Readings for Lent
V, Year B:
Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33
April 6, 2003
The Rev. Mary B. Blessing
St. Jude the Apostle Episcopal Church, Cupertino,
CA
Lent began March 5 with our Ash Wednesday remembrance "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Ash Wednesday was that day we gathered to remember our mortality. To remember that unless we seek new life in Christ, we are dead. Spiritually dead
We have now traveled 32 days into the wilderness with Jesus, seeking a deeper understanding of ourselves and our relationship to God. We have watched our country engage in war, we have prayed for peace. By the grace of God, many of us have received inner peace, even as we have watched terrors of war. None of us can predict the outcome of this current turmoil, but in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have been promised new life, no matter what happens in our world.
Today's gospel reading is a poignant reminder of this "life, death, rebirth" cycle. It is here that Jesus makes that pivotal decision to allow his death to take place. It is here that Jesus announces "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified." (John 12:23) It is here that Jesus proclaims what, according to the gospel of John, he has always known: He must die in order to bring God's glory to the world.
Other gospels do not insist that Jesus must die upon the cross that other's may live. John's gospel is mystical. It describes a Son of God who has always existed, before the beginning of time. It describes the Son of God as one who descended to our world and became human, Jesus, to show us this mystical path of union with God. John's Jesus lives a life in which he is continually on the edge of re-uniting with God, his Father. John's Jesus continually invites us into this journey with him, so that we, too, may unite with God, our Father. We are to do as Jesus does, to serve as Jesus serves, to love as Jesus loves, and today "to die" from the ways of this world, so that we might have eternal life in Christ's world.
As you continue your Lenten journey, are you willing to follow Jesus on this mystical path to face the cross? What does it mean to be born into new life in Christ on the cross?
Recently at an Adult Forum, our very own Mary Menacho offered a fabulous, enlightening talk on "Stages of the Mystical Path to Jesus". As a guide, Mary used the book, Son of Man, by a contemporary mystic, Andrew Harvey. Harvey writes of the challenges people have when they seek full union with Christ. There are times of joy and lucid awareness of Christ's presence. But to receive new birth, most saints, mystics, and maybe many of you, go from times of feeling very close to God, to times of utter despair. Inevitably the human self attempting to entirely fold the historical Jesus into the mystical Christ has two stages: the agony and the cross-a dark time of loneliness, perhaps depression. In one's persistence to remain in prayer, God walks the person through the darkness, through death into new life. "What happens in the flowering of illumination then, is that the dark night is a total annihilation of the self in God. At this stage the seeker will experience, in terms of his or her own temperament, life and innermost being all the torments of Gesthemene and Calvary, all the feelings of persecution, utter illusionless isolation, a sense of abandonment by God that afflicted Jesus himself and prepared him for the revelation of the resurrection. Only Supreme Love and faith can take the seeker through this horrifying experience." (from Son of God, as quoted by Mary Menacho). Andrew Harvey says we must not down play the importance of this dark path on our journey to union with God, for then we deny truth, and "risk aborting the birth of Christ-consciousness."
This agony of the cross cannot be avoided if we are to become one with God. We must walk this journey with Jesus--feel his pain, his abandonment, the ultimate test of selflessness, that the self has to die to pass into new life. There is no resurrection without the cross.
You do not have to be a saint, a so-called "person of God", to follow this path into union with God. Each and everyone of us is invited to follow Christ to the cross, and receive union.
You may have heard me speak of my spiritual journey. In most ways, mine is an ordinary life. But a life that faced tragedy young, when at age 15 I suffered the death of my older brother. As I have shared before, after many months of sadness, God graced me with answer to prayer when I sincerely got down on my knees and asked, "Where is my brother?" As I listened, I felt a calm come over my body, and a complete knowing, a feeling of Christ present with me, letting me know, "I am with your brother, and I am with you." The feeling of knowing was so profound, I will never forget that complete sense of being close to God I felt at that moment-a moment I wanted to last forever. But as we know, and as Andrew Harvey says about the mystical path, these moments do not last forever. A few years later I was an arrogant college student who thought I could prove the existence of God using my intellect. I tried to use philosophy and logic to prove my experience of God was valid, but I failed. After two years of intensive study, I found my life in a deep, dark pit, failing to remain faithful in prayer. I lay in the infirmary at college, physically ill, emotionally spent, completely alone. I hit rock-bottom; my spiritual well was completely empty. As I lay there, I thought, "What is the worse thing that could happen now?" And after a moment I realized, the worse thing that could happen would be, "I could die." I could die? Oh, well, if that's the worse that could happen, well, then, that's not so bad. Jesus had died a miserable death, an ugly death he did not deserve. He suffered abuse that I had not suffered, and he willingly died on that cross. Oh, so my death was really not the end of the world, because Jesus had already shown me that in death there is new life.
At that moment when I realized my own death was a very viable possibility, I gained a will to live. Suddenly I felt an immense onrush of complete love. The emptiness I felt was filled with a warm, secure, strong love I understood to be Father love, as in God the Father fully embracing me. The One who created my life in the first place had just breathed new life into my soul. Through tears and emotional release I felt a cleansing, a rebirth into life with Christ.
The image of Christ on the cross, in pain and agony, arms reaching far and wide to embrace all that I had let go out to the edges of my life, was an image that finally made some sense to me. As Mary Menacho shared in her talk on the mystical path to Christ, the cross is an ancient symbol representing the 4 elements of earth, water, air and fire. The power of the cross comes in the center, where opposites-any opposites-male/female, East/West, are utterly united. As Christians, that is where we envision Jesus, at that place of sacred union, bringing together all nations, all peoples, even those who see each other as enemies. All the contradictions of life are held in balance at the center of the cross. When we center our lives in Christ at the center of the cross, all our ups and downs, all our light and dark moments are held in balance. Those pieces of our lives which are torn and fragmented are brought into wholeness on the cross. From this wholeness we are birthed into union with God.
As we continue to the end of our journey toward Jesus on the cross, I invite you to use the following prayer as a possible meditation for your days before your Easter rebirth. It is found in our Book of Common Prayer (p. 101):
Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name, AMEN.
| Updated 4/7/03 |
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