A Good Friday Homily
John 19:25-27
“This man is now your son. She is now your mother.” From then on, that disciple took her into his own home.
These are practical, personal words spoken by Jesus concerned about providing for his mother: the love and care Jesus had for her shown even from the cross in his moment of greatest suffering. He was thinking of her loss and her need to be cared for after he was gone. At the same time Jesus was responding to the loss experienced by a beloved disciple. John was losing a friend, rabbi, and mentor. Jesus provided him a new role and responsibility, a new relationship in a new family. Jesus from the cross created with Mary and John, a new home.
Jesus on the cross, outside the city, the forsaken Son of God, living at this moment without family in heaven or on earth, this homeless one, calls all of us to be family and opens the way for all of us to practice hospitality. Mary, a widow and sonless, represents the most vulnerable for whom the church has always taken special care. John, the beloved disciple finds in his own loss a way to new love. Out of death has come life, out of their shared loss, they have created a new home.
We know the brokenness of our own community; we remember today our own personal experiences of loss: the corporate and individual crosses we bare. We know the need is great for us to act as family toward one another, to seek life out of death and to heal the pain we feel. Jesus is calling us to take the widows and orphans, the poor and homeless, into our homes. We who are widows and orphans, poor and homeless, desire to know again the warmth of home and family. For all of us in our various forms of poverty, isolation and loss we long to find a new way of being at home with one another.
On the Yakama Indian Reservation there is still a strong sense of family that is a part of the cultural strength of this community. “Attowetotikwat,” is a Yakama word that means loving family and has within it a sense of extended family that includes all our human relations as well as all the animals and plants and the land and sky itself, all are family, all my relations. On a practical level it is a tribe of 10,000 members and everyone is related, but in a larger spiritual sense they understand this connection with everything.
And yet on the reservation there is incredible brokenness, homeless youth move from relative to relative escaping family situations, lost and adrift, struggling to find their own identity. A high suicide rate that speaks of a huge sense of hopelessness among many, family dysfunction, drugs and alcohol, a decimation of culture: all this has its root in more than 150 year history of domination by another alien race.
I have heard again and again the stories of Yakama women who have opened their homes to take in children and youth. “When they show up at your door step you have to take them in because they are family,” someone said to me recently. Grandmothers are raising grandchildren. Youth have many aunties who take in lots of far flung nieces and nephews. Over and over again the words of Jesus are repeated, “This is now your son, this is now your mother.”
Several years ago it was my wife, the Rev Sheri Noah, who stood before you and preached a Good Friday homily on one of the seven words of Jesus. My own cross that I bear, the death of my wife, and the journey of grief that I have been on the last two years has also opened me up to a new solidarity with others who are in transition, new relationships, and a new sense of family and home especially among the homeless.
A year and a half ago we began Noah’s Ark Drop in Center and Shelter in Wapato run by an organization called Generating Hope, and I have also turned to a new job of placing the homeless into housing. For many moving out of homelessness, like all transitions, is similar to the grief process, saying goodbye to an old life, and finding a way to claim and embrace a new life. Now in a real way I can say these are my brothers and sisters, my sons and daughters, my mothers and fathers. We are united in the cross we bare together, in the loss we know, in the loss of home and family, struggling once again to claim a new hope in the future. It has become a part of my own spiritual journey to walk with them and welcome them home.
Hear once again the words of Jesus, “This is now your son and this is now your mother.” Let us find the community that is formed in our common suffering, and know that as Christ is lifted up on the cross, he draws the whole world to himself, and we all are welcomed home.
