The Sunday of the Passion
28 March 1999
St. George’s Episcopal Church
Le Mars, Iowa
Dr. Donald Wacome, Lay Preacher
The Rev. Karen A. H. Wacome, Celebrant
Psalm 22.1-11
Isaiah 45.21-25
Philippians 2.5-11
Matthew 27.1-54
Who Cares?
The reading we took part in this morning draws us into events we’ll seriously remember and reflect on in this coming week, Holy Week. “Holy” means “set apart;” often “set apart for God’s special purposes.” But the things this week’s readings and services focus our minds and hearts on are set apart in another sense. They are events that in the end can’t fit in. We can’t assimilate what happens to Jesus into our normal way of seeing things. We can’t make sense of them. We can’t simply take them in and go on with our lives unchanged.
I used to think that of all the virtually unbelievable claims we Christians make the most outrageous is that this man Jesus is God himself. This fellow from the hinterland entering Jerusalem quasi-comically astride a donkey, cheered by the fickle crowds but obviously enough heading for a disastrous confrontation with the religious and political powers, that right there we see the God who made all things. We say that God, goodness himself, became flesh, and dwelt among us, but was then arrested, mocked, beaten and finally judicially terminated, put to death on a cross. This, I used to think, was the hardest, least believable thing you and I confess together.
But now I think where we really challenge credulity is closer to home, closer to our own experience. The truly outrageous claim is that there’s a God who cares. There really is a God not indifferent and uninvolved, or safely non-existent, but really here, really caring - a God who cares despite all the evidence to the contrary.
We rehearse the story of Jesus, that man of sorrows, helpless and abandoned, seized by the authorities and crushed by those great powers that account for so much of what goes on in this sad world: human fear and self-righteousness. Yet we say that hidden in this suffering and death God is taking into himself and healing all the world’s - all of our - fear and faithlessness. That in some way what happened then made things right. That God in Christ is truly gracious, neither remote nor judgmental but invincible in love, set on doing whatever it takes to get to us and bring us the help we need.
But how can we say this? Has anything changed? Now just as then the innocent are killed, the powerful oppress the weak, injustice is not diminished. Sadness, pain and death are still alive and well. Why, if Jesus took into himself all the suffering, all the sin and evil, then why is it still here, in Kosovo and Le Mars, in you and me?
Our reading from Matthew ends with Jesus in the grave. The stone closes up the tomb. Life and light gone, all hope lost. The God who cares is nowhere to be seen. Where to find him?
When I think about this, I’m drawn to Luther, that great theologian of the cross. Martin Luther the young monk, longing for righteousness, neurotically terrorized by a vindictive God, acutely aware of the relentless accumulation of his sins, piling up faster than penance can make them right. Caught in endless self-examination in pursuit of a purity of motive humanly impossible. The quest for a gracious God driving him to hopeless defeat and beyond to faith in the crucified God.
Luther sought a God who cares. And that’s who he found - or was found by - a God who cares and more. “Faith,” Luther wrote, “makes of you and of Christ as it were one person, so that you cannot be divided from Christ, but cling to him, as though you were called Christ, while he says: I am that sinner, because he clings to me...” (Ebeling’s Luther, p. 168)
This is the meaning of this Holy Week: there is a God who cares. Not a God anything like you or I would have imagined, but a gracious God who makes our plight his own, who joins himself to us.
How much does he care? In the epistle we heard St. Paul describing Jesus to the Philippian church: “though he was in the form of God [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” (Philippians 2.6) The empty God. God emptied of infinite beauty, goodness and power and filled with the world’s sin and pain, fear and sorrow. In the Hebrew Scriptures to call a thing empty is to call it foolish. Hollow, like an idol. Jesus, betrayed and abandoned in the world: there it is, the foolishness of God. It’s the thing that doesn’t make sense. Our inclination is to dream up a God who keeps score, a God who punishes and rewards, but that’s not the God we see carried to the tomb and sealed behind the rock. Father Robert Capon says it simply enough: “Grace uses no sticks and no carrots. It just dies for our life.” (From Noon Till Three)
When we consider these Holy Week happenings it is human and honest to ask if there is a God who cares. When we do we move not away from but closer to the God made flesh in the crucified man from Galilee. We share in the fear and doubt he must have experienced in those days, when his friends fled, the crowds that had of late hailed him cried out for his blood, and he makes his inexorable way to a humiliating death. Derelict on the cross he cries out at last My God my God why have you forsaken me? No inspiring courage, no holy confidence, just human despair and the fear that the God in whom we hope is not really there, or that he doesn’t care.
We trust that God did hear and answered, that the silence of the grave was not the last word, and that in our doubt and fear Jesus is with us, making our sin and sorrow his own. Making us his own, binding us to him in love and faith.
Pascal in the Pensees [ 526-27] wrote that the knowledge of God without knowledge of human misery causes pride, and that the knowledge of human misery without knowledge of God causes despair. What we need, what saves us, is the knowledge of Jesus Christ, because in him we find both God and our misery.
May we in this Holy Week come to be bound in faith to the crucified Jesus and in him know the God who cares.
Amen