| Rector’s
Meditation
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| This is a long three hours, but rarely have I talked to those who have been here for these three hours who don’t comment that it feels like much less. In a way, perhaps, as we sing the hymns and hear the scripture and concentrate on the meditations and prayers, we can get caught up in this drama in much the same way when we’re concentrating on something so intently that we can’t believe the time in which it’s occurred. One of the joys of my life is to paint one watercolor every summer. You’d think that with the joy it brings me I’d do it more often, but no, just once a year in the summer. And the reason is that I have a friend who offers a workshop for ten or twelve of us who become disciples, as it were, and quite amazingly produce something that looks like we actually know what we’re doing. But the truth is that I become so absorbed in following her direction, so focused on getting it right, and so fascinated by how a blank piece of paper can be transformed into a lovely reproduction of a set of buildings or a fleet of boats or the ocean and shore that I enjoy that time gets lost, or at least my consciousness of that time. So it is with these three hours. We are painting pictures in our own minds of the greatest drama the world has ever known. We are thinking about what Jesus must have felt, about the other players in this drama, the parts they played, what Jerusalem looked like and what Golgotha looked like, the interaction between religion and politics and public opinion and a foreign occupation. It is truly a long three hours, but not if we’ve allowed ourselves to be participants. In recent years there have been questions raised about the violence which attended the death of Jesus and to what extent that violence was necessary for the sacrifice that Christ’s death represents. The spiritual writer Father Andrew says, If we really believe that the man who was nailed to the cross at Calvary is our God, and hung there for love of us, we cannot wish that our following of him should not be a very costing thing… Perhaps the suffering which Christ endured and the suffering that we might experience as faithful persons can find their meaning in how it is, ultimately, that Good Friday is not the end of the story. We cannot leave this service as if it is an end unto itself, as if the great thing about Christianity is that Jesus died on the cross. Instead, we leave this service knowing that the import of Christ’s death can only make sense by the celebration of his resurrection. But for me, Good Friday is the opportunity to stay connected with Jesus and to know that I will be forever connected with Jesus and therefore by extension with all those I have loved and who have died, but who remain an influence in my life and are never farther away than my memory of them. Think of those persons in these few days before Easter, and think of them in light of Paul’s insistence that there is nothing in life or in death that can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Christ Church is blessed with a churchyard of great beauty and of great comfort right outside these doors. And it’s no accident that we begin our Easter Vigil by gathering in the churchyard where in the darkness fire is kindled and we say, Dear friends in Christ: on this most holy night, in which our Lord Jesus passed over from death to life, the church invites her members, dispersed throughout the world, to gather in vigil and prayer. For this is the Passover of the Lord, in which, by hearing his Word and celebrating his Sacraments, we share in his victory over death. Christians, by definition, are connected people. We are connected to God through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, and we are connected to one another, to all those who have gone before, to all those who will come after us, connected in love. Amen. |
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