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Tuesday In Holy Week
O God, by the passion of thy blessed Son didst make an instrument of shameful death to be unto us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Tuesday In Holy Week
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Scripture citation(s): Isaiah 49:4-7; Psalm 71:1-14; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; John 12:20-36
A Sermon by
The Rev. Elaine Farmer
on
Isaiah 49:4-7; Psalm 71:1-14; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; John 12:20-36
✛
“Touching the Mystery”, a Sermon Series for Holy Week 2023 Preached by the Rev. Elaine Farmer —
We Want to See Jesus
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“The fact of evil, the difficulty of virtue, the fickleness of [the] human heart.”[i] These three things are making this Holy Week journey with us. God’s story embraces ours, we said on Palm Sunday, but yesterday we were made to ask ourselves, do we stick to the path virtue demands, like Mary of Bethany, or are we tempted to stray, like Judas, giving in to self-importance and pride, putting human ways before God’s? Fickleness stirs puddles of doubt in our minds but, like those Greeks who came to Philip … and said to him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’[ii] we are drawn to the mystery of him. John doesn’t tell us anything about these Greeks or whether they got to see Jesus or not. We could speculate but perhaps it doesn’t matter. Whoever they were, they were curious about the sensation Jesus was causing, so they wanted to see him. Curiosity, doubt and faith jostled for dominance in their minds and they had questions they wanted answered. So do we.
I remember when that struggle between doubt and faith struck me. I was sixteen. You know what being sixteen is like. The heart of the tempestuous ‘who-am-I’ teenage years. Emotions crashing around. Romantic notions of this and that always in the wings ready to gush out as joy or tears. Literature and poetry were my thing. Not religion. Not faith. Then, out of the blue, one of the poets invaded my life with words that have never left me:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him,
and under running laughter.[iii]
At that moment, I burst into tears. Bewildered. Who was this “Him-with-a-capital-H”? This pursuer. And why should I have felt so radically shattered? Of course, I realised “Him-with-a-capital-H” was the god in whom I didn’t believe. But I was content with faithlessness, with atheism! I’d even taken delight in mocking a devout Baptist girl in my class, reducing her to tears. I’d felt smart, and clever and funny. Now the poet’s words — or this pursuer — left me shocked, bereft.
Bereft of what? Questions followed me round like persistent flies but it was sixteen years before I sought answers. Who was this God? Was this Jesus of whom people spoke? And what would accepting “Him-with-a-capital-H”. mean for my life? Like those Greeks, I wanted answers or explanations or possibilities credible enough to survive alongside the doubts, something to allow faith to stand on its own feet. I wanted the smell of black-and-white truth. Truth about myself, yes, but also of a bigger world beyond me. Somehow I knew the two mattered to each other. That there’s more to life than each of us as individuals. That holding ourselves aloof from each other is a kind of betrayal. Ridiculing that unfortunate Baptist girl, for example, was not just unkind, cruel and rude but betrayal of responsibility to her as part of that bigger world.
Betrayal is an ugly thing. Oh, I don’t mean the times when we have been betrayed. Any of us who has been betrayed knows what that feels like but to drag out those moments during this week seems to me a kind of personal indulgence. An evasion. Closing one’s eyes to that bigger picture. The bigger world.
Holy Week, of all times in the Christian year, is when we must speak of betrayal and what actions in our lives have been betrayals of our faith, our responsibility to each other, in the eyes of God. Of course, talk of betrayal turns every mind to Judas but I wonder whether racing to bag him out isn’t simply too easy. For two thousand-odd years everyone has focused on him as the quintessential bad guy and maybe he was a really nasty piece of work. Or maybe just a poor soul who was clever, but too clever by half. Who misjudged his friend, Jesus, and the politics of their world, thinking he could manipulate both. He couldn’t. Jesus didn’t buy Judas’ goal of trouncing the Romans so Judas played the last card in the pack: betrayal. And he lost. Jesus died and so did Judas. The one, ultimately, in glory, the other in miserable ignominy.
God’s story embraces ours, we say. Judas forgot that — in passion for his own story, his own goals. He betrayed Jesus — and lost. Peter betrayed Jesus too, by denying he knew him, though Peter learned his lesson in the end. The other disciples abandoned Jesus on the cross and ran away. Disloyalty. Betrayal. Fickleness. Probably Peter and the disciples didn’t mean to betray Jesus but they did. If we are not to be fickle and betray like them we need to remember the bigger picture and Jesus’ words, “whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also”.[iv]
But here we have a difficulty. Those poetically attractive but slightly remote words cannot be separated from other less comfortable words from Jesus, “if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’.[v] It’s a challenge which Luke rubs in. Take up your cross daily, he says. It’s very tempting here to continue dithering between faith and doubt. Stick with faith and we’ll be challenged to be sacrificial with our lives, serve and love others, think more of their needs than of our own. Stick with doubt about the very existence of God — “Him-or-Her-with-a-capital-H” — and we can do as we wish, forget the tough stuff, silence any niggling questions, and forget all about those Greeks who wanted to see Jesus. And about our own questions. Game, set and match to doubt.
It’s so easy to avoid the challenge of faith and hide behind doubt. We do it all the time when a problem is far away or not of our particular life or surroundings. Here I want to read you a piece about a problem that may not be part of your lives or mine but is an ongoing and painful issue for both our countries: the sad business of refugees and asylum seekers. It’s from a book called American Dirt. The central character, Lydia, is preparing a meal and listening to news about migrant caravans coming to the US from Guatemala and Honduras. She hears about:
Mothers pushing strollers thousands of miles, small children walking holes into the bottoms of their pink Crocs, hundreds of families banding together for safety … coming all the way to el norte to plead for asylum. Lydia chopped onions and cilantro in her kitchen while she listened to their histories. They fled violence and poverty, gangs more powerful than their governments. She listened to their fear and determination, how resolved they were to reach Estados Unidos or die on the road … because staying at home meant their odds of survival were even worse … [Lydia] felt a pang of emotion for them [as s]he tossed vegetables into hot oil. That pang Lydia felt had many parts … anger at the injustice … worry, compassion, helplessness. But in truth, it was a small feeling, and when she realised she was out of garlic, the pang was subsumed by domestic irritation.[vi]
Despite her genuine compassion and concern, the demands of Lydia’s faith were lost in a moment of immediate domestic concern. It happens to us all. It’s so understandable and so confrontingly human. The fickle human heart pulls away from virtue and we hardly notice. Or not for long. Until the moment is passed. Because we, as individuals, can’t alone solve such a massive tragedy as a world where millions of refugees and asylum seekers prefer to face death in the hope of living. Helplessness silences us.
But in our own individual lives and worlds? Again I wonder: how might we — like Judas, Peter and the other disciples — betray our God, our families, our friends, our very selves? How often do we succumb to helplessness and the easiness of doubt rather than squaring our shoulders before the challenge of faith, standing firm and saying, like those Greeks, we wish to see Jesus? How often do we hide behind Amos’ words pleading, “O Lord God, cease, we beg you! How can [we] stand? We are so small!”[vii]
It will always be like this, flawed as we humans are. It is why Jesus’ words challenge when he says to us, “whoever serves me must follow me”. It is why we need to repeat at every Eucharist, “we believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth …We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God.[viii] It is why, as Luke said, we are to take up our crosses daily. It is why when daily we say, “I believe”, we must also say, “Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One, help us in our unbelief![ix]
[i] It is actually “the fickleness of one’s own heart”, as quoted in my Palm Sunday 2023 sermon. From A.N.Wilson, The Vicar of Sorrows, Penguin, 1994, pp.286-287.
[ii] John 12:21
[iii] All highlighted quotations are from ‘The Hound of Heaven’ by Francis Thompson
[iv] John 12:26a
[v] Mt 16:24, Mark 8:34 and Luke 9:23
[vi] Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt, Tinder Press, Great Britain, 2020, p.331
[vii] adapted from Amos 7:5 which reads ‘O Lord God, cease, I beg you! How can Jacob stand? He is so small!’
[viii] Opening lines of The Nicene Creed, The Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer as found in Eucharist Rite II
[ix] Adapted from the Trisagion, as in The Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer as found in Eucharist Rite II. The Trisagion reads, “Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One, have mercy upon s.
