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And just like that we are on our annual slide towards the cross and the empty tomb. Advent was full of so much expectation, and now we can look with eyes wide open at the great revealing of God on mission with what and who God loves. Honestly, this reading might be better served during Lent, but it seems right to jump start the meditations earlier than normal. I would ask you to “read,” and attempt to “see” what this reading really offers and invites us to know. Not everyone will… nor will everyone even try… but you might IF you’ll consider the revelation with more than a casual glance.

Every liturgical season is another opportunity to see (maybe) what we’ve never been able to see. To look longer and more intently into the depths of what (maybe) we’ve never been able to comprehend. That’s usually my approach anyways, and I pray that you heart is stirred all over again at the gloriously horrible, and the mysteriously beautiful, journey of the Passion of our Christ!

Dying, Christ destroyed our death.

Rising, Christ restored our life.

Christ will come again in glory. AMEN.

As always… much love,

Mike

The supreme irony of the whole crucifixion scene is this: he who was everything had everything taken away from him. He who was seemingly perfect (Hebrews 1:3; 5:9) was totally misjudged as sin itself (Romans 8:3-4). How can we be that mistaken? The crucified Jesus forever reveals to us how wrong both religious and political authorities can be, and how utterly wrong we can all be—about who is in the right and who is sinful (John 16:8). The crowd, who represents us all, chooses Barabbas, a common thief, over Jesus. That is how much we can misperceive, misjudge, and be mistaken.

Jesus hung in total solidarity with the pain of the world and the far too many lives on this planet that have been “nasty, lonely, brutish, and short.” After the cross, we know that God is not watching human pain, nor apparently always stopping human pain, as much as God is found hanging with us alongside all human pain. Jesus’s ministry of healing and death, of solidarity with the crucified of history, forever tells us that God is found wherever the pain is. This leaves God on both sides of every war, in sympathy with both the pain of the perpetrator and the pain of the victim, with the excluded, the tortured, the abandoned, and the oppressed since the beginning of time. I wonder if we even like that? There are no games of moral superiority left for us now. Yet this is exactly the kind of Lover and the universal Love that humanity needs.

This is exactly how Jesus “redeemed the world by the blood of the cross.” It was not some kind of heavenly transaction, or paying the price to an offended God, as much as a cosmic communion with all that humanity has ever loved and ever suffered. If Jesus was paying any price, it was to the hard and resistant defenses around our hearts and bodies. God has loved us from all eternity.

—From Richard Rohr, “YES, AND…” pp. 79-80