Can't Look Away

Luke 23:1-5, 13-25 
Moorestown Ministerium Ecumenical Good Friday service

I can’t watch. I can’t look away.

It’s obviously a put-up job, a made-for-publicity set of accusations, meant to condemn Jesus in the court of public opinion, not a legal court.

 

Pilate sees that, too. 

He tries to deny it. Tries look strong, decisive. But he’s giving in to the loud voices, the political manipulators and then the crowds, at every step.

It’s a foregone conclusion, despite all the grandstanding and delay, and it’s just so hard to watch it unfold.

I feel so helpless.

But I can’t look away.

 

It’s a familiar feeling – an experience I know from all parts of life, from high school social dynamics through congressional hearings and national “debates” and all kinds of workplace and family dramas in between.

Maybe it’s familiar to you, too.

 

There are bullies and a victim, or accusers and accused.

There’s someone whose job it is to do the right thing, see that the right thing gets done.

And yet you know all along that the force of “public opinion” – political expediency or majority rule – makes injustice, makes compromise with evil and oppression, a foregone conclusion.

You hate to watch.

You feel helpless.

But you can’t look away.  

Because it’s the only thing in the news sometimes. Because it matters, other times.
Because you can’t help hoping, even though you know it’s going to go wrong.

 

We can’t look away.

And I think, today, that that’s the point.

 

Oh, I want to read this story with you, and talk about how this motivates and transforms us to fight injustice. To learn to be the voice in the crowd that speaks up and says, “No, he is innocent, release him,” no matter what it costs.  To learn from this story to use our authority, our power, as Pilate might have, to save an innocent life, in spite of the pressure to concede.

 

And I think that lesson is there.

But before we learn that, we need to stop and feel the horror of our helplessness.

Feel how easy it is to let one man die for the sake of “peace”.
Feel, with Pilate, how impossible it is to do the right thing, sometimes, when the wrong thing is the only option you are offered.

Feel that helplessness, and the frustration, and the tragedy.

And not look away.

 

Because when we look away – when we tell ourselves this isn’t happening in front of us, to us, among us, either then or now;
when we tell ourselves we would have stopped it, could have stopped it, if we’d been there, 

we look away from ourselves. 

From our own truth, and even our own hope. We look away from the whole of the story.

 

We could not rescue Jesus. Still can’t.

And when we recognize that, we are able to recognize more deeply, more profoundly, the whole truth that Jesus rescues us.

Rescues us from all the sin and evil and helpless grief; from powerlessness, from the death that we cannot vanquish on our own. 

Rescues and heals us, so that we, in turn, can save and heal others.

 

That’s why we gather at the cross today, [at the arrest, at the trial, at the cross and tomb,] and sit face to face with our own powerlessness, our own inaction, in this story and so many others. 

We feel the wounds made by everyday compromise with evil, with oppression, with injustice, to keep the everyday “peace” in our own world. 

Because that’s how we remember that we cannot rescue ourselves,

and know and feel the wonder that Jesus never looks away from us, mired in that messy compromise, that helpless grief, 

looks at us, loves us, and rescues us.

 

It’s hard to watch. Of course it is.

But love will not look away.

  

Bare Your Soles

John 13:1-17, 31-35

Why are you doing this?
Why are you insisting on doing something for us that we could very well do for ourselves (probably have already done for ourselves today)? That’s really someone else’s job?
And why are you interrupting dinner to do it?

What are you doing, Jesus? Why?

 

You won’t understand – yet – even if I explain it, Jesus says. 

But if I don’t wash you, you have no share with me.

 

Which is enough in the moment, it seems. No one at that table wants to be cut off from Jesus. Probably even Judas wants a share, even though he’s about to break the relationship in another way. (And Judas gets a share – John would have told us if Jesus omitted Judas’ feet as he went around the table with his basin and towel.)

 

In fact, Peter – probably speaking for the rest of them – wants to ensure he doesn’t miss out. If foot washing ensures my connection with Jesus, let’s double down and get more. How about hands and head, too? 

You and I don’t want to get cut off from Jesus, either, if the only price is some mealtime  awkwardness and wet feet.

 

But I’m quite sure Peter doesn’t know – the other disciples at the table don’t know – and maybe we ourselves don’t really understand – just what this “share” is that Jesus is offering us.

 

Jesus knows, of course.

John, telling the story later, wants us to know, too. So he tries to describe it this way:

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God…started washing his friends’ feet.

I think John is trying to tell us that in pouring water, wiping feet dry, getting his hands dirty and clean with us, Jesus is folding us in to that deep, certain knowledge of unity with God that Jesus himself is experiencing at this central, crucial point in his life and work.

 

Jesus is deeply rooted, absolutely centered in the completeness of his unity with God, profoundly filled with trust in God, God’s trust in him, and the certainty that nothing can separate him or us from God. And that’s what he’s doing to Peter’s feet. To all the followers and friends around that table.

 

Jesus takes all these feet in his hands – 

feet, meant to carry us where ever we go, 

feet which are our primary contact with ground and gravity and earth 

– takes our feet in his hands to ground us in that same complete trust, that same certainty of unity – that Jesus himself experiences with God all-powerful and eternal. With this odd act, breaking the norms of host and guest, master and servant, and manners at meals, Jesus roots us in the certainty that nothing can separate us – heart, soul, identity, body – from God, from Jesus himself.

 

I can feel a little shiver in the soles of my own feet as I say that.

Can you?

 

We are going to need that grounded, deep, certainty of our unbreakable unity with God, of being centered in God’s will and inseparable from God, in the days to come.

The days to come for Peter and Judas and John and James and Mary (and other Marys) and all the others around that table – when every one of their senses will demonstrate that that connection with God is breaking, that politics and death are absolutely separating Jesus from us, that their life-giving connection is over.

 

The days to come for you and me when the news suggests the entire world has lost any connection to God, and God has lost any connection to us. The days when the daily grind, the constant stream of unholy tasks and demands, or daily loneliness and losses, erode our sense of connection to one another, to ourselves, to God in any form.

 

Except, maybe, for a sense lurking in the soles of our feet, that Jesus has grounded us in an unbreakable love, a unity with God’s will, God’s transformative work, God’s life-giving wonder, that we share with Jesus, even in the face of death.

 

I want that.

I hope you do, too.

I want that for you.

Jesus wants that for you.

 

And more, too.

Do you understand? he says. (You don’t yet, quite, but maybe you will.) 

Do you get what I have done? he asks.

And that what I have done for you, you also should do for one another?

 

Jesus shares his certainty of unity with God through the skin of our feet, and we are to do the same.

To take other people’s feet in our hands – literally, sometimes, metaphorically more often – and ground that other person in the same certainty, the same identity, that unity and trust and confidence and wholeness, that Jesus is sharing with us.

 

We give ourselves a chance to practice that tonight, a bit.

We break a bunch of norms and take our shoes off in the middle of church and let someone else do for us what we can perfectly well do for ourselves (have probably already done for ourselves).
Let someone else wash our feet with Jesus’ hands and perhaps let Jesus use our hands to wash someone else’s feet.

 

We don’t do it just to be awkward.

We do it for the same reason we take a bite of bread and sip of wine from Jesus’ table, later. We do it for the same reason Jesus did it.

To share that unity, certainty, trust and assurance, that absolute wholeness of being fully engaged in the life-giving work of God. Share that with someone else.

 

When the time comes for you to bare the soles of your feet tonight, I’m going to ask you to also bare the soul of your self a bit – to deliberately open yourself to receiving Jesus insistence that you are unbreakably united with God.
When the time comes for you to take someone else’s feet in your hands, I’m going to ask you to reach into yourself for that assurance that Jesus has placed within you – however faint or strong it feels right now, reach into that – and offer it to the other person with your hands, and the water, and a towel.

 

When the time comes for you to offer other acts of loving service outside the church – to do for someone else a chore they could (perhaps should) do for themselves, do something that’s not really your job, whether it’s making a meal for your family or a stranger,
taking out the garbage (metaphorical or literal) at work or in an environmental cleanup,
or any other act of loving service – reach into that assurance that Jesus has placed within you, however deep or faint or strong, and wrap that unbreakable unity with God around the others you serve.

 

And when the time comes outside the church for you to accept those acts of love and care that you’d rather do for yourself, thank you, bare your soul a bit then, too. Intentionally open yourself to receiving Jesus’ hands on your ticklish, un-buffed, awkward feet, or your tender, awkward soul. Open yourself to Jesus’ insistence that you are unbreakably united with God, with Jesus himself, in life-giving love beyond all human measure.

 

It's a lot to ask.

But it’s not too much to give, or to receive. 

And Jesus insists we receive and share.

Will you put your soles, your soul, in Jesus hands?

 

A Heart That Big

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

I must have read this story several hundred times. Re-told it myself at least a hundred.

It’s a classic.

And it’s one of those stories Jesus tells that absolutely gets you in your feelings. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s a metaphor, many of us are going to find ourselves identifying with one of the characters as a person. And it’s absolutely meant to get us emotionally involved, not just to take a lesson from the story with our brains. 

 

You and I are supposed to get worried or uncomfortable or sympathetic or anxious when Jesus tells about a kid leaving home and squandering themselves and their resources. Supposed to feel the relief, the sadness, the shame or the hope as that kid remembers and realizes what’s at home; supposed to be upset or overjoyed when the wandering, foolish kid comes home. Supposed to react, with our hearts, when the other kid gets mad and spouts resentment about it all.

 

Maybe you’ve felt yourself, once or often, as the young adult determined to try your wings, making foolish decisions, getting in trouble, yearning for help.

Maybe you’ve been surprised by welcome and forgiveness, or you’ve known what it is to long for those things with all your heart. To feel hope for yourself when Jesus tells this story.

 

Maybe you’ve felt yourself, once or often, as the responsible one, the steady one, the one who gets the group project done when everyone else is blowing things off. Maybe you know exactly how it feels to watch others extravagantly welcomed and forgiven and made at home while you work and work and work.

Maybe you’ve felt all that stir up grief and longing in your relationship with God.

I’ve felt all that.

I’ve known this story inside and out, in my life, and in the book. 

And then it surprises me again.

 

This week, I sat down with this story, ready for all the welcome and forgiveness and resentment and anxiety and self-righteousness and hope lurking in it, ready for what’s familiar and expected,

and then I felt something new.

 

A yearning to be the parent in this story.

A yearning to discover in myself the heart bursting with love and joy that can give away, let go, hope at a distance, brim over with joy and forgiveness, give it all away again to the one who was lost and found, and still burst with love and pride and joy in the one who’s always been there.

 

I want to feel that way about my family, my friends.

I want to feel that way about strangers.

I want my heart to be that big.

 

And I think that’s what Jesus wants for us, too.

I think Jesus tells this story because he knows we’ve been one of the sons. We’ve been, we are, squanderers, mistake-makers, hurtful to others, selfish…sinners. And that we need to see the possibilities of repentance and forgiveness unfold in front of us when we remember love, remember that there is someone we can trust, even after we fail.

Jesus knows we’ve been, we are, the hard workers, narrowly focused, self-righteous, resentful, lonely…sinners. And that we need to be astonished, shocked into new perspective, by an exaggerated, over the top display of forgiveness, opportunity, love and joy – joy and love that want to draw us in, and share, when we don’t know how to feel that for ourselves.  

 

I believe Jesus knows we need to hear, to recognize, our own relationship to God, our own sin, our own invitation to be loved, in this story.

And that Jesus wants us to take up the invitation to bring our failures to God, discovering in this story that God runs to meet us, to embrace us before we confess, to pour abundance on us before we even begin to start anew.

 

And I suspect that Jesus also wants us to want more.

Wants us – eventually, if not the first time we hear this story – to want to be the ones pouring out abundance and love. Wants us to want to be overjoyed at welcoming the failures, loving the selfish, delighting in the resentful ones, until they each find the hope and trust that heals them. Wants you and me rejoicing in the generous work of putting the world back together, gleefully giving yourself away.

 

Jesus delights in all that himself, you know.

And when something is that good, that life-giving, you want the people you love to experience it, too.

 

So what failure would you love to be able to welcome home?

What foolish mistakes would you love to be “over”? Who do you miss, deeply, since they screwed something up that hurt you?

Maybe it’s something you yourself have failed at and need to forgive. 

 

What anxious, resentful relationships would you delight in reassuring? What would you love to be able to say to help someone who is trying to do it all themselves relax into love and confidence?

 

What parts of yourself – of your “wealth” of possessions or leadership or control – would you love to give away, so that someone else can find themselves?

 

What do you long to heal? What do you yearn to forgive?
What do you hunger to restore and renew?  

Who do you ache to build a home for, to welcome?

 

Me, I want to feel that generous love instead of resentment when I read the news or the internet about the way this pandemic gets handled.  I want to feel that generous love when someone tells me I’m wrong about masks or vaccines or social protections.

 

I want to delight in forgiving friends who’ve hurt me. To run and welcome home the person who took love from me for two years and never gave it back, instead of feeling the grief and the hurt all over again when they send me a tentative message.

 

I want to give you – you here and now – all the love and hope I feel when I read Jesus’ story this week, and keep giving it away and giving it away and keep discovering that it never actually runs out.

 

I want my heart to be that big.

I want that for you, too. I want your heart to feel that free and open, to rejoice that much in one another.

 

I’m pretty sure that’s what Jesus wants from us, for us, when he tells this story to the selfish, lonely, reckless, resentful, mistake-making, self-righteous “two sons” in each of us, and we recognize the love that’s waiting to welcome us home – home we left long ago, or home we’ve forgotten we’re in the middle of all along.

Wants us to come home, to know ourselves forgiven,

and then long to pour that out on everyone else,

to be so full of prodigal joy and hope and love that we can’t contain it, 

and we run to meet every child of God coming home to us.