O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Holy Tuesday
“The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” – 1 Corinthians 1:18
When the Apostle Paul penned these words nearly two millennia ago, the notion that Messiah, God’s Anointed, had actually been put to death by the machinations of an Empire was an affront to the “way things were supposed to be”. Messiah was supposed to liberate God’s people from oppression, not fall victim to it!
Paul’s argument in the face of this contradiction was to adamantly hold to the righteousness of God and to invite his friends to enter more fully into the mystery of the cross as saving event rather than mourning it as a travesty of justice or the tragedy of human cruelty. We are invited, during this Holy Week to do the same. To walk the way of the cross is to confront our own discomfort with a part of the Gospel story we’d probably prefer to ignore.
The collect appointed for today, asks, in part, that the Church will “glory in the cross of Christ”. How does that happen? How is God’s wisdom made known in the illogical (even foolish) shamefulness of the cross? How is the wisdom of the world turned inside out by this event which defies human logic? How exactly does the body of Jesus being nailed to the cross unleash the power of God to save the world?
So many questions come along with us on this Holy Week journey. Very few answers make sense. Most answers sound somewhat incomplete.
I wonder. If we could figure out all the answers, would we then begin to trust our own wisdom as a power on a level with God’s? Would we begin to act as if we had some control over the God of Sarah, Rebecca, Ruth, Hannah and Mary – the God who, over and over again, refuses to conform to human expectations of how a god should behave?
The God of the Matriarchs and Patriarchs still confounds us today – with irascibility we find unsettling. This God comes to us in the ways of weakness – a babe in a stable cave and a dying man on a cross. The Church proclaims, with particular emphasis during Holy Week, that this foolishly behaving God has, “brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” (BCP, p. 368) But this power of God to salvation and wholeness isn’t merely a set of interesting teachings inscribed in a book. This saving power is gifted to the world in the weakness of human flesh – Jesus, Son of Mary, Son of God.
The Rev. Gary Manning
Rector
Trinity Church, Wauwatosa
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