Living Story Grace

Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12; John 19:16b – 37

It’s frustrating to try to summarize and offer a few quotes from these remarkable sermons by Wright — I always want to offer you the whole thing because so much of it is meaningful.  So again, I am forced to choose and again I suggest you buy this wonderful book and read it in its entirety:  Christians at the Cross by N.T. Wright.

About God Friday, Wright says that it is the “cataclysmic event” of Holy Week, an event that made no sense at all at the time, especially to Jesus’ friends and followers:  “the stupid and pointless snuffing out of the brightest light and best hope Israel ever had.  Jesus’ crucifixion must have made his followers wonder if Satan had been tricking them all along, if God had not after all been at work in Jesus, if Israel’s God was maybe not the world’s creator and judge after all, if maybe Israel’s God didn’t exist, if maybe there was no God at all….Watching Jesus get dragged off to a mockery of a trial, a brutal and degrading beating and then the worst torture and death imaginable would force all those questions on them.  If we don’t recognize that, then we have domesticated the cross, turned it into a safe symbol of private faith, and forgotten what it was really about.  And then we wonder why we are left with nowhere to turn when things in our own lives, our own families, our own communities, our own civilization, seem to go not just pear-shaped — at least a pear still has a shape! — but utterly chaotic, totally random.  Good Friday was chaos come again:  darkness, earthquake, violence and the death of the one who had given life to so many.”

[And now I am skipping a lot of excellent writing about the cross to get to the best good news about the Cross...]

“…in Jesus’ world that word ‘finished’ is what you wrote on a bill when it had been settled:  ’Paid in full!’  But underneath these is the meaning John intends, I believe, most deeply.  When God the creator made his wonderful world, at the end of the sixth day he finished it.  He completed his work.  Now, on the Friday, the sixth day of the week, Jesus has completed the work of redeeming the world.  With his shameful, chaotic, horrible death he has gone to the very bottom, to the darkest and deepest place of ruin, and has planted there the sign that says ‘Rescued’.  It is the sign of love, the love of the creator for his ruined creation, the love of the saviour for his ruined people.  Yes, of course, it all has to be worked out.  The victory has to be implemented.  But it’s done, it’s completed; it’s finished.”

Did you hear that:  ”IT’S DONE!! IT’S COMPLETED!!! IT’S FINISHED!!!!”

What are the sorrows, confusions, pains, betrayals, sins you want to place in the basket and put on the Cross?  Perhaps for you it would help to write them down as the people at Easington Colliery did.  Perhaps kneeling and naming would be an act of relinquishing your efforts to carry them.  Or perhaps like me, it would help you to have a permanent tattoo stamped on your forehead so you can never forget:  PAID IN FULL! (In case you’re wondering, I don’t have such a tattoo, but i have wondered, due to my penchant toward gospel memory loss, if it might be a good idea:)

Whatever you do, sing, dance, cry, celebrate — GOOD FRIDAY IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF CHAOS!

Exodus 12:1-14; 1 Corinthians 11:23-29; John 13:1-17, 31b-35

N.T. Wright tells us in his powerful book of sermons delivered Holy Week 2007.  ”Maundy” comes from the Latin word commandment, “because at that Last Supper Jesus gave them a new commandment, to love one another as he had loved them.”

Yesterday, rightly so, a friend emailed me to ask HOW do we lay betrayals at the foot of the Cross?  Of course I have no 4, 5, or 6 step answer.  Nor does Wright.  But he does offer some thoughts that may help me and my friend as we struggle to forgive and live in the freedom for which Christ set us free.

Maundy Thursday, and Wright’s writing on it, are about the meal.  He says, “This meal is therefore simultaneously part of our journey through bereavement, acting out the dying of Jesus within which our sorrows can be held and dealt with, and also part of our mission, because it is the powerful declaration that on the cross of Jesus Christ the living God has dealt with all that distorts and defaces human life.  And this meal therefore propels us out, to go into the community in the confidence that God is at work, that Jesus is Lord, that the Spirit can and does heal and renew.”

Wright moves further into our HOW do we live in forgiveness question with these reassuring thoughts:

“When I was a student chaplain I often had to listen to all kinds of stories of sorrow and anger as my young folk found their lives in a mess of one sort or another.  I knew I didn’t have the answers.  But I also knew that if they would only come to the Lord’s Table, bring their problems here, offer them up with open hands and then receive Jesus’ own life in return, there was the strong hope of freedom, of change, of healing, of transformation.  I pray that it will be so with us.

And remember, when God is up to something new, it doesn’t always have to start with a bang.  If God is going to hear our prayers in Holy Week and do new things in the Colliery, and in our lives, by our working through our sense of loss and bereavement in the light of the story of Jesus, it pretty certainly isn’t going to mean that suddenly hundreds of people are going to flood into church, hundreds of new houses are going to be built, crime and drugs will stop and all the problems out there and in here are going to be solved at a stroke.  No.  Jesus often told parables about sowing seeds, about things growing secretly, little by little.”

I don’t have the answer to my friend’s “how” question nor the solution to my own struggles to move into sorrow, betrayal, and confusion of some of life’s stories.  But if I hear Wright correctly, and far more, understand the contour of the grand narrative of Scripture, I think it means to keep moving toward the Cross.  To dine on his body and drink of his blood, that being the nourishment that works inexplicable changes in heart and life.  To let this nourishment grow a new way of living for me and to be energized to go into a broken world and tell this amazing story of grace.  And to go to the Cross on Good Friday and wonder again why they call it “Good” when it is so tragic.  But that topic we will save for tomorrow.

P.S. For more on Maundy Thursday, read Scotty Smith’s prayer for the day.