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| "Crucifixion," by Georges Rouault (1871-1958) |
Meditation for Maundy Thursday
John 1:1-18
It’s unusual to hear the opening
lines of John’s Gospel read during Holy Week. We’re used to hearing how the “Word became
flesh [– incarnated –] and lived among us” (John 1: 14) on Christmas Eve and
Christmas Day. Incarnation for
Christmas. Crucifixion and Resurrection
for Easter. Sometimes during Christmas we sing carols about how Jesus was born
to die or that the shadow of the cross is cast over the manger. Scripture doesn’t exactly put it this way. Our hymns do, but not scripture. Rarely, though, do we bring the Incarnated
One, this one born in a manger, and place him on a cross.
In John Irving’s novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Owen says, “Anyone can be sentimental
about the nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter
is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a
believer. ‘If you don’t believe in Easter,’ Owen said. ‘Don’t kid
yourself—Don’t call yourself a Christian.’” I take his point, but I would like
to suggest that this is a perfect example of what I think we should not do.
With all due respect to Mr. Irving, I think he gets it wrong. We can’t
separate Christmas and Easter. Nor can
we favor one over the other. We cannot separate Incarnation from Crucifixion
and Resurrection.
If anything, the early church reversed the order, they
considered the Incarnation the “main event,” the greater mystery, not the death
and resurrection. Why? Because as the early
theologians often said, “What God has not assumed, God has not saved.” That’s
how the fourth century theologian Gregory of Nazianzus (330-390) put it. "What God has not assumed, God has not saved.” In other words, in order for humanity to be
saved, it has to be assumed, taken on, saved from within, enfleshed,
incarnated. This is what makes the
incarnation so extraordinary. And without
the claim of incarnation the crucifixion is “just” the death of another
innocent human victim in history, and the resurrection, still mysterious and
wondrous, is the resurrection of a human victim. Without the Divine-human mix in Jesus, his
life and ministry lose something of their power. It’s the Incarnate One on the
cross.
Theologian Wendy Farley makes this clear: “The cry of dereliction of the Incarnate One
on the cross inflames history by enacting the deep truth that there is nowhere
we could go on earth or in the heavens above the earth or in the deep under the
earth and fail to find the Beloved.
Nothing severs the unity between Divinity and humanity. Nothing obscures from the Beloved the
radiance of our own spiritual beauty.” [1]
Divinity and humanity linked on the cross.
Nothing can obscure that connection.
Nothing can sever that link, that union, that relationship – even the
abyss of death. Humanity and Divinity;
Divinity and humanity. Flesh and spirit;
spirit and flesh. Not either/or, but
both and. Always both-and, held together
in tension.
All of us are servants of the Incarnate One who calls us to love
and to serve one another, not in the abstract, but concretely, physically, in spirit
and flesh. This bread and this cup are
not “spiritual,” they are real, tangible, material. The bread and juice we will take into our
bodies and digest; and they will become part of us.
We’re called to embody Christ in tangible ways, called to embody love.
Being a servant of the Incarnate One was beautifully demonstrated today in the images of Pope Francis washing feet this evening in Rome. Washing the feet, not of priests or cardinals, but twelve young offenders, aged 14 to 21. And for the first time, a Pope washed the feet of two women, which was significant enough, but one woman was a Serbian Muslim.
Being a servant of the Incarnate One was beautifully demonstrated today in the images of Pope Francis washing feet this evening in Rome. Washing the feet, not of priests or cardinals, but twelve young offenders, aged 14 to 21. And for the first time, a Pope washed the feet of two women, which was significant enough, but one woman was a Serbian Muslim.
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| Pope Francis, Maundy Thursday foot washing in Rome. |
There are people in the church and beyond the walls of
the church this night who need to know that this Christian life is more than
just an ephemeral spiritual exercise that has nothing to do with real life; instead,
it’s about real life, really real life,
the real lives of real women and men and children who have been to hell and back, who
need to know, in tangible, personal ways that God is with them and for them,
that love continues to be embodied and incarnated in the world. God is with us.
We’re going to read the opening verses of John on Good Friday and again on Easter morning to drive the point home. The cross and resurrection proclaim the grace
of the Incarnate One, who comes in the flesh for the sake of humanity, in order
to heal and restore us and make us whole, who comes to serve, who comes in love,
“who having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end”
(John 13:1), and calls us to do the same.
[1] Wendy Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away: A Theology of Incarnation
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2011), 166.
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