Good Friday Homily April 18, 2014 - Second Word from the Cross

One of the criminals hanging there also insulted Jesus by saying, “Aren’t you the Messiah?  Save yourself and save us!”  But the other criminal told the first one off, “Don’t you fear God?  Aren’t you getting the same punishment as this man?  We got what was coming to us, but he didn’t do anything wrong.”  Then he said to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into power” Jesus replied, “I promise that today you will be with me in paradise.”  Luke 23:39-43

Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement in the 1930’s said, “The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”

The Catholic Worker published a newspaper, established houses of hospitality in inner cities, and farms in the country where people from all walks lived together in community, where the poor were fed, clothed and sheltered and people envisioned a new way of being in the world.  She said of the movement:

“What we would like to do is change the world--make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words—we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”

“The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.” This truth is most powerfully illustrated here in this passage, as Jesus speaks to the two criminals from the cross.  One mocking Jesus, the other believing that they are getting what they deserve and so in awe of Christ.  “We’re getting what’s coming to us, but Jesus has done nothing wrong.”  It is to this criminal, who in the eyes of the powers that be deserves death, that Jesus promises a place in paradise alongside of him.  But we cannot look at this passage and imagine that the mocking criminal was any less loved by Jesus than the one who petitioned him.  Jesus died for all whether they repent or not, whether they know what they are doing or not, while they were yet sinners.  And we suddenly find ourselves in the same boat with these men.  There is no separation between us and them, between the righteous and the unrighteous.  We are all the undeserving poor.

Love is not something that is earned, it is freely given to all.  And it is this radical hospitality—this unconditional welcome that Jesus offers to the criminal—that transforms each individual and ultimately the whole world. 

Even though we imagine that there are all sorts of other things we can do to gauge people’s real repentance, all sorts of ways to evaluate progress, to measure outcomes in people’s lives, to get people to do stuff we want them to do, to judge whether some are worthier than others to receive our attention—all we really have to offer is the same thing that Jesus offered this criminal.  Welcome.  A radical welcome that discriminates against no one, that freely offers even to the most “undeserving” a place in paradise.

As Dorothy Day says, “there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”  To love even our enemy, to love not just the one who is kind to us, but the one also who mocks us, who abuses us, hurts us greatly, the one who disregards all of our good intentions and good deeds, who mocks our own sacrificial acts.

In so doing we will not just be welcoming people into a heavenly paradise after death, but with our own radical hospitality, again as Dorothy Day says, we will be creating “an oasis, a little cell of joy and peace in this harried world.”  A sign here and now of the hope of the resurrection and the Kingdom of God to come.  This is what it means to be the church, to be a community of faithful following the example of Jesus.  And with each small act of kindness, each loving response we offer indiscriminately to everyone, we throw our own pebble in the pond and we can be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world.

Good Friday Homily, April 18, 2014 - Fourth Word from the Cross

 

 

At noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.  And about that time, Jesus shouted, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When some of those standing near heard this, they said, “Listen, he’s calling Elijah.”  Someone tried to give him something to drink and then said “Now leave him alone.  Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down.”  (Mark 15:33-36)

Elijah has long had a place in Jewish spirituality and practice as heralding the coming of the Messiah.  According to scripture Elijah did not die, but rather ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot about 700 years before Christ.  And so he is a living presence throughout Jewish history occasionally appearing to rescue people from danger and reveal secrets of the Torah.  He visits every bris (the ceremony of circumcision) and at every Passover, the door is open, a place at the table set with an empty chair, and a cup of wine is poured for Elijah.

Elijah represents the ever present protection, salvation and presence of God, and so though it seems like the crowd has misunderstood Jesus’ cry, “Eloi, Eloi” as a call for Elijah, Elijah is also the one who comes at the darkness hour, just as this day was, when the sky was black at noon.  So it is Elijah the people think of at this moment when it seems that all is lost.

The Jewish people throughout their history have known the reality of exile, of abandonment, of being forsaken by God.  Night by Elie Wiesel describes his experience as a young boy in the concentration camps of the Holocaust. It is a night, a time of deep darkness, of abandonment, in which his God dies at the hands of Nazi’s as surely as all the millions of human beings who also lost their lives.

And yet he begins his Nobel Prize acceptance speech many years later, by giving thanks to our common Creator, as, he says, Jewish tradition commands us to do. “Barukh shehekhyanu vekiymanu vehigianu lazman haze.”  “Blessed be Thou for having sustained us until this day.”  For Elie Weisel the reality of suffering in this life has meant his own dedication to stand in solidarity with all who suffer injustice throughout the world.  He ends his speech by giving thanks also to his younger self saying, “I express my deepest gratitude as one who has emerged from the Kingdom of Night.  We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering, not to share them would mean to betray them.  Our lives no longer belong to us alone, they belong to all those who need us desperately.”

St John of the Cross, 16^th Century Spanish mystic and poet, speaks of the Spiritual Path as the Dark Night of the Soul.  This is not a path for the faint hearted.  All of us have experienced periods of pain and sadness, times of great grief as well as times of spiritual dryness, desert times when we cannot feel the presence of God.

But I think for Elie Wiesel and St John of the Cross, this Dark Night is not just a temporary passing time in our lives, it speaks of something fundamental about what it means to be a human being.  We are finite, limited creatures who suffer and die, for whom God always remains a mystery, hidden in a cloud of unknowing, as another mystic once put it, and suffering is never something that can be explained.  Life cannot be comprehended, rather it must be loved.

And in this love we always keep hoping. This too is essentially human.  We keep opening the door for Elijah, waiting for him to appear.  And even when he did not come to rescue Jesus from the cross, even though Jesus died after his own pitiful cry of forsakenness—even though this suffering of Christ is a sharing in the suffering of all of humanity, as we were reminded when we began this Holy Lent, that we are but dust and to dust we shall return—even though we walk through the valley of shadow and death and darkness covers the land—even so we fear no evil.

 

We say as we are commanded to say, as we are called to say, as we are made to say by our Creator, “Blessed are You Lord God King of the Universe for sustaining us unto this day.”  Thank you for placing in our hearts a love and a hope that cannot die, no matter what.  Even now as we go from this dark Friday to keep vigil with our Lord who is laid in a tomb, so we stand in solidarity with all who suffer and we await the morning of the third day.