A Text with Consequences

From The Sounds of St. Francis, 5 Apr. 2017

Lauren Winner, a professor at Duke Divinity School, grew up as an Orthodox Jew.  In college, she converted to Christianity and is now an Episcopal priest.  Much of Winner’s writing focuses on the way her practice of Judaism has helped her to appreciate aspects of the Christian faith many of us Gentiles take for granted. She also describes how tone-deaf the Church can sometimes be about the way Jews perceive basic elements of our faith, when our words are set in the context of centuries of Christian hostility to the Jews. 

In her memoir, Girl Meets God (2003), she describes one of her first experiences of the Palm Sunday liturgy in her Episcopal congregation in New York City.  Reflecting on hearing the reading of Saint Matthew’s Passion Gospel (the same text we will read next Sunday), she wrote

“Today I feel stunned.  I am stunned because of how the Jews look in this drama.  He whole thing reeks of charges of deicide. The Passion play makes sharper what John’s Gospel makes clear: Pilate is useless, the Jews are to blame, they turn into some bloodthirsty chanting mob and killed Jesus.  I look around me at the small children sitting in their pews and I think, When they leave, they will think the Jews are bad…

I don’t know what to do with this text, but I figure this much should be obvious; it has been two thousand years, and we see that this story, the Jews-killed-Christ story, is a story with consequences.  After two thousand years, it seems to me the Church should take some responsibility for the way we tell this piece of salvation.  I don’t mean we should deny that this chapter is sacred writ, or stop reading it.  But we shouldn’t just act out charges of deicide, and then leave them sitting there (160-161).

Ave and Consummatum Est

“He said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”  St. John 19:30

Today is the twenty-fifth of March.  That, in itself, may seem rather unremarkable to you.  The dates for the celebration of these great three days of Holy Week change from year to year, depending on the cycles of the moon.  We last kept Good Friday on March 25 eleven years ago, and it will next be on this date in 2157, when we will have all gone to our reward. 

But it may be that the first Good Friday was also on the 25^th of March, and as they say, thereby hangs a tale.

If you know your liturgical calendar really well, you will remember that when Holy Week and Easter Week don’t interfere, we celebrate another festival on this date, March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, and God sent His Son into the world to save us.  Christmas is exactly nine months from today.  This is a day of the great end, but also of the great beginning.  He came on this day to save us, and this day He announced His work was done.   The life of Christ is a perfect circle.

He is the new wine

“The mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’”  St. John 2:3

A friend of mine made her debut on reality TV a few years ago.  Now, this was in England, where they spend even less on broadcast production than here, and where they seem to find the clergy endlessly fascinating.  She was part of a series that followed newly ordained clergy in her rural diocese in the West Country.

And when the time came for her to officiate at her first wedding, the BBC camera crews were on hand.  She was nervous, of course, and I guess her hands shook a bit, and she would be the first one to say that she’s always been a little clumsy.  She took the rings, as she practiced many times before, and laid them on her open prayer book for the blessing.  And then she dropped them—right through enormous cast iron grate on the chancel floor, down into the belly of a Victorian coal furnace.  I think they ended up calling the local fire department to get them out.  Of the hundreds of hours of film they shot that summer, well you can guess which scene got top billing in that episode.