep, if it has fathoms and fathoms, if you have to go down, in, or beneath to get there, that’s where God goes. Where God is. God loves the deep.

Now, we often speak about God differently: God, we sing in our hymns, is enthroned on high, above the skies. God thunders from the mountaintop. God goes up to shouts of joy. We raise our eyes to the heavens. We lift our hearts to God. God is over and above and higher, higher than our thoughts. God is up—a ‘higher power.’

But if you go by some of the great stories of the Bible, it’s not up God loves so much as down. God is a ‘deeper power.’ God’s preferred trajectory is downward, into the depths of creation, into the depths of our lives, into the depths of love, loss, ecstasy, sin and perversity and pain; into the depths of our prayer where our sighs replace our words. Downward God goes, into the deepest thing of all, our human deaths. If something is deep, if it has depth, God will go there.

Moses discovered this when he came to the Red Sea with the Hebrew children in tow and Pharaoh’s army at his back. There God’s love plunged deep into the sea and parted it. Water high on the left and right, and in the middle, in the deep, bedrock. And the Hebrew children got down to the bottom of things. They went deep and were free. God loves the depths. If it’s deep, if you go deep, to the bottom of things, you find God there. And freedom.

Jonah discovered this when he boarded a ship to anywhere but where God wanted him to go. In a raging storm, the sailors threw him overboard, and he began to sink to the bottom. A big fish swam up out of those depths and swallowed him. In the belly of the fish Jonah swore to God he’d be a good boy and a docile prophet if God would get him out of there. It was a prayer so oily and self-serving that it made the fish throw up, spewing Jonah onto the shore, saving his life and giving him another chance to do what God wanted. God loves the deep. God works in the deep. God changes things down there.

Ezekiel learned this when God took him on a guided tour of a grisly sunken place of bones. Bone by bone, God rubbed his nose in the charnel, as if God wanted Ezekiel to certify that they were in fact ‘very dry,’ as the story says, which is another way of saying ‘very dead.’ They were. Like the corpses bulldozed into open pits at Treblinka, or the skulls of neighbors lined up on the pews of village churches in Rwanda, those bleached carcasses stood for a people, “the whole House of Israel.” The valley held a fate worse than death—genocide, the prospect of a future erased, no one left to remember and tell. And  in those depths of horror and despair, God told Ezekiel to prophesy life. You know what happens next: ‘the knee-bone connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone connected to the hip bone…” The people live. Out of the depths.

Jesus knew it by heart, this word about God and the depths. He went deep himself when he put aside the glory that was his and lowered himself into a fully human life in his mother’s womb. It was in a lowly trough where she first laid him to sleep one silent night. And it was in an airless cave cut deep into rock that he was laid to sleep again when he died, wounded with the wounds we gave him. Out of the deep God raised him to indestructible life. Easter, never forget, took place in a grave. God loves the deep.

And remember the way he wept and groaned out of his deep love for  Lazarus? It’s a mysterious story, Lazarus’ rising. Like all stories about love and pain, loss and confusion, faith and hope, it’s deep, and we can’t fully fathom it. All we read is this—Lazarus was dead, decaying for days, but at Jesus’ command, he came out. Out of the depths he came back to life.

If you didn’t know this deep God already, wouldn’t you love this God? A God who is not a highness, but a lowness? If you loved this deep God deeply, you wouldn’t be content to live well, with panache and brio, high spirits, high ambitions, high expectations and high hopes; you’d find yourself instead longing to live in a lowly way, profoundly, with depth, humility, and outstretched hands. If you loved this deep God deeply, your trajectory would start to mirror the divine course: you’d tend to the subterranean, track downwards, into, and beneath. All the way down into the fissures love has not yet bridged you’d go, into the lesions love has not yet healed, into your own and others’ pain, into the guilt and haplessness, the fear and falsity, the secret shame, the bottom-feeding greed and self-protection. Down there, on bedrock, you’d know again on whose unfathomable mercy you utterly depend, as life and freedom beckons, and deep calls longingly to deep.

 

 

 

 

 

“Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” — Psalm 90:12

In the Middle Ages, many Christians practiced a spirituality summed up by the Latin phrase, memento mori: remember that you die. Our forebears figured that cultivating an awareness of death was the best way to keep themselves bracingly honest about life and deeply engaged with the world.

The proximity of death taught them that nothing is secure or permanent. The democracy of death taught them that power and privilege mean nothing in the grave. The finality of death taught them that on this side of the grave they might as well risk everything.

Such realism, they believed, was essential for grounding an authentic love for God and neighbor. But it doesn’t come naturally to us, we have to work at it. It’s an everyday discipline.

So, for example, if a medieval nun kept a companionable human skull in the alcove where she prayed, she was not being morbid, and she was not depressed by her daily contemplation of its unmistakable message. It ushered her instead into a realm of radicality, clearing her mind of the world’s nonsense and her heart of egoistic clutter.

In its shadow it seemed foolish to aspire to the unnecessary; it became easier to refuse ephemeral delights and savor lasting ones, easier to gain the freedom of soul to respond to the urgent claims of her neighbor. By a practice of discernment and detachment in the light of our common end–a practice of distinguishing impulses from needs, needs from wants, and wants from entitlements–she prepared her heart to offer the least possible resistance to the Holy Spirit.

She believed that Jesus asked her to live in such a way that when death came it had very little left to take from her.

She would be surprised that we find that notion grim. What she would find grim, as another writer has noted, is a culture like ours that considers the accumulation and protection of wealth to be so serious as to merit the efforts of a lifetime.

What she would find depressing is the way that the material things we collect and store away like cadavers in a morgue captivate our hearts.

The big question is why we don’t.

*****

Image: St Francis Contemplating A Skull, Francisco de Zuruburán, c. 1635

 

Last Ash Wednesday, my mother went to church to receive ashes and was told by her priest that she was going to die: ‘You are dust and to dust you will return.’

A couple of days later, a young physician with a too-loud voice told her the same thing—‘You have stage four metastatic cancer and at best eight weeks to live.’

It was six.

Pastors explain Ash Wednesday as the day the church reminds us that we’re mortal, that someday we’re all going to die. I used to say that too, but after last year it feels a bit too theoretical. Now I think of Ash Wednesday as the day we receive a terminal diagnosis: You’re dying now, and it won’t be long.

When my mother first got the news, all she could say was ‘Unbelievable.’ Over and over: ‘Unbelievable.’ So fast. She was ninety, but she felt cheated. So did I.

After a day or so of digesting the news, she told us that the only way she could do it, her dying, was if she took things one day at a time. It’s the way we’re all doing it, I thought to myself, except we try not to know.

She also told us she couldn’t do it alone. She asked us not to leave her. We didn’t. From the day she entered Hospice House until the moment she died, we accompanied her in round-the-clock shifts. We did it for her, but not just for her: she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t do it alone.

Tomorrow I’ll go to church and get a terminal diagnosis. I hope the minister won’t get all progressive about it, change up the old words to soften the blow, use flowers instead of ashes, or mingle them with glitter to remind me I’m stardust, or some such trendy thing. It will ring really false to me after last year when things suddenly got real. I might get visibly pissed, and that would mess up the contemplative atmosphere.

Just give me my burnt cross of ashes and let me cling to it grieving for a while. In time I’ll come to. I’ll decide I can do it one day at a time. I had a good example. I’ll ask for the company I know I’ll need, and with any luck I’ll have it.

Christ, in whom I died to rise, will take it from there.