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Year A
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As Lent
approaches and begins, an essential task of
the preacher is to exhort all — the
preacher included — to seize the day.
Are preachers themselves, year by year, discovering
and articulating the need for Lent and its
vitality in our communities? Someone has to
summon the church! February 6, 2005 is the
final Sunday before Ash Wednesday. That day,
or Ash Wednesday itself in some communities,
or the First Sunday of Lent can be the time
to attempt such an exhortation, a mystagogy
of Lent, a summons to Lent based on our experiences,
good and bad, with Lent in the past. What
follows is cast as a homily for the First
Sunday of Lent.
Gabe Huck
Where are our ashes? Where are the ashes you
and I put on last Wednesday? Where is that dust
of the earth that was rubbed into our heads? “Ashes,
ashes, all fall down!” children used to
sing, perhaps still do. A cute game, a strange
truth. Ashes, ashes, we are all falling down.
Falling down on our knees, falling flat on our
faces — our faces on the ground, on the
earth from which we were taken and to which
we will return. Ashes, ashes.
The church that was smeared with ashes just
a few days ago now gathers for the first of
six Sundays within the forty-day time of Lent,
days that will take us to Holy Thursday night
and the three days of our Passover in Christ.
These six Sundays in Lent are like and not like
all other Sundays of the year. As on all Sundays,
we assemble and we attend to God’s word
in scripture and preaching and we intercede
for the whole world; we gather at table to give
thanks and praise and then come hungry and thirsty
to share the meager banquet of the body and
blood of Christ.
But how are these six Sundays different from
all others? More than any other time of our
year, on Lent’s Sundays we may be so thankful
to be embraced within the assembly. We are needful
of knowing that Lent is not my own private task,
doesn’t depend on me alone, but is the
doing of this assembly, this congregation, and
beyond that the doing of all the baptized and
the about-to-be-baptized over all the world.
Here together each Sunday we sense that in song
and sight and prayer and peace.
However we may have kept or not kept other Lents,
this one is here right now and just beginning.
We have time to submit to it, time to take it
on with gusto, time to put aside certain things — each
of us knows or can find out which ones — and
help each other keep this Lent together. Perhaps
in our lifetimes it has never been so clear:
Here, right here, in every assembled church,
is where the body of Christ must be built up
and must learn to love the world as God has
loved the world. Here, right here and in small
groups and praying households, is where we can
open the scriptures to one another and at the
same time and the same breath open the world
to one another.
Where are our ashes, then? They were not intended
only for a brief moment last Wednesday. If we
have washed them off or rubbed them in, let
it be for appearances, but the truth is that
those ashes are here on our faces, on our hands
and feet, on the outside and on the inside.
The ashes are not simply one single thing. Their
Lenten work is to tell us about ourselves and
our church and our world. We don’t get
to Easter just by staying alive for forty days.
We get to Easter again and again by keeping
Lent again and again, marked with the ashes.
So today and for the next five Sundays we come
here clothed a bit differently in our hearts,
spirits, minds. Today the church reads from
Genesis about the tree and the banishment. Look
what happens, the scripture says. Look what
we have done and do now. Blessed with much,
we grab for a little more. Does any one of us
doubt it? It’s a story with ten thousand
thousand variations, an ancient story that goes
fiercely on today. We who keep Lent have to
know this: It is not tragedy that is being told;
it is the mystery of human freedom. The poet
John Milton began his “Paradise Lost” by
saying that he would sing:
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe. …
But he said it with such delight! And when at
last he tells of Eve and Adam expelled from
Paradise, he imagines the couple taking their
first steps:
They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them
soon;
The world was all before them. …
Milton knew us well! Yes, they cried a little,
he says, but then they wiped their tears, blew
their noses and looked about, no doubt full
of amazement and wonder: The world was all before
them! The poet knows what we are like, what
we can be like. The wonder and the ashes are
all part of us. These days of Lenten discipline
bring on the time of testing, training for the
race, struggling for the prize. The whole story
will get turned upside down. Adam and Eve, naked
in Paradise and sewing up leafy garments, will
bring us to Jesus, stripped of all garments
and naked on the cross. The hunger for more
of this or more of that, more of everything,
the deep hunger that brought Adam and Eve to
taste the tree’s forbidden fruit, brings
their descendant Jesus to go fasting into the
wilderness for forty days — and then refuse
to turn hunger on its head: Not by bread alone
are we to live, but on every word that comes
from the mouth of God.
We don’t go sad into Lent, even in these
sad times. We go with some speck of hope, some
sense that together we can make a modest try,
or maybe this year a bold try, at getting ourselves
into the fray. We don’t go gloomy; we
go with some glimmer that, as is whispered today,
another world is possible. We don’t have
to grind this world into global warming. We
don’t have to keep food on our tables
at the expense of hungry people. We don’t
have to live constrained and afraid, behind
walls. We don’t have to find joy in fads
and all sorts of frenzied entertainments. We
don’t have to do what we’re told
by the powers that be. Beginnings can be made.
What else is Lent for in our lives and in our
church’s life together? Like mother Eve
and father Adam, we can rejoice to be together
facing whatever beauty and whatever terror.
Like Jesus, we can be led by the Spirit and,
being simple as doves and wise as that serpent,
we can enter this Lent. Simple as doves, so
we don’t agonize endlessly over the odds
of success. Wise as serpents, so we go out eyes
wide open when we confront all the harm and
suffering around us, all the harm and suffering
we inflict by what we do and what we do not
do as a church or a neighborhood or a nation.
How do we do this Lenten turning round, we the
ashes-wearing children of Eve and Adam, the
sisters and brothers of Jesus? Always we do
it together, members of Christ whether within
the household or the parish or the larger church.
And always we start by reinventing those disciplines
that for centuries have been the marks of Lent:
fasting, prayer, and almsgiving.
What is Lent’s fasting? Let’s use
our common sense and our imaginations. What
if we ate only food that was good for us? What
if we ate in rhythms that allowed us, most of
us so far from hunger, to know bodily hunger?
What if we ate simply and adequately from the
basic foods and seasonal foods only? (After
all, is it necessary for apples to travel thousands
of miles so you can have fresh apples any time
of year?) If we are to know the joy of giving
thanks over the simplest food, we need to renew
our senses of taste and beauty and our sense,
too, of justice. Baptized people mean to come
here to the table every Sunday hungry: hungry
to be with one another, hungry to hear the word
of God, hungry for the great thanksgiving and
hungry for the holy Communion. But what do we
know of hunger?
In our place and time, it would be absurd to
think of fasting as only about food. We are
all wooed hour by hour to indulge, to take our
eyes off the needs and beauty of the world and
instead to stuff ourselves like good consumers.
We need Lent’s fasting discipline in many
areas.
So with the disciplines of prayer and almsgiving.
What is a simple rhythm of prayer we could make
our own —
as basic as morning and night prayers — that
would give measure and proportion to our lives,
that would make us daily praise God for all
the good and intercede with God for all the
hurt? And so with the giving of alms: What direction
should we be starting on with the way we spend
our possessions, our money, our time, our energy,
our learning, our experience? How can we use
these to bring health or joy or hope or solidarity
to some who are needful of it? How can Lent
be a sort of experiment in daring acts of justice?
All our stuff really isn’t ours anyway,
and we can thank God for that. Can we find smart
ways to keep it circulating?
Are we only after the reality that could be
ours if tomorrow we became truly poor and hungry
people? Not at all! We are after what the ashes
proclaim: Repent and believe the good news.
We are after the freedom of the children of
God. That is finally what prayer and fasting
and almsgiving work in our hearts and bodies,
such a freedom as Jesus knew and preached. Now
there are great powers on this earth set against
such freedom. These powers dealt with Jesus
and they’ll deal with us, though more
subtly. We know these powers firsthand because
we have our stake there also. Again, we go simple
as doves but wise as serpents. The good habits
we acquire this Lent are not necessary only
for the forty days. We want to reach the Easter/Passover
days with hearts made new. Together.
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource
of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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Year B
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This series
of homilies strives to “unfold the mysteries” where
liturgy and life meet. One understanding is
this: Though the homily may well begin in
the day’s scriptures, it wants to reach
beyond. It wants to engage more of the whole
ritual of the church and, even regarding scripture,
it wants to work from an understanding that
the scriptures of a liturgical season are
a whole. This Third Sunday of Lent has texts
that need to be heard in light of what has
gone before and as preparation for what will
come the next weeks. And the scriptures of
this Year B of the cycle need to be heard
as part of a larger Lenten scripture that
embraces all the years. The preacher needs
to be mindful of this whether it is ever directly
mentioned or not. Note that the Lectionary
offers the option of a much shorter first
reading on this Sunday, no doubt the work
of the same hand that allowed most of the
Easter Vigil’s readings never to be
heard. There are perhaps two or three places
in the entire Lectionary when the “shorter” reading
makes sense. This is not one of them (and
the homily below needs the full reading from
Exodus).
Gabe Huck
This is our third time to gather on Sunday since
Lent began on March 1, and it is something of
a turning point. The texts of scripture assigned
to be read at the Sunday liturgy are arranged
in a three-year cycle. What we heard this morning
we heard three years ago and we will hear again
three years from now. But Lent’s first
two Sundays can make us forget this because
every year on those first two Sundays we read
the same two Gospel stories. On the First Sunday
in Lent we always tell of how Jesus fasted and
struggled against the power of evil in the wilderness.
Two weeks ago today we heard about this from
the Gospel of Mark who tells it in just four
or five intense sentences. A year ago we heard
it at greater length from the Gospel of Matthew
and next year from the Gospel of Luke. Every
year this fasting-in-the-wilderness story summons
us to keep Lent, to engage in this contest,
to make these forty days an intense training
to be what we were baptized to be. Then a week
ago, on the Second Sunday of Lent, the Gospel
was that story of Jesus with Moses and Elijah
on a mountain, talking about the Passover of
Jesus that was to happen in Jerusalem. We heard
Mark’s telling of the transfiguration
this year, but a year ago it was Matthew and
next year Luke: same story as it had come to
be told in different communities.
But on this Third Sunday in Lent, in each of
the three years we hear a different Gospel.
Now 2006 is a year when Mark’s Gospel
is read year-round on almost every Sunday, but
beginning today we have three Sundays of not
reading Mark. Instead, the Gospel comes from
John. So that is one way to see this Sunday
taking us round a corner, deeper into Lent.
It is also the first of those Sundays when those
to be baptized and confirmed at the Easter Vigil
come before the community for the scrutiny.
That word “scrutiny” should be taken
to heart by all of us for Lent intends scrutiny
for all of us. For the catechumens it means
what it says: They are to undergo a certain
scrutiny. What do those who are helping you
toward baptism have to say about your readiness?
Baptism is nothing to trifle with. We take it
seriously here. Today and on the next two Sundays
the catechumens need testimony of their efforts,
and we pray over them that with God’s
grace they will recognize and choose what is
good and reject what is evil. We who are already
baptized witness this. Though baptized, we are
still in that struggle, still striving to accomplish
what was promised in those waters.
This year, with the lateness of Lent, this Third
Sunday comes a day before the equinox. When
spring begins tomorrow, in the northern hemisphere
light gains the upper hand. Only then does the
Christian calendar start to wait for the next
full moon and only after that first full moon
of spring can our Lent time come to an end because
on the very next Sunday we can celebrate the
Easter Passover of the Lord around the font
and the table. What might it mean that the center
of our year depends not on the return of some
date on a human calendar, but on the earth circling
around the sun, and on the moon circling around
the earth, leaning on its axis so that we have
seasons?
So Lent today grows a bit and we see how it
is woven of many materials, many colors. The
first readings of these Sundays are as vital
as the Gospels, but the first readings in Lent
are not chosen for some relation to the Gospel
as is the case through much of the year. Rather,
on these first three Sundays of Lent the first
readings seem to summon the whole long procession
in which we stand. We read two weeks ago of
Noah, the flood, the rainbow to seal God’s
covenant. And last Sunday we read of Abraham
and Isaac in one of the hardest stories in scripture.
In other years on these Sundays we read of Adam
and Eve or of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses before
the burning bush or later bringing water from
a rock in the wilderness. So far away, so long
ago all these stories and characters, but here
we are, reading them again to discover not some
moral or some history, but rather to discover
what is the meaning of this assembly, of ourselves,
of this church that is so woebegone yet no stranger
to suffering and death and promise. As Paul
wrote to that church at Corinth: The foolishness
of God — we’ve all experienced it — is
wiser than all our human wisdom. And the weakness
of God — can you doubt it when you have
known Christ crucified and when you have witnessed
the betrayals even within this church — the
very weakness of God is stronger than all our
human strength.
Amid all this, a few moments ago we read from
the book of Exodus what we know as the Ten Commandments.
This is one more story of covenant between heaven
and earth, between God and humankind — like
the covenant with Eve and Adam, with Abraham
and Sarah. But in the story of Moses, the terms
of the covenant between God and the people are
spelled out. Perhaps we have in the past thought
of these commandments as “laws” or
“rules.” They are not. They are
terms of an agreement, a covenant. As such,
they were seen by Israel as a gift, a wonder,
something to delight in.
These ten terms of the covenant bring together
on the same tablets what seem to us very different
kinds of things. There are those things that
are done or not done day by day between human
beings in their various communities: killing
or not killing, stealing or not stealing, lying
or not lying, adultery or no adultery. And there
are those things that seem to be about one’s
religious life: bowing down only to the one
God, honoring God’s name, keeping holy
the Sabbath day. It used to be that illustrations
of Moses and the tablets of the Law put these
about God on one side, and those about killing
and lying on the other side. But the scripture
makes no such distinction. It seems all of one
piece. How we behave, how we place ourselves
and conduct ourselves in every dimension of
life on earth, all that is woven in a single
fabric with the ways we manifest our bond to
the God who loves us. Not killing rather than
killing, seeking and holding to truth rather
than carelessness or harshness toward truth:
in so many day-by-day ways we make our lives’ basic
choices not in moments of crisis but in what
we learn to do by heart: morning by morning,
Sunday by Sunday, Lent by Lent. Living in these
rhythms allows us to rehearse over and over
exactly who we are, whose we are. Scripture
does not imply that three commandments are about
religious responsibilities and seven are about
social responsibilities. They are all religious.
They are all social. They come together, these
ten, as a powerful and compact way of proclaiming
a way of life. What are the habits of this community’s
heart? How are we known to each other and to
the world? We are to be the people who refuse
all the false gods — and who name them
publicly in the choices we make and the paths
we take.
Hearing today the full scripture text of the
commandments we may be struck by how long those
first three are and how short the last seven.
We may only have heard these first three reduced
to: 1. I am the Lord your God, you shall not
have other gods before me. 2. You shall not
take the name of the Lord in vain. 3. Remember
to keep holy the Sabbath day. But that is not
the way scripture writes it, and the full text
opens up the meaning. What is all this about
the Sabbath? “Six days you may labor and
do all your work, but the seventh day is the
Sabbath of the Lord, your God.” Days are
to be arranged in sevens and one day in seven
is to be unlike the others. A rhythm is created
between the six days and the seventh and the
stuff of the difference between the one and
the six is work and don’t work. Work is
what human beings do if they can. Work puts
food in mouths and roofs over heads and, for
some, brings satisfaction and for others ill
health and humiliation. In the commandment it
is the prohibition of work that sets the one
day off against the six. Leave things alone!
Leave creation alone! The reason for the rhythm
of work and rest is given: “For in six
days the Lord made the heavens and the earth,
but on the seventh day God rested.”
Why should this arbitrary way to mark time matter?
We need that answer. We need to know that what
matters is that we are part of God’s rhythm.
We live and move and have our being in that
rhythm. Work and no work make such a rhythm.
There are others certainly. The point is not
about work but about our human need to find
our place in some great dance.
The truth of this need is the same truth that
brings us to Lent and to Easter each year. Little
by little, week by week, Sunday by Sunday, Lent
by Lent we learn the steps of this dance. We
learn the rhythms not only of work and rest
but of rejoicing and lamentation, of repentance
and forgiveness, of giving and receiving. This
is not done by some magic but by the disciplined
effort to keep these days and seasons, to keep
them first as a church, a parish, this very
assembly here today, and then as the persons
and households who together are the body of
Christ in this world. It is not catechisms and
fund raisers that make the church, it is the
way we together enter into these rhythms and
disciplines and find ways for body and soul,
muscles and spirits.
Whatever we have or have not made of this Lent,
we can begin today to enter into its rhythm
of fasting from whatever is distracting us from
our covenant. We can figure a few things out
about how we make poor use of time and God’s
other gifts. We can make bold efforts to find
the freedom of the Gospel instead of the compulsions
of the consumers. We can, like Jesus, take strong
action against the money-changers that have
set up shop in the temple of our own lives.
And we can dare to look those commandments up
and down in all their raw power, recognizing
— for example — that “You
shall not kill” had no subsections about
“except convicted murderers,” or “except
when the government says to.”
Yes, it seems foolish but it is the foolishness
of God.
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource
of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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Year C
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What follows
is cast as a homily for the Fourth Sunday
of Lent, Year C, March 21, 2004. As a homily
in a mystagogical mode, it draws on the
scriptures of this Sunday as well as other
words and gestures of the assembly’s
liturgy to unfold something of the gospel
sense for reconciliation.
Gabe Huck>
Halfway through the forty
days of Lent and there is still time to start
if we haven’t yet been ready. Halfway
through, still time to find the ways that
we need to fast, the ways we best can pray,
the alms we most need to give. Halfway through
and the invitation, the call, the summons
is right there for all of us: Come and wrestle
with what the Gospel says to us, come and
know that our whole selves are caught up in
that baptism we received, drowned in those
waters but alive in Christ Jesus. Halfway
through the forty days of Lent and it is the
Lord’s Day today and so we are assembled
here and we have read the scriptures and we
have to talk about Lent’s hardest work.
What else can we talk about when we are confronted
with that parable of a parent’s outrageous
love for a selfish loser of a child who’s
coming home only out of desperation? Lent’s
hardest work, what is it? Paul gives it away
in the letter to the Corinthians: God in Christ
has done the reconciling and has made us reconcilers.
God was in Christ doing the reconciling of
the world. God was in Christ not counting
our sins against us but instead making us
be what Christ is, the gospel of reconciliation.
Many
who grew up Catholic have expressed dismay
at the understanding they remember from childhood
of what sin is, of what repentance means,
of what it is to be forgiven, of the reality
of reconciliation in human life. They express
dismay because — unlike many other things
we first began to grasp as children — we
probably still think about sin and repentance
and forgiveness the way we did as children.
These very real parts of human life — sin,
repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation —
came across as something totally private. “Sin” is
something I commit. It’s my business.
If I have done something sinful, well, then
I have to deal with it, perhaps confessing
my sin to God before the church’s
minister, and asking forgiveness. It is
thus not only personal but very, very private.
We may then go through life never thinking
how such things as sin and repentance, forgiveness
and reconciliation, have some relation to
how the society distributes wealth or education
or health care. Never thinking how sin and
repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation
have some relation to how a family or a
city or a corporation or a nation raises
and spends money. Never thinking how sin
and repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation
have some relation to why there are so few
in the world who are adequately cared for,
so many who are not. But listen to Paul
in the middle of this Lent: God was reconciling
the world and of that reconciliation we
have become the ministers, as strange in
the society’s eyes as that forgiving
parent, as hungry for peaceful ways on this
earth as that wayward child was hungry.
So we have to do some growing
up this Lent. We have to put aside those notions
of sin as private, notions of confession as
private, notions of forgiveness and reconciliation
as private. Lent’s fasting should so
clear our sight that we can see what sin is
and does day by day in this whole world. Our
prayer should find us practicing how to intercede
for all the sinners and the sinned against.
Our almsgiving should so turn our priorities
upside down that we can imagine what we are
meant to be — not some of us but this
whole baptized assembly — makers of
reconciliation, makers of peace, examples
of those who lay down the weapons of all kinds
to find a different way. The thing that makes
Lent vital to this church is that here in
Lent we do the training. We are again apprentice
Christians learning the trade of reconciliation.
Don’t think of Lent as forty days to
do something a little hard, then it’s
over. Think about Lent as the forty days each
year when we move on. In forty days we explore
the way we mean to be all the days after.
Some vital part of that we practice together
here every Sunday. At the threshold of the
liturgy, before the book is opened and we
begin to read, we repeat: “Lord, have
mercy. Christ, have mercy.” This is
the ancient Kyrie eleison in Greek,
a cry for mercy and a praise of God’s
mercy. Muslims begin their days and deeds
saying: “In the name of God, the All-merciful.” We
begin in a similar way, placing ourselves
within the Lord’s mercy, a mercy Jesus
was trying to understand and explain when
he told that story of the wayward child and
the ecstatic parent. That’s mercy. Preparing
for this liturgy, preparing for every day
of life, we clamor for that contagious mercy,
as contagious as sin is contagious. As the
poet Hoskins wrote,
“I say that we are wound / With mercy
round and round / As if with air.” How
deep is that in our Catholic hearts? How would
those around us know that we believe we are “wound
with mercy round and round”? What does
a church so wound in mercy look like? A household?
A person? Isn’t mercy some soft, sentimental
sort of thing, hardly what’s needed
to deal with real problems? Real problems
are dealt with through prisons and wars and
buyouts and layoffs. But is that the truth?
Or is that the cycle of violence and unforgiveness?
Sometimes we join this cry for mercy to the
confession of sin, another way of preparing
to do this liturgy. We have sinned in thoughts
and in words, we say, in what we have done — and
in what we have failed to do. Some Sundays
we rush through this, in common, and it is
lost unless in preparation we have looked
hard at what we have done and most especially
at what we have failed to do. The tradition
would have us rehearse this prayer every night
at bedside, the examination of our conscience
it has been called. Before we sleep, we recall
and place before the merciful Lord all that
went wrong today. This is the habit of living
in God’s mercy, the habit of calling
ourselves to account for what we have made
of the daily gifts of God. What we have done.
What we have failed to do. It isn’t
a tally: five wrong today down from eight
yesterday. It isn’t a tally. It is a
life on the way, a life slowly learning that
what I do and what I fail to do matters. It
matters before God and it matters before those
the Gospel says matter: the hungry, the prisoners,
the sick, those who are being left out of
all we think of as our rights. The mercy of
God, it turns out, is hard to bear, but we
come here to bear it together.
The liturgy of the Maronite church expands
on the Kyrie and Confession with words
like these: “Come, you who are angry,
and make peace with your enemies. Bow your
head before them and embrace them. Engrave
in yourself the sign of the Son of God as
he humbled himself before others. So humble
yourself!” Sounds fine, we think, but
let someone else go first. It won’t
work. Bow my head? Embrace my enemy? But such
is the way we rehearse life here together.
The story Jesus tells in this Gospel today
is told in response to some remarks made about
the way Jesus was conducting himself: “This
man,”
people were whispering, “welcomes sinners
and eats with them.” Yes, Jesus says,
I am practicing ways to act as God acts.
If Lent is for facing the hard stuff, then
Lent is for facing how hard it is to act as
God acts. How hard to take the prayer of confession
and the praise of God’s mercy and let
them shape what I will do tomorrow and how
I will do it. Martin Luther King Jr., like
anyone who has been treated with scorn, with
sneers, with brutal physical and psychological
weapons, had more reason than most of us to
put forgiveness off, but he read his Gospel
and he knew he couldn’t put it off.
Once he referred to the passage where Jesus
says to forgive seven times seventy times.
King said: “A man cannot forgive up
to four hundred and ninety times without forgiveness
becoming a part of the habit structure of
his being. Forgiveness is not an occasional
act; it is a permanent attitude.” And
that attitude is the gospel truth, and that
is the truth of what we are rehearsing here
every Sunday. To look to Martin Luther King
or to others like him is to know that to forgive
is not to shrug and say things will never
change. To forgive is to change things.
But these Sunday deeds are also about seeking
forgiveness, something a good deal harder
than forgiving. “Forgive us our trespasses,” we
say before we come to the holy table and make
the holy communion. Easily we say it to God,
though we should tremble at those words and
the words that follow. But how hard it is
to say to one another.
In some Christian churches at the beginning
of Lent, people come forward one by one. And
each one first kneels then is prostrate on
the floor and each says to the priest, “Forgive
me, a sinner.” But the priest also makes
this prostration before each one of the assembly
and says,
“Forgive me, a sinner.” We may
not have this beautiful gesture, but in the
Lord’s Prayer and the sign of peace,
we have something like it. And what are we
rehearsing here except a heart courageous
enough to ask forgiveness?
If we are baptized for the work of reconciling
the world to God, then we are baptized into
thinking about how the forgiveness we ask
of one another here and in our households
and places of work must be extended. More
than anywhere else today, that must be thought
about by us as citizens of the
United States
. That is hard. We have as a nation talked
as if we never have anything to apologize
for. It seems might makes us right. We sit
atop more than half the world’s wealth
with only one in twenty of the world’s
people. We spend more on preparations for
war than all the rest of the world together.
We loose sanctions and military strikes without
any concern for the lives destroyed. We refuse
our own children the education and health
care we could easily afford. In thousands
of ways we refuse to care for the earth and
so become agents of sickness and death into
the far future.
We must ponder how to ask forgiveness. But
to ask forgiveness of the poor, the earth,
our children, to bow our heads or bend our
knees and cry for our sins — we know
that such a thing would be so terrifying.
We would feel naked before the world. Besides,
aren’t we getting religion and politics
mixed up here? Yes, we are. So finally let
us listen to Archbishop Romero, twenty-four
years after his murder. He said this about
the work of the church: “[The church]
says to the rich: Do not sin by misusing your
money. It says to the powerful: Do not misuse
your political influence. Do not misuse your
weaponry. Do not misuse your power. It says
to sinful torturers: Do not torture. You are
sinning. You are doing wrong. You are establishing
the reign of hell on earth.”
We are the rich, the powerful. We here are
also the church. How then do we speak as church
to ourselves as nation? What does this eucharist
prepare us to do? What will this Lent prepare
us to be?
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for Celebration,
the worship and preaching resource of the
National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web
site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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Year C
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Over the
past few years these homilies for a Sunday
in Lent, usually the March issue of Celebration
and coming from one starting point or another,
have tried to explore how Lent itself is a
way that the church is formed. To adapt (from
the Jewish tradition) the most compact way
to put it: It is not so much that Christians
keep Lent, but Lent keeps Christians. The
homilies in this column last month (for the
Sunday before Lent and for Ash Wednesday)
might also be helpful. The homily that follows
is for the Fifth Sunday of Lent in 2007 but
some of it could be used on any of the Lenten
Sundays in March this year. The song verses
used are from a collection of ritual songs: By
Heart: Seasonal Songs for Gathering, Interceding,
and Communion (Tony
Alonso and Gabe Huck, GIA Publications: Chicago,
2005 at www.giamusic.com or
call 800-442-1358).
Gabe Huck
When we hear the first few words of today’s
Gospel we likely have no idea where it’s
going: Early one morning Jesus goes to the temple
area, people come to him and he sits down to
teach them. But when we hear the first words
of the next line, we know at once what story
this will be. Some men arrive and with them
a woman “caught in the very act of committing
adultery.” They haul her into the midst
of the people gathered around Jesus. It is a
strange and memorable story. Likely we all know
how it will end even as we listen to that beginning
line. But the drama still holds us. This story,
like none other in the Gospel, describes the
postures of Jesus: Jesus sitting, bending down,
straightening up again. It makes for drama as
it takes us to the conclusion we know but still
wait to hear again: Neither do I condemn you.
(How these words are a promise to us all!) In
the end, everyone has gone away, including those
who came to hear Jesus teach, everyone except
the woman and Jesus. He tells her to go also.
Jesus is left alone, perhaps still bending down
to write with his finger on the ground.
So with just twelve of Lent’s forty days
remaining, what are we to make of this? It might
be a call for the church, for us, to look together
at what sort of balance we are striking between
being on the one hand a sort of police state,
and on the other a very vague sort of club where
each of us does pretty much that he or she pleases,
believes pretty much what he or she is comfortable
with. Every human institution, and the church
is certainly that at any level from our assembly
this morning to the Vatican, every human institution
faces temptations. One such temptation is this:
When it seems that things are falling apart,
those who hold titles and offices are all too
liable to become afraid. They are likely to
dust off old rules and make new rules. They
are likely to try to nail down what’s
right and what’s wrong. They are likely
to think that safeguarding the church means
just leave it all to them: Father knows best.
At such times, the leadership may confuse the
church with themselves.
What then do we make of this tiny story of the
hubbub caused when some perhaps well-meaning
men brought before Jesus and his listeners a
woman who, in their minds, had broken God’s
law? We should not miss something rather amazing
in the story. It is this: These men listen to
what Jesus tells them: “Let the one among
you who is without sin be the first to throw
a stone at her.” They listen, and they
must glimpse in Jesus’ words some bit
of a vision that there is another way to do
things, another way to be faithful members of
the community. They have the honesty and the
courage to face the truth and give up the righteousness
that sent them out looking for a sinner. Jesus
challenged the ground on which they were standing,
the way they were telling people it had to be,
the sort of things they thought it would take
to maintain the faithful community.
What we have in this story is a rare instance
of leadership listening to another vision of
the community. And not just listening, but open
to a truth not recognized before, a truth that
shakes the foundations on which this leadership
has been standing. So they went away, one by
one. They didn’t ask more questions, they
didn’t argue. This is amazing given what
we all experience of human nature and human
institutions. Of course we have no idea what
came next for them. Maybe some of them fell
back to games of power, deciding who’s
a sinner, who’s messing up the precious
institution, what burdens to put on others.
But for this moment they give us a breath-taking
example of how a clear and honest word can turn
us around.
Whether we have been hard at our Lenten disciplines,
our Lenten work, since Ash Wednesday, or whether
we haven’t really given Lent a half-serious
thought, let’s turn this morning to those
dozen days that remain, and think about them
in light of this story.
Lent is about one thing: the deed we are going
to do when Lent is over. When Lent has ended
on Holy Thursday afternoon, we enter into three
days — Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter
Sunday — that are the very heart of our
year and of our lives. Through Good Friday and
Holy Saturday we help each other to prepare
well for what this church, ourselves ready or
not, will do in the night between Holy Saturday
and Easter Sunday. Together and alone we all
do the praying and the fasting to make these
days different from any other of the year. And
then we come to spend that Saturday night here
together keeping vigil, listening to scripture,
singing psalms, calling on all the saints, returning
the lovely alleluia to our lips, until we are
as ready as we can be to approach the font with
those who will die in the waters of baptism
to live new in Christ.
All of Lent exists to get us to that font. For
forty days the church struggles with the gospel
it believes, struggles to become what we are:
We are those who renounced evil, accepted the
way of the gospel, and then in those baptism
waters were embraced by God and became what
ever since we have struggled to be, the body
of Christ, the church. In a way, once we are
in that baptism water, we stay there. It isn’t
like some sort of entrance examination: once
we pass, we never have to think about such things
again. Instead, ready or not we are plunged
into waters that forever define who we are,
still swirl around us. Each year we gather our
strength and for forty days, or maybe just twelve
if we start today, we do some things that renew
us as the church that is ever being created
at the font.
Through the years of many Lents little by little
we put on Christ, we learn the way of the baptized,
we fast and pray and simplify our lives so that
we may see more clearly what we are doing here
in this world, we who are the church, we who
are the world. A Lenten song puts it this way:
Marked by ashes we have come,
we, the world so troublesome,
we, the members: Christ, our sum.
Now we pray by day and night,
Keep the fast to clear our sight,
Share our goods to set things right.
What is this “fast to clear our sight”?
Certainly it can’t be doing without something
that is superfluous anyway, something we’ll
just start again on Easter. It may not even
be about food or drink or cigarettes and such.
What fast do we need that will “clear
our sight”? What things, what deeds, what
habits? We have to think about our time, for
example, and the stuff around us, about our
bodies, about each other. How will a baptized
person see these in relation to all the earth,
all the world? Can we examine how we use up
time, use up the earth, use up our bodies and
those of others, use up so much stuff that there’s
little or none left for most folks on this planet?
Now we’re talking about a fast that clears
our sight: to free ourselves with some hard
effort these Lenten days and so have the time
and space to see clearly. To see this world
with eyes of baptism, with gospel eyes. How
will it look? What will we find urgent? What
must we pay attention to? Where must we have
an impact?
And what of “share our goods to set things
right”? When we do what we must to gain
clear sight of this world around us, then baptized
people like us are going to find a thousand
thousand ways to make some justice happen in
a world more and more unjust, in a world where
more and more we privileged live behind expensive
walls. And to make some justice happen in a
world where the greed of one generation threatens
the very existence of future generations.
We are not just scattered souls each working
alone on Lent. We’re the church. Listen
to another of these little verses:
Strong and weak, be here at home.
Bold or shy, here laugh, here groan.
Gospel weighs too much alone.
So it does. Gospel weighs too much alone. Who
could bear it alone? We must do this together.
Around this table we make that pledge every
time we share a common bread and drink from
a common cup, eating and drinking what in truth
we are, the body of Christ.
And so we return to that story about how Jesus
challenged those men on that morning when they
presumed to speak with authority. The Lent we
strive to keep, forty days or twelve, wants
this church of ours to be as faithful and as
free as Jesus was when he answered the question
about putting the woman to death.
Right now this cumbersome structure, the bishops
and the various bureaucracies, have not had
such a good decade or two. Lots of wrong brought
into the light. Lots of folks going elsewhere.
The respect of outsiders gone. Lots of blaming.
In such a time those who have authority grow
afraid, like the men in the story. Rules. Control.
As if the discipline of the gospel were not
enough. As if we the church are to be defined
and bound by anything other than the immense
discipline of this table, this gospel. And we
all can get pulled in by the fear. It becomes
more important to keep some people from the
table than to ask: Why am I carrying this stone
in my hand? Am I building a community or a wall?
Lent is a deadly serious matter for us, for
us the church. One last verse:
Hear, O God, a servant’s wail:
You, Almighty, now so frail,
Shall the power of death prevail?
This is the mystery in which we Christians begin
and end: God almighty, frail and crushed, crushed
like the grapes of our wine, like the grains
of our bread. “You, Almighty, now so frail.” And
the question that the church works all Lent
to answer: “Shall the power of death prevail?”
Shall it prevail? In Iraq? In Haiti? In the
church? Thanks be to God! Let us keep Lent and
so be ready with an answer.
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource
of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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Year A
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In the April
2004 Celebration,
I offered a homily for
Passion (Palm Sunday) that reflected on
how the church concludes Lent and enters the
Triduum. The focus there was on the rituals
of Holy Thursday and Good Friday and how we
keep these days. What follows here is a homily
for Passion Sunday, April 20, 2005. It begins
by saying some of the same things that were
said a year ago, but then moves on to pick
up where that homily left off. The focus here
is Holy Saturday, the Vigil, and Easter Sunday.
Is there time for a homily on Palm Sunday
when the full rite of the blessing of palms
and the procession is celebrated? As I noted
last year, if all is done well and the assembly
is doing its liturgy, then people aren’t
looking at their watches. They know this day
is different. The need to build participation
in the central deeds of our year means that
the “regular schedule” may have
to bend. Given that this is part exhortation
to take part in the Triduum, the homilist’s
own passion for these days is obviously important.
Gabe Huck
For a last time in this Lent of 2005 we gather
in our Sunday assembly. During Lent’s
forty days we have pondered here some amazing
scriptures starting with the ever-puzzling story
of Eve and Adam and that lovely tree. We heard
of Abraham and Sarah when they first set from
their Mesopotamian home, we heard of the times
when those who had escaped slavery in Egypt
thought it might be better to go back rather
than die in the wilderness, we heard of Samuel
finding handsome young David and pouring the
fragrant oil over him, and we heard of Ezekiel
in that awful place filled with dry bones. We
heard of Jesus in a series of encounters beginning
with the wilderness and the tempter, then how
he was once speaking with Moses and Elijah on
a mountain. Next we heard about his conversation
with a woman by a well in Samaria, and then
of the time he used spit and soil to make mud
that he rubbed on the eyes of a blind man, and
last Sunday we heard of the siblings of Bethany:
Mary, Martha and Lazarus. No lack of strong
characters here! It all led to what we have
just proclaimed, the passion and death on the
cross.
Lent has immersed us in such stories, but Lent
will end four days from now, this Holy Thursday
evening. We, the baptized, together with the
catechumens set aside for penance and preparation
and purification these Forty Days. Thursday
evening this Lent will slip away quietly. Ready
or not, we will enter the Three Days, the Triduum
of the Passover, the Easter Triduum. Ready or
not, that will happen. Some of us may only today,
Palm Sunday, be ready to get serious about Lent.
That’s good! It’s good for all of
us. Even those who have earnestly tried all
40 days to keep Lent with prayer and almsgiving
and fasting know this: None of us ever really
does it right. The only way we can walk into
the Three Days is to walk in together, humbled
by what has become of us in our efforts to pray
and read scripture, our efforts to fast from
all the stuff in our lives that does no real
good for us or the world, our efforts by alms
to bring some tiny bit of justice to the ailing
world.
With scarcely one hundred hours of Lent before
us this morning, we have strong words from Matthew’s
telling of the passion to ponder. On that day
of palms, the evangelist tells us, the whole
city was asking, “Who is this?” Still
the question today. Peter not only had no answer,
he said what may often be our own fearful response, “I
do not know the man.” Peter said this
just hours after Jesus had told him and other
drowsy disciples, “Watch and pray.” It
was a normal day for the occupying army in Jerusalem;
we’re told they had two revolutionaries
to crucify, and they made Jesus the third for
that afternoon. Matthew says that even these
two anti-Roman insurgents , themselves near
death, reviled Jesus. Matthew knows nothing
about John or Mary being at the foot of the
cross. The only friends of Jesus Matthew has
heard about were standing far off and all of
them were women, “many women” Matthew
tells us. Then, late, that one man named Joseph
shows up to take the dead body, wrap it in linen,
and place it quickly in a tomb.
This assembly, all of us, this church, lives
its life baptized into the death of Jesus. We
have put on Christ, in Christ we have been baptized.
This Lent has been and still is the Forty Days
when we strive to conform our whole self and
our communal self to God’s saving deed
in Christ. We strive to become a strange contradiction,
those whose glory is the cross. Thursday night
when we have finished Lent, we will begin three
days when we try to let that glory fill us.
Thursday night here we will do the once-a-year
deed of washing one another’s feet, that
unsettling gesture that overturns all our shabby
hierarchies. Doing that, we come into the Three
Days and we begin 48 hours that should be totally
unlike any other time all year. On Friday and
Saturday we don’t work, we don’t
watch TV or listen to music or read our usual
reading, we eat almost nothing, we delve into
the scripture and we take walks and join in
times of ritual and prayer. We strive for ways
that life in our homes is caught up in the mystery
of the cross. It has everything to do with what
we make of this world, but for these days we
keep trying to experience just how Christians
love and embrace the world. We are at the core
of the whole cycle of our year.
By Saturday night the church is three things:
tired, hungry, and exhilarated. But instead
of going to eat supper or going to bed, we come
together here. This is called the Easter Vigil,
and it is the night that all of Lent and the
first 48 hours of Triduum have made us ready
for. Sadly, much of the church never feels invited.
We only do this Vigil once in the year, and
our room here should be filled to capacity and
beyond. We are all needed: not invited, needed!
The work Saturday night is long and there’s
no rushing it. We don’t begin until dark.
The work we do is entirely for the nighttime.
It is what many women in many cities have said
these last decades: Take back the night. That
is what our Christian communities do all over
the world next Saturday night: We take back
the night. Or rather, Saturday night we come
and we witness how God has taken back the night,
the blessed night. In the darkness we huddle
outside around a fire and do other once-a-year
things: bless that fire, throw incense on it,
celebrate a huge Easter candle and finally light
that candle and follow it into this room, proclaiming
that Christ is our light. When everyone is here
the great Exsultet is sung. Angels, earth, church,
everyone: Rejoice! This is the night when slaves
are delivered to freedom, the night God breaks
the chains of death, the night the mighty are
brought low and the poor lifted up, the night
when evil is driven out and peace takes hold
at last.
Then we do in abundance what we do briefly here
each Sunday: we open our book and we read page
after page. Yes, it takes a while. It is a long
story that has brought us to this place and
we need to hear it and we need to tell it to
our children. The story tells that God is creator
of all the world’s beauty and diversity.
It tells that God is a maker of promises to
ancestors like Abraham and Sarah. It tells that
God guides the captive people to freedom through
the waters of the sea. It tells of strong poetry
by our prophets and at last, after we have once
again let Alleluias resound in this room, the
story tells of those women who had witnessed
the death of Jesus on the cross now coming early
on Sunday morning to anoint the body of Jesus.
They are greeted by earthquakes and angels and
then by Jesus himself who tells them what we
need to know again and again: Do not be afraid.
Do not be afraid of earthquakes and angels,
do not be afraid of how they executed me on
that cross, do not be afraid of all the troubles
and harm people do to one another.
When all these stories have been told we turn
to the main works we have to do this holy night.
Calling on all our ancestors in the faith, from
Adam and Eve and Mary and Joseph to Elizabeth
Seton and John the Twenty-third, we go in procession
to the baptismal font with those who have been
chosen for baptism. By the side of the font
they are asked to do what we once did and now
do again: To proclaim before all of us that
they are turning their backs on greed and hatred
and all the works of evil, and they are believing
in the God who is Creator and Savior and Holy
Spirit. Then in the name of God they are baptized
in the waters, passing over from death to life
in Christ Jesus, to life in this church, to
life as brother or sister to us.
All through this Lent in our various ways we
have been truly, truly coming to grips with
the death that dwells in all the ways we humans
devise: wars and exploitation, harm done to
human beings because of their race, because
of their sex, because of their age, because
of their religion or their nationality. We have
been coming to grips with death as it dwells
in our abundance at the expense of others’ hunger
and sickness. We have been coming to grips with
death and now we witness the struggle of life
and death in these waters by which we claim
for Christ our newly baptized sisters and brothers.
Coming out of the waters the newly baptized
are anointed with the very fragrance of Christ,
that fragrance we are meant to be in the world,
and then we go with them for the first time
to the holy table here, and at that table we
prepare the bread and wine so that all together
we can give God thanks and praise for all creation,
for all the saving deeds we have heard and seen
this night. Then at the table new Christians
and veteran Christians partake of the bread
and wine become for us the body and blood of
Christ. Amen.
Amen. Where else can we be on that holy night?
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource
of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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Year C
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What
follows is cast as a homily for Palm Sunday
of the Lord’s Passion, Year C,
April
4, 2004
. This is one of the days in our liturgical
round that shows how mistaken we have been
to presume that Sunday Mass is a one-hour
event. Sunday Mass is going to vary if the
people are celebrating their liturgy. On this
day, they need the time for a gathering and
procession and the time for the able proclamation
of the Passion according to Luke. Do we buy
that time from the homily? Wrong question.
Rather, the homilist and others who prepare
parish liturgy know what the rhythm of the
liturgy needs at the time of the homily. And
a good homily is prepared accordingly. If
all is done well and the assembly is doing
its liturgy, then people aren’t looking
at their watches. They know this day is different.
What follows might be the approach to the
Passion Sunday homily in parishes where real
efforts are made to keep Lent and the keep
the Triduum. It seeks to announce the end
of Lent and invite full participation in the
Triduum.
Gabe
Huck
For a last time in this Lent of 2004 we gather
in our Sunday assembly, the sixth Sunday since
we set off on Ash Wednesday. The books of
our scriptures have been opened for us here,
especially the Gospel of Luke, and we have
heard stories that only Luke tells us. When
we blessed palms we heard Jesus say that if
the Hosannas of the children are stifled,
well then the stones themselves will cry out!
And now we have heard the story of an angry
disciple of Jesus striking out with a sword
and cutting off the ear of one of the posse
that had come to arrest Jesus; and we heard
Jesus’ response:
“Stop! No more of this!” and he
healed the wound. When the Roman soldiers
are taking Jesus to his execution he tells
women who are lamenting: “Not for me
your crying and your weeping! If these things
are done when the wood is green, what will
happen when it is dry?”
Lent will end four days from now, this Holy
Thursday evening. The Forty Days that we,
the baptized and the catechumens, set aside
for penance and preparation and purification,
will quietly conclude. And ready or not, we
will enter the Three Days, the Triduum of
the Passover. Ready or not. Some of us may
only today, Palm Sunday, be getting serious
about Lent. That’s good and it is a
good to this whole assembly. Even those who
have earnestly tried all 40 days to keep this
Lent with prayer and almsgiving and fasting
will know they are not ready yet or ever.
The only way we can walk into the Three Days
is to walk in together, humbled by what has
become of us in our efforts to pray and read
scripture, our efforts to fast from all the
stuff in our lives that does no real good,
our efforts by alms to bring some tiny bit
of justice to the ailing world.
The song and scripture of this Sunday give
much to our hungry souls. Pondering some of
them in the days ahead will perhaps give our
hearts clarity about the tasks we have to
do beginning this Holy Thursday night in this
our gathering place. We can carry with us
those words from Luke’s Gospel:
“The stones will cry out!” And
to the person who has wielded the sword (and
we have all wielded the sword over and over
again): “Stop! No more of this!” And
that terrible question: “What will happen
when the wood is dry?”
Each of us must realize through these last
days of Lent how much we need one another
to be here, to be here together, on Thursday
night and on Friday and on Saturday night.
It isn’t a matter of something being
performed and the more who can show up the
better. No. Not that at all. What is to be
done is to be done by this church, this local
church that we all are. What is to be done
is hard work for all. We have to do those
deeds that bring into our hearts and souls,
our minds and our muscles, our eyes and our
ears, what it is to be a follower of Christ,
a keeper of the gospel, a church.
So when we meet here this Thursday, it is
not for some nostalgic thoughts about Jesus’ last
supper. Listen to the first words the church
proclaims when Lent is over and we are entering
the Triduum: “We should glory in the
cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is
our salvation, our life and our resurrection;
through him we are saved and made free.” No
play-acting the last supper and passion of
Jesus here! If we call to mind the supper
and the arrest and the lash and the nails
and the tomb in these days, it is because
our glory — our glory! — is the
cross and here is salvation, here is life,
here is resurrection. If we tell again of
agony in the garden or the denial by Peter
or of Jesus stripped naked, it is because
for us these are part of how we have found
life to be.
On Thursday night we do a once-a-year deed
in this room. On the night before he died,
Jesus knelt on the floor and washed the feet
of the whole crew of disciples who had gathered
that night. And afterwards he told them, “I
have set you an example, that you also should
do as I have done to you.” And what
had he done? As we boldly enter the Three
Days, we try to discover this not only by
telling the story, but by doing the deed.
We put aside decorum and perhaps pious reflection
and we take out towels and basins and soap
and water. Shoes and stocking come off, and
we wash one another’s feet. It is an
unusual thing to do and to have done to you.
Across so many years and so much change, what
does it mean? John’s Gospel seems to
say that when the time of all Jesus’ preaching
and healing was over, when he sensed what
tomorrow would bring at the hands of the Roman
occupiers, he did this simple thing. He washed
all those feet. If we know how to do that,
we will begin to know how to hear the gospel
of Jesus, we will begin to know how to say
that we glory in the cross! This washing of
the feet, humbling for the one whose feet
are washed, humbling for the one who washes
and kisses another’s feet, that is our
entrance into the Passover of the Lord. Come
Thursday night so this whole church can do
these deeds together and so enter the Passover
together.
On the first full day of our Triduum, Good
Friday, the church will be assembled here
again and quietly we will read together from
the scriptures, especially the passion of
the Lord from John’s Gospel. John knows
what it means to say that the cross is our
glory. The prophet Isaiah wrote of something
like this and we read that also: about someone
despised, acquainted with suffering, a “no
account.” Only a church can bear these
Good Friday words. It is not a matter of making
more vivid the suffering of Jesus, it is how
we foot-washing people see what we are called
to be in today’s suffering world. For
that we need one another desperately. The
prophets and poets have grappled with what
it is to cling to the cross. Preaching to
the church in
El Salvador
twenty-five years ago, not long before the
Triduum, not long before he himself would
be murdered by agents of the state, Archbishop
Romero told it straight about the church and
the passion of Jesus. He said:
For the church, the many abuses of human life,
liberty, and dignity are a heartfelt suffering.
The church, entrusted with the earth’s
glory, believes that in each person is the
Creator’s image and that everyone who
tramples it offends God. As the holy defender
of God’s rights and of God’s images,
the church must cry out. [The church] takes
as spittle in its face, as lashes on its back,
as the cross in its passion, all that human
beings suffer, even though they be unbelievers.
They suffer as God’s images. There is
no dichotomy between humans and God’s
image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever
abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human
being abuses God’s image, and the church
takes as its own that cross, that martyrdom.
If only it were as simple as telling a story
about what happened to a Jewish preacher in
Judea
those centuries ago! It is not. Here together
on Good Friday we lift up in prayer all the
world for it is our baptized job, as Romero
says, to take upon ourselves the suffering
humans inflict on one another. That is why
the prayer of intercession
— on Good Friday, every Sunday, every
day when we pray at our bedside —
is the work of the church. Loving the world
is what this church does. | | | |
