Maundy Thursday
A recent issue of the Economist reported on a dramatic discovery, a fossil record of what precisely happened when a giant asteroid smashed into the Yucatan peninsula approximately 66 million years ago. Geologist Walter Alvarez, along with his father Luis, a physicist, both of UC Berkeley, first proposed the asteroid impact theory in 1980, and Walter was on hand recently, almost 40 years later, as archaeologists analyzed perfectly preserved fish discovered in a single day’s deposit of 1.3 meters of debris in North Dakota. The fish were fossilized all facing the same direction, into a massive wave. There was the asteroid’s telltale layer of iridium as well as other evidence of the impact. The event was, as reported, hellfire on earth, and this is tangible evidence, as dramatic as the ruins of Pompeii, a cataclysm frozen in time.
The Alvarez’s and colleagues believed the event marked the end of the age of the dinosaur. There are competing theories, not about whether an asteroid impact created a planet-wide catastrophe, which seems certain, but about whether that was the single cause of the mass extinction. In any case, the dominant and arguably most evolved life forms on the planet went nearly extinct in a relatively short period of time. What was left of dinosaurs evolved into birds, while mammals took off, resulting in, among other things, us.
Things evolve and change, though for most of human history, this goes on without people really noticing. To be sure, there are times when massive shifts happen within one or two generations, and we happen to live in such a time, but generally, we think the way things are is the way things have always been. It is at best a comfortable fiction.
Religious practice evolve too. Many will know that our New England Puritan ancestors did not celebrate Christmas. Few will know that Christians did not celebrate Easter for the first century or so of the faith. They saw no need. They celebrated death and resurrection every single time they remembered Jesus as they broke bread and raised the cup.
They were doing this before there was a written record, before there was scripture, at least Christian scripture. Paul refers to communion in his first letter to the church at Corinth, an early Christian text, a portion of which I just read. Some time after Paul, the gospel author Mark, coming from a different tradition centered around Peter, would describe the events of the Last Supper in almost the same words, a story then taken up by Matthew and Luke. Only the gospel traditionally attributed to John is missing the instruction to remember Jesus, the declaration that the bread is his body, the cup filled with his blood.
In his letter, Paul reprimands the Corinthians for allowing class divisions to divide the church, the wealthy followers eating and drinking the good stuff, having a separate feast, before welcoming the less fortunate. But the apostle to the Gentiles would also contribute to a problematic way of understanding Christ’s words. Through the lens of memory, of a developing theology, through Paul’s own immersion in the Hebrew’s Temple cult narrative of transactional faith and sacrifice, Christians would come to understand this rite of memory as sacrificial, symbolic to those of us in the reform tradition, literal to those still aligned with Catholic theology. Paul would conflate the Holocaust sacrifice at the Temple, a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins, and the Passover sacrifice, which nourished and marked the faithful, and would try to fit the Last Supper and the Crucifixion into this mashed-up system, a theological platypus that is neither one thing nor the other.
And I’d like to suggest that Paul’s sacrificial interpretation of the Last Supper is wrong, that there have always been alternative understandings of the Last Supper and indeed of the Cross, that nothing about the Jewish reform Jesus preached is actually transactional. God’s love, God’s forgiveness, God’s healing, are not based on payment in honor or goods or blood to God. To be sure, Jesus asks that we let go of our attachments to worldly wealth and power, for they are obstacles, but Jesus measures in intent, in faith, not in payment received. Why would he suddenly create a rite as he ate with his disciples that is as transactional as the economic engine of Jerusalem’s Temple complex, a blood sacrifice like the empty rituals he so forcefully criticizes?
I’d like to suggest, instead, that this is precisely an un-sacrifice. In the story we have received, he knows that he will be killed. He knows that he will rise again on the third day. But right now, this night, he is with friends. The descriptions of the meal are remarkably intimate, for eating is an intimate act. But the only thing that is broken is a loaf of bread. The only things that are crushed are the wheat and the grapes. While so much of the Law and the cleanliness code of the ancient Hebrews were about setting things apart, walling off unclean things and unclean people, this is a rite, like all of Jesus’ ministry, of bringing together. Come together, he says, break bread, lift a cup, and remember me. If you do this, I will be present with you, as real as flesh and blood.
Everything we know of this night, this meal, prayer in the garden, the arrest, it will always be frozen in these ancient texts written by humans who believed that something remarkable had happened and were trying to make sense of what they experienced, of the stories they were told. We will never know exactly what Jesus meant that night, how he understood his command to break the bread and drink the cup and remember him. But it seems appropriate that this celebration around which the church would form was an everyday event, a coming to the table, for he shared the table with the righteous and the sinner, the clean and the unclean. He was extraordinary and completely ordinary, God-with-us in every way. This is his body, this loaf and this cup. This is his body, this ordinary people gathered at table on a Thursday night to remember him. This is his body, those who break bread, who sit around the table chatting and drinking into the night, just normal folks made holy not by sacrifice, but by love. Amen.
Good Friday
Paris Fire Department Chaplain Jean-Luc Fournier is no stranger to drama. At the Bataclan concert hall, he administered last rites, heard confessions, offered absolution, prayed and provided comfort as best he could, all in the bloody minutes after a 2015 terrorist attack that took 90 lives and wounded hundreds of others. Father Fournier was on the scene with the first responders, more combat chaplain than civil servant.
Monday was altogether different, for his mission was not one of offering comfort and administering sacrament to the critically and mortally wounded. It was a different sort of rescue mission. Accompanied by his fellow firefighters, Fournier courageously entered the burning Cathedral of Notre Dame and retrieved precious Christian relics, including the Crown of Thorns.
Now, if we are going to be honest, it is probably not the real Crown of Thorns, but rather a pious forgery, much like Turin’s famous shroud which has been dated to the 14th century. St. Helen, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, never mentions the Crown of Thorns, though her 4th century pilgrimage and search in Jerusalem would lead to the discovery of Jesus’ tomb, possibly authentic, and other relics like the “true cross,†certainly not the real thing, for there were hundreds of crosses in Jerusalem, as there were in all cities governed under the fist of Rome at the turn of the age. Only a century after Helen’s pilgrimage is there mention of a Crown of Thorns being venerated in Jerusalem. Like many Holy Land relics, it would be taken to Constantinople during the era of Byzantine rule in the east, where a cash-strapped Baldwin II would sell it to the French king in 1238, though it had to be bought out of hock first, for it was collateral in the hands of Venetian bankers.
Even if we doubt the authenticity of the Crown of Thorns, there is a sacred glow about an object that has been venerated and adored by millions for centuries.
The cross, whether it is the 4th century relic discovered by St. Helen, the actual instrument of execution and torture used by Rome, or the idea of the cross, the cross as saving, has been made sacred, whether it is emptied, as in the Protestant tradition, or still bears the corpus, as in the Roman and Orthodox heritages. We sing of the cross, we wear crosses on chains, we use it to decorate our houses of worship and our tombstones, this instrument of execution. It is as if we had a replica electric chair here on the chancel, had a noose hanging from the rafters.
We are souls embodied, in a time and a place, and sometimes abstract concepts, symbols, and ideas are not enough. We experience the sacred in many ways, but mostly through our senses, through places and objects, through art and sound that shakes our bones and through smells that become a flashbulb of memory. We need to walk, to see, to hear, to touch, to be still as the planet turns and our hearts beat louder and louder. We see the Cross and are reminded. We break bread and are reminded. We march down Main Street on Memorial Day and are reminded.
We go on pilgrimage and retreat, stand where mighty towers once stood in Manhattan, walk battlefields, visit historic homes and halls.
Just a year ago, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened overlooking Montgomery, Alabama. It is an abstract name for something that is not at all abstract, for it is a remembrance of lynching. And though lynching now takes different forms, black men are still routinely murdered because of the color of their skin. Jews are shot in their synagogue despite holocaust memorials and our attempts at education. Today’s crown of thorns is a kippa or a do-rag, a ball cap worn sideways. We don’t know what to do with these places, street corners and deserted schools, so many Golgothas, where those with power crush those who would speak of liberation, who re-tell the story of Exodus, who sing songs of resistance. So we stand, silent, before a crown of thorns, a cross, a battlefield, a movie theater.
It is okay to remember. And we do remember. It is okay to go on pilgrimage. But time does not stand still, and we are not called to live forever in this time-between, three days frozen. The dawn will come, the stone will roll, and he will say “Go forth.â€
May we hear him. May we go forth. Amen.
Sunrise Service
A Lutheran colleague and Harvard classmate recently went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. No doubt she was moved by the things she saw and the places she visited. Folks often comment on the surprises of geography and climate. I hope to one day go myself. Among the things she visited was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a structure which is traditionally understood to contain the site of Golgotha as well as the tomb of Jesus.
As I mentioned Friday night, these sites were discovered in the 4th century by St. Helen, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine. Though other relics she supposedly discovered are suspect, geography is geography, and if it is not the actual tomb, it is close, though the entire rest of the limestone cliff containing the tomb was carted off to build the church.
Of course, the point of the entire story is that when the women arrived, Mary Magdalene alone in today’s reading, Jesus was not in the tomb. While Muslims face Mecca, and Jews declare “Next year in Jerusalem,†Christians have generally never been people attached to a place. To be sure, many Christians. Especially Catholics, as well as lovers of art and architecture and the City of Light mourned this week for a place, the dramatic damage to the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. But the faith
quickly spread beyond Judea and Galilee, took in Gentiles who were not attached to David’s city.
The heart of Christianity was not the Temple or the city, both destroyed during the lifetimes of those first followers, but anywhere that they gathered at table. The location of Christianity is still not a building, but is a people, and our God is found not on a mountain, but anywhere that we encounter the
poor, the hungry, the oppressed. The location of Christianity is anywhere that the sun comes up and people declare that the Lord is risen, sing alleluias, and break bread. May it always be so.