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(A post from last year, but i had a hard time putting it better this year, and it is a great preview for our week ahead in El Salvador)
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?This question sits heavy on our chests over the days of Holy Week. Today is Good Friday, and today the tomb is full. Jesus has died a miserable and tortured death.I just spent a week with students in El Salvador and every day we asked, “What was hard for you today?” There were a lot of answers to this question: watching our cook Mercedes cry as she explained that she hadn’t seen her daughter for three years because she had crossed illegally into the United States to try to better the family’s situation back home; listening to young people who were afraid to play in church soccer tournament lest they be caught up in gang violence; seeing depictions of bodies tortured and murdered during the war; the sights of the ongoing poverty throughout El Salvador.
David Moseley, a theologian who teaches at the Bishop’s School, has been giving a course on Jurgen Moltmann’s book “The Crucified God” during lent. Last night he preached for the Good Friday service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. His theme was theodicy the question: “where is God when people suffer?” Often we think about Jesus of Nazareth’s death on the cross as the “sacrifice to cover our sins” as if what was needed was a perfect man to die. Moltmann reminds us that in Jesus, God Himself suffers on the cross. God does not exact revenge on an innocent human, but comes to earth and reveals his love by suffering WITH us. It is God who is crucified, God who cries out in agony and feeling abandoned, God who dies. God enters into the absolute messiness of humanity and experiences excruciating loss out of a desire for relationship.
I was struck by one of the relics on display at the Centro de Mgr. Romero. It was here where in 1989 six Jesuit priests were martyred because they dared to write that God was on the side of the poor. On the night that the Salvadoran ejercito entered the theology center and executed the priests, one of them was reading “The Crucified God.” The book soaked up so much blood from the priest that it appears waterlogged. Now it is displayed in a glass case like the relics of more ancient saints, reminding us of God’s work through people who choose to follow.
The German Lutheran Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who died in a Nazi Concentration camp wrote that grace is costly. 70 years ago Bonhoeffer wrote against a Spirituality that provided what he saw as “cheap grace,” salvation without struggle, supposed appeasement of the need to feel redeemed. This grace is not the salvation of Jesus, who calls on us to follow him in the way of the cross. Discipleship leads to suffering because the world still perpetuates the anti-Christian systems of oppression which diminish the humanity of the ones God created and loves. Those who follow Jesus are called to throw themselves into the gear-work of the world’s machine of oppression.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord? The disciples must have asked this question of God. Seeing him beaten, thrashed, bloodied, hanging by nails through his flesh. Jesus himself asks, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Where is God when those we love suffer? Our faith in the incarnation causes us to answer that it is God himself who asks that question, God himself who today suffers with us unto death.
God then is with the suffering of the world. The Crucified God died with the Jesuits in the UCA, He cries with the hungry children out in the campo, and is there when a teenager is murdered in the name of gang war.
Were you there? Will you be?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble…
After writing the post on Maundy Thursday below I attended a unique foot-washing witness outside the UCSD hospital with faith leaders from around San Diego. You can find out more about the campaign here.
“After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord–and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.” (John 13:12-17) (see the rest of this reading)
Maundy Thursday celebrates the last supper of Jesus with his disciples, and particularly his action of washing their feet. This is the Biblical introduction of the “servant leader” paradigm. That phrase doesn’t surprise us today; we hear “servant leader” used frequently, but that frequency can limit our understanding of this passage. Jesus is doing something radical here. To be a servant in the first century meant to be of a lower degree of humanity. Whether because of gender (I wrote a whole paper in college about how Jesus is behaving here as a woman), nationality, race, or religion, in ancient Israel you were a servant because you were seen as less than fully human, less than a Jewish man. That Jesus has stooped down to behave like a servant radically controverts the expectations of his disciples and would anyone in his society. Leaders were the most highly elevated. They were carried around on human shoulders and wrapped in purple cloth. They didn’t bend down to wash someone’s feet. Jesus radically transgresses the barriers between him and those who are valued less and tells his followers that this is true leadership.
The Maundy part of this Thursday comes from the Latin mandatum, command. Jesus commands his followers to behave like him in this radical way (he has to repeat and rephrase this command a couple of times to make sure it sinks in). Whether we transgress physical boundaries like those between us and our sisters and brothers in Tijuana, or societal boundaries like those that tell us how we should look or how we should behave towards those who are different from us; we are called to radically transgress the boundaries and structures of our society in order that we might serve one another. This mandatum comes in the shadow of the great commandment of John’s Gospel: “Love One Another.” We are to love one another by breaking down the walls that separate us from those our society considers less, and in doing so we will follow the lead of the great servant leader.
(Icon from Society of Saint John the Evangelist)
Tenebrae, the service of shadows, traditionally occurs on Wednesday in Holy week. We enter into the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah. Lamentations 2:19 reads
Arise, cry out in the night,
at the beginning of the watches!
Pour out your heart like water
before the presence of the Lord!
Lift your hands to him
for the lives of your children,
who faint for hunger
at the head of every street.
(Miguel and Becca)
Reading this line from Lamentations, I can’t help but think of the two kids we met at Dorcas House this past weekend, Miguel and Jasmin. Miguel was 5, Jasmin 3. They both speak English much better than Spanish, and so having the English speaking group around this weekend was a great comfort. They were found on the streets of Tijuana being beaten by an unknown man and were brought by Mexican Social Services to Dorcas House. We discovered a couple of days ago that the children are US Citizens and are missing from a foster home in San Diego. A woman identified as their mother was arrested Friday as she tried to enter the United States (undocumented). Their older brother, who was with the mom at the time, has been returned to the foster home. As we are invited to repent this week, we must examine our indifference to a border system that last week left 5 year old caring for his 3 year old sister on the streets of Tijuana where they were abused. We must lift up our hands to God for the lives of these children, and children everywhere.
Holy week invites us into the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. For Christians, the three days ahead represent the central answer by God to the great question of suffering in our world: Where is God when we suffer? God suffers with us, because God suffers humanly on the cross. But suffering is not the end of the story. The ultimate vindication of God’s reign, the triumph of the good news of LIFE over the powers of death in this world, THE RESURRECTION is the last word.
Pray for resurrection in the lives of Miguel and Jasmine, in the lives of children throughout the world, and in our own lives.
Immigration continues to be present for me. My buddy Casey wrote a song for my other buddy Chris based around the ideas in his graduate thesis exploring immigration. I’ve been in continuing conversations about immigration lately, some of them framing immigration as the new civil rights question for our time. Could San Diego be the next Montgomery?
I don’t know, but I do know that my community continues to spiritually process immigration. As Christians we are called to cross our borders. We are called beyond the boundaries we set up by the Christ who breaks down all walls.
