Image by Denys Tymchyshyn UBP
Seventeen years ago a film premiered during Lent. The film is about these holy days we are entering, this sacred week that remakes the world.
There’s a scene in the film of Jesus falling flat on his face into a dusty road: surrounded by crowds, a crown of thorns on his head, the heavy timber he is carrying comes down hard on his back.
He falls at the intersection of an alleyway, where we see his mother collapsed against a wall in anguish as she waits in horror to glimpse her son, Jesus, passing by.
When Jesus hits the ground just yards from her, Mary flashes back to a moment when as a child Jesus stumbled and hurt himself. In the memory, Jesus runs to her in pain and she takes him into her arms of comfort.
Startled back from her vision—back to the reality of her son laying prostrate in the dust—Mary springs to life and rushes to Christ’s aid.
When Jesus sees her, he shoulders his cross, and as he slowly rises back to his feet, he looks at Mary and says, “Behold, mother, I make all things new.”
This is how God makes all things new: not by waving a magic wand, not by taking up a sword or dropping a bomb, not be decreeing himself ruler of all worlds forever, but by dying in the most shameful way imaginable.
Once a year Christians let this story of the crucified God be the priority in their lives for a long weekend.
We take children out of music lessons and sporting events. We don’t plan social engagements. We pause. We take a deep breath. We put ordinary busyness on hold. We take a long weekend of sabbaths.
We pray. We sing. We lament. We remember. We find silence and dwell in it. We worship.
In gathered liturgies that make the past present we *enter* the story *together*: the gift of the Last Supper, the command to love as God has loved us, the anxious questions and perspiration of Gethsemane.
We climb the holy mountain to take an honest look at the cross, at our own violence against God, at the Love that forgives even as we betray and deny and flee, as we smite and whip and nail and mock.
In the quiet of Holy Saturday, we ponder a world without God, where death reigns without the resurrection, for we are not yet privy to the work Jesus is doing to tear down the gates of hell and trample down death by death, to set death’s captives free.
Then we gather once more to accompany the women in the vanishing darkness of the garden at dawn, where we learn with great joy that death is not the end of anyone or the end of the world; that resurrection is the end of all things.
In our worshipful remembrance the distant past is made present.
The events of the life of Christ participate in eternity and so are available to all times and places, and in our liturgies we experience the ever-present grace of these “mighty acts.”
This history of God in the flesh makes God’s healing life available everywhere.
Ponder with me how this is true also for us on a less-universal scale:
You and I bring our life experiences with us when we gather with other Christ followers for worship.
Everything that has happened to us on our pilgrimage in this world accompanies us, in fact, wherever we go.
Our past is part of what makes us unique persons. What we have endured and felt and accomplished informs our conversations and often helps determines our actions in the present moment.
This is part of what it means to be human, for good or ill: we have have a past that impacts the present.
The loss of my father to the conflict in Vietnam when I was four, the six years in Chicago riding trains every work day for four hours, my Southern Pentecostal roots, ministering to scores of persons in the hour of their death, two decades along the ocean in Southern California, and more than 30 years now raising seven children with a brunette from Oakland are all part of what makes me tick, and these moments never leave me; they live on in and through me.
Whenever two or more Christians gather, there is a Person, Jesus Christ, who is also present with us.
In his ongoing humanity, he bears the wounds he suffered, the cross he carried, a memory of the temptations he conquered, the touch of his mother's hand on his face, a last meal with the ones he called friends, the sawdust and grime that covered his body after a day of labor with Joseph.
Christ brings with him to us his turning Cana's water into wine, his baptism by John in the Jordan, his conversation with Moses and Elijah on Tabor, the voice that raises Lazarus from death and decay near Bethany.
Wherever the resurrected Jesus goes these experiences live on in him and through him and because this one is also God he can and does make his human life our human life.
Jesus brings with him to our gathered worship the victory won by divine humility and self-sacrifice over the powers of sin, death, and the devil.
Jesus carries in his bosom the love of the Father that casts out fear and overcomes the world.
By the Spirit, he brings his incarnate life, miracles, parables, transfiguration, torture, abandonment, death, descent, resurrection, and ascension to all places where two or more congregate in his Name.
Jesus is simply all of the saving events of his sinless life among us, the sum of all his teachings, and because they are part of who he is as God and who he yet remains as a human, by the Spirit we who gather share in these temporal experiences that are eternal realities.
We *relive* these moments as though we were there with Jesus: most poignantly on the occasions when the church calendar marks the most significant moments of his history with us as the Nazarene.
“Liturgical celebration is a re-entrance of the Church into the event, and this means not merely its ‘idea,’ but its living and concrete reality.” —Fr. Alexander Schmemann
On Christmas Eve, as we attend to the presence of the resurrected Christ in our midst, we are once again with shepherds, kneeling at the hard wood of the manger, as he who made the heavens is laid in a feed trough.
When Transfiguration comes around each new year, we ascend the mount with the disciples to glimpse the glory of the Father shining from the face of Jesus and, with Moses and Elijah, we hear the majestic voice from heaven: “This is my Son, my Chosen One. Listen to him.”
As we re-enter the week Christians call Holy, we are there with Christ on the heady road into Jerusalem, in the Temple as he predicts its (his!) doom and third day triumph, we recline at the meal he shares with his disciples and he serves us by cleansing our dusty feet.
We examine our part with those who condemn Jesus before Pilate, weep with Mary and the women at the cross, hope against hope as we lay his body in the tomb.
The loneliness and darkness of Holy Week are in the end illumined by a joyful perception: that Jesus plunges down to the depths of death with us and fills all things with himself, so that now there is quite literally no place where he is not.
If we make our bed in hell, he is there—he is there *wherever* we gather in his Name.
Instead of a transient miracle, we experience the permanent restoration of Resurrection. We are there in the garden with the astonished Magdalen on the first Easter. When we turn toward his voice, we exclaim in recognition with her, "Rabonni!"
Are you ready not simply to remember, or call to mind, but to now *enter* by the Spirit of God the events that brought us so great a redemption?
Because the Risen Christ is truly with us in our worship, he brings these saving experiences with him. The Holy One who inhabits our praises is this human God.
When these days come around each year, they are ever-new for us. The events do not change— *we* do.
Each new year, as we come to Holy Week—as we encounter the unchanging reality of this sacred time—we are different people than we were the last time.
As the imitation of Jesus Christ deepens in us by the Spirit, we see in these fathomless moments what we missed before, as when we read a passage of Scripture read a dozen times before as if for the first time.
I want to encourage you to disconnect from the grind and walk the way of the cross this week, to stay with Jesus and the women and John in the tragedy of Golgotha—all the darkness that *must* come before the new creation.
You will never quite understand the community of the church, her ancient practices, or the deeper meanings of this week—as for instance that death is the only way to any kind of life—until you let it *take over your life* once a year.
Try it. From Thursday night to Sunday morning, it’s only three days.
And with each passing year, as you keep this sacred week sacred, free from other obligations and pursuits, you will see and experience and encounter Jesus Christ anew.
I invite you to surrender your agenda and enter contemplation of the mighty acts whereby God has reconciled the world to himself in Jesus Christ—the things only Jesus can do for we cannot in a lifetime do them ourselves—where we find genuine rest from our labors in the acts of Love that remake the world.
Jesus saying this to Mary, “I make all things new” was the one thing I took from the movie and have never forgotten. I have wondered if this was in the Bible? Thank you for any info ❤️
Posted by: Mary Beth Alberts | April 13, 2021 at 12:41 PM