Holy Tuesday

Jesus was already in Jerusalem when some Greeks came to his disciples and said "We wish to see Jesus."

Do you wish to see Jesus this week? It won't be like a Sunday School picture, gentle Jesus meek and mild, holding a lamb or patting a child on the head. This is Jesus showing us something very important about who he is and how much God loves the world. It's not that God is a divine child abuser, beating and killing a son instead of us. It's not a festival of blood and guts, as Mel Gibson would have had us believe.

It's that Jesus remains absolutely faithful to his identity as God's son; he remains absolutely clear about who he is and what he is doing here; he walks right into the center of power of his world and religion, unmasks all the ways that world and religion crush the life out of people, and because he unmasks those powers, they turn on him and kill him.

And so all the ways we fail him, fail his father ... all the ways we collapse under the weight of the world's evil and our own fallen natures ...all of that does not stop him. He goes anyway, he goes where we cannot go, he goes in a manner we could never attain. He goes even when it looks like God has abandonded him completely.

He does not fail us. Ever.

Can you see Jesus this week?

+ Kit

(Holy Eucharist is offered this evening in the chapel at 7.)

Reading Ahead: You May Ask Yourself, Well, How Did I Get Here?

When last we left Jesus and his friends, it was at the end of Chapter One of Mark's gospel. A lot had happened in just a few verses. John appeared in the wilderness, announcing the Messiah. Jesus turned up, was baptized, then driven into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be tempted. He returned to Galilee, began his ministry, called disciples, healed in the synagogue, healed Peter's mother-in-law, went out to other towns to proclaim the message and healed a leper.

Whew. That was one intense chapter.

But now, as is its wont, the lectionary schedule of readings has picked us up just as we were ready to dive in to Chapter Two, and plopped us here, on this mountaintop, with Peter and James and John and Jesus ... and Elijah and Moses!

And -- as Talking Heads memorably said -- you may ask yourself, well ... how did I get here?

The Last Sunday after Epiphany is always given over to this story of the Transfiguration. Whether or not it makes any sense. So we have gone from Chapter Two to Chapter Nine of Mark in the blink of a week. What have we missed in the interim?

Healings, controversies, fights with Pharisees and others, calling of the twelve apostles, casting out of demons, telling of parables (which no one understands), the beheading of John the Baptist, feeding of the 5,000, walking on water, and finally, finally, after chapters and chapters of no one understanding who he really is, he asks his disciples, "Who do you say that I am?"

And Peter says "You are the Christ," and Jesus begins to tell them that the Son of Man must go to Jerusalem and be handed over to the authorities and be crucified and on the third day be raised. And Peter doesn't like this idea and scolds Jesus, and Jesus lays him out and says "Get back, Satan!"

And tells us what it means to follow him: "If any would be my disciple, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."

OK, NOW we can talk about what Jesus and his friends are doing on this mountaintop.

This mountain top is the hinge point of Mark's gospel. On the front side of it, only the demons know who Jesus is. His identity is a secret. He does great deeds of power. He heals, he exorcises. Now, here on this mountain, his friends hear the voice that only Jesus heard at his baptism. The voice from heaven that declares Jesus his son. They see Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophets. They see Jesus as he appears to his Father, shining and pure and good.

Everything after this is an inexorable walk to the cross. There are few, if any healings after this moment. Jesus seems powerless, yet powerfully focused on the road to Jerusalem. He is on the move, teaching his friends what must happen, yet they don't get it. He is trying to explain to them what it looks like to walk the way of the cross.

We pause here, on the mountain, looking down at the road out of Epiphany into Lent, the road that leads to the cross. We know who Jesus is in this moment of glory on the peak. Will we recognize him when he is lifted up, broken and battered, on that cross?

That is the question for the next six weeks. How shall we answer it?

+ Kit

Reading Ahead -- Pentecost 16

This week's Gospel reading is the core of the gospel of Matthew. This is when Jesus reveals his identity and his purpose to his friends. Peter identifies him as the Messiah and Jesus drops the bomb about what being the Messiah means:

Being the Messiah means not success, but failure.

Being the Messiah means not conquering the world, but suffering what the world is and does and means.

Being the Messiah does not mean throwing out the oppressors, but coming under the power of the oppressors.

Being the Messiah means not fixing all things but bearing all things, suffering all things.

Messiah = Cross.

And if we are to become followers of the Messiah, we must also become bearers of the cross, the cross that suffers, the cross that bears, the cross that yields to power, the cross that fails rather than become part of the system of cruelty and oppression, the cross that finds power in powerlessness, the cross that conquers by being vanquished.

Are you ready to take up that cross? What's getting in your way today?

+ Kit

Church Words -- Christus Rex

Christus Rex means Christ the King. It is the "church word" for the image of Jesus on our cross at All Saints. Rather than show a suffering and tortured Jesus on the cross, the Christus Rex shows Christ triumphant over sin and death through the crucifixion. Vested in the garments of the priest at the eucharist, the Christus Rex also symbolizes the sacrifice of Christ in the eucharist.

All Saints began in the Chapel of Christ the King, the Episcopal mission to the MSU campus. It met just up Abbot Road in what is now the Sigma Nu house. Although the name changed when the university mission gave birth to our parish church, the image of Christ the King, the Christus Rex, continued over the All Saints altar. And so it remains a reminder to us, not only of Christ's victory on the cross, but also of our church's origins in that first campus ministry.