Passion C
Passion Sunday, March 28, 2010
A Teachable Moment
Luke 22:23-24
Then they began to ask one another, which one of them it could be who would do this. A dispute also arose among them as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest. (NRSV)
At every turn from the Last Supper onward, the twisted longings of the players come out: these Christ-followers; the whole ideological apparatus of Jerusalem and environs. The narrative soon collapses to the point that the sides don't matter anymore. The disciples through whom the church will be founded are like recovering addicts who take a step or two forward only to fall back on their old crutches. We see it coming: betrayal, will-to-power – all that sad list of things that turn the blessings of creation into depredations. And, of course, Jesus is in the middle of it all. Where we stand in the text, the best of the lot are vying for positions in the new administration. It is, to say the least, discouraging. S.O.S.
They don't get it, the twelve. They are like old Israel walking underneath the walls of a raging sea into an unknown waste, the finger of God suspending the maelstrom over their heads, the same God who just embraced the firstborn of the land behind with the kiss of death, and these pilgrims are toting their old gods in their back pockets. These old-god-toters died in the wilderness, still passing over, object lessons, scorched and snake-bit. And now, at the Last Passover before the Kingdom, Year 30's prospects seem little better.
But creation is never merely what has already been. It is what is becoming, and, so typically, it is what is becoming in the sourest moment. The message of the “Passover Generation” was that the greatest generation does not exist for itself. Jesus made that message personal to his twelve recalcitrants: the secret of the Kingdom is to be a servant (ho diakonon). To borrow the language style of Buddhism: the table of honor for which we presently strive is an illusion. But there is a table. At this table the servants preside. That is the new administration. The kingdoms represented are organized behind their servanthood. If you look among them, the Crucified One is seated at the head, which is the foot.
It was a teachable moment. It did not stop the betrayal. It did not stem the torture of Christ's suffering. But we know it was a teachable moment. The Spirit would eventually open the eyes of eleven to glimpse the new creation of which that table, and they, were now a part. They would remember what Jesus showed them on that sad day. And what they learned they would teach to us.
© 2010 Andy Gay
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Life of Discovery
Isaiah 50:4
The Lord GOD has given me
the tongue of a teacher,
that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.
Morning by morning he wakens--
wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught. (NRSV)
The figure of the suffering servant looms large in this last week. This teacher leads a hard life: abuse, rejection, even torture. Thus the “tongue of the teacher” comes at a high price, even though it is a gift of God. Judging from the poetry of the prophets, there is suffering on both sides of the exchange. Maybe there always is. Nothing worth learning in this last week is a “gimme”: everyone involved carries scars. Scars seem to be the price to be paid for “sustaining the weary with a word.”
But if scars bespeak suffering, they also bespeak strength. The strength of integrity. For this servant and this week they testify to a kind of integrity we might dare to call “holy”, for they are not the scars of a mere victim – if there ever is such a thing as a mere victim. We do not call things “holy” on a whim. It is always something of a dare. Always a risk of blasphemy. For it is only by the Holy Spirit that we know holy things, and we are sorely tempted to trivialize the things that “morning by morning he wakens.” Or to call things “holy” that he never "wakened". Or, perhaps the worst of all, fixing the holy within the terms of a definition. I personally believe our language of the holy would best be spare and reticent. Reserved for those few things that shift the tectonic plates of faith. This last week. with all of its scars and betrayals, is one such thing.
So when we speak of the holy integrity of the suffering servant, we are not justspeaking: we are teaching. These texts make us partners in an exchange that – as all true teaching does – opens a new horizon of hope to the weary. Jesus could gaze upon Pilate with a face of flint because he knew that not even an instrument of torture as evil as a Roman cross could infringe on that holy integrity of which the prophet wrote. He knew that, even in death, there was something yet to discover. For that is the way of the teacher.
© 2010 Andy Gay