This Particular Body: Good Friday 2022

Addresses preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on April 15 2022 by Revd Richard Springer

This Particular Body: Good Friday 2022

Luke 22.39-46

He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’ Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.’ [[Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.]] When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping because of grief, and he said to them, ‘Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’

This Particular Body Address 1 ‘Get up and pray’ 

Recently, I was flying back to London from a southern European city. A I looked through my window I was struck how much of the land below is green and brown and shades of green and brown.

From my great height the interspersed villages and towns seemed so random in the landscape. The habitats had no shape, unlike the rolling hills and stretching fields. These residential areas typically had three or four different exit and entry points to and from the arable land around them. These towns and villages are ‘interruptions’ sitting within our green land. The green land is constant. We have made communities of bricks, mortar, electricity and vehicles to break-through it.

Down on the ground, it seems to us as if we are the beating heart of the country with our bricks, mortar, electricity and vehicles. But taken from another view we seemingly are not.

I think I was struck in this way because on the plane I was reading about the atrocious civil and continental wars that took place in east Africa in the 1990s and early 2000s – specifically in the Congo and in Northern Uganda. The hopeful reading I was engrossed in made a powerful Christian claim. It is that despite the overwhelming and brutal evidence to the contrary, it is not the prayers and worship of the Church that responds to war and violence; “rather, it is war and violence that interrupt the more determinative and peaceful gathering of history that the church’s liturgical time marks.” In other words, even the greatest evils that humans can do to one another and therefore to God are only interruptions within the overarching story of God’s love. The story of God’s love that the Church captures in the movements of the liturgical year.

Our focus today on the Cross of Jesus Christ is to focus on real life. Good Friday marks ultimate reality, the rest of life’s activities are our ideas of what this reality means for us, our lives literally gather around the cross.

In 2017 or 18 I experienced the most moving Holy Week of my time as a Parish Priest.

We gathered for the Liturgy of Maundy Thursday, where we recall the institution of the Eucharist – known as the Last Supper. Afterwards we entered into The Watch the solemn quiet copying the long night in the Garden of Gethsemane. For some reason, The Watch was a prayerful shambles.

Silent solemnity in the darkened church on this holy night was lost to mobile phones ringing, fidgety congregants pacing around, people getting cups of water or hot tea and generally coming and going. Such commotion may well have tried the patience of those more able to kneel or sit still before the Altar of Repose.

The liturgy was being worked on us, not just to us. We were all disciples. We may not have fallen asleep as the disciples did but the subconscious drive to avoid the evening’s presentation of a suddenly diminishing Jesus was certainly active.

The next day, Good Friday, at the Veneration of the Cross it is customary at the invocation to ‘Behold the wood of the cross on which hung the salvation of the world’, to queue to kiss the feet of Jesus Christ hanging on the cross in the church.

Our Anglican queue down the central aisle of the church fell apart. People paused too long at the feet of Jesus causing a hold up behind them. Some knelt to the side of the cross confusing people who wanted to kiss his feet and return to their seat, others lined up and then seemed to dare not approach, sitting in a front row pew at a slight distance.

These surprising responses to the story of His passion and death were authentic and personal. Crucially for the task of the Church they were also communal and public. I shall never forget those people bringing their circumstances into the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday Liturgies and entering into God’s reality.

Our example for this is Jesus Christ. See, how in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus going to the Mount of Olives prays, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.’ This is honest wrestling with the Father of love, even appealing to special release from the road ahead. Yet acknowledgment of the greater story within which even Jesus has submitted himself. We are told an angel is sent to wait on Him. The strength he is given by the angel causes him to pray even more earnestly.

Jesus’s body is His alone but it comes out of a woman and out of a people. And it is given to and for us publicly. In our church that Holy Week a few years ago, we, in our individual bodies, were a people responding in diverse ways as a public witness to His death. Our private interiors in the liturgy are given up to the will of God in worship and we become public participants in God’s story.

In a moment we will listen to the choir sing the anthem, ‘Upon your heart’ arranged by the Canadian composer, Eleanor Daley. The words are taken from the lovers’ poetry of the Song of Solomon, the eighth chapter, from the line which reads, ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart’. The heart is the traditional home of loving sentiment in the body. This Jewish writing captures our deepest desire for a relational love that is stronger than death; not just beside us or as an example to us, but to reside within us. The music is chosen as an invitation into today’s story of the Cross, which is a story of love for people. The story of the God of love in the world is for us an invitation to reside within the limitless love of God, where we find the perfect will of God.

Jesus’s custom to go to the Mount of Olives to pray might be seen how rather warmly as a retreat from the challenges of daily living but Jesus does not seem to see prayer in this way. Our prayer is not a break from life but entrance into the greater story of God’s love.

Jesus’s earnest prayers cause “his sweat (to fall) like great drops of blood”. He then finds his disciples asleep because of the anxiety of their circumstances. They are no less disciples because of their grief but Jesus entreats them to ‘get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’ To ‘get up and pray’ is an injunction to enter and to be sustained in real life. To not be weighed down by the burdens of the enemy.

In prayer, as in a sustainably loving relationship, I cede control and mastery of today and the future in openness to God’s will and love. I do this as a disciple learning from Jesus himself. This is the task of the body of Christ, the Church.

We learn from scripture and also from others, such as the hope-filled Christians in war torn Congo who can categorise the horror of civil war and genocide as events unable to destroy God’s story in the world.

I learn from stories closer to home. From those who know what it is like to not be masters of simple daily choices. That is, those who are marginalised by the way our society is structured. In his encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis teaches that “realities are greater than ideas”.

The goal of Jesus and therefore the goal of the body of Christ is not to create a false reality made up of  ideas that we can control the future. I sense the invitation to follow Jesus Christ by praying myself into giving such notions, inclinations and ideas up.

Prayer is entrance into reality. So, as we follow Jesus’s instruction to ‘pray’, I pray we will do so within these reflections, pray within the scriptures, pray within the music, pray within the silence and we will find ourselves forming as a particular body in this room and praying with Jesus.

—

At the conclusion of each address I will close with a prayer written by London based Barbadian Priest, Shana Maloney.

Let us pray:

Take my hand, Precious Lord,
Lead me on, let me stand.
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
This body holds:
The pain of the world
The complexity of our diversity
The cry of the poor
The oppressed, the refugee and asylum seeker
Silent tears we weep
God of our weary years, in the heaviness of pain we have fallen asleep
Our bodies have encountered many defeats,
In our anguish we fall on our knees
So that we may be lifted up by you
The body rises with you
The body eases in you
Precious Lord, as we pray, guide this body
save us in the time of trial.
Amen.

Luke 22.47-53

While he was still speaking, suddenly a crowd came, and the one called Judas, one of the twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him; but Jesus said to him, ‘Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?’ When those who were around him saw what was coming, they asked, ‘Lord, should we strike with the sword?’ Then one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus said, ‘No more of this!’ And he touched his ear and healed him. Then Jesus said to the chief priests, the officers of the temple police, and the elders who had come for him, ‘Have you come out with swords and clubs as if I were a bandit? When I was with you day after day in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this is your hour, and the power of darkness!’

This Particular Body Address 2 Rejecting goods

The Church is the body of Christ. Great motifs and metaphors to explain this fall short because the Church being His body is more than a metaphor par excellence.

In some circles it is said we are his hands and feet in the world. This may be illustratively helpful but only so long as I do not forget he continues to have His own hands and feet forever wounded for me. Nor is He simply an example to me; He is my brother and my King. As it is put at the beginning of John’s Gospel He is the truth born of the reality of the ‘word made flesh’. The incarnation is God being human in the person of Jesus Christ.

And God, in Jesus, took on the violence of sin and won the victory in the most upside-down way through His death on the Cross. His way is the way of every baptised disciple. He has literally gone before and those who follow pay attention to His path.

Jesus Christ had a particular body in a particular place and time. Even now his glorified body bears witness to the historic and eternal act of salvation we commemorate today. His body still bears the marks of the cross even as he now sits in glorious honour at the right hand of the Father. The Cross of our salvation roots us not just in the story of God but within His body. He is the central force of the Church, the taproot around which our rootedness in him and one another is intertwined.

This passage of the betrayal of Jesus led by Judas Iscariot concludes with Jesus addressing those who had come to arrest him, “this is your hour, and the power of darkness!” Jesus announces the transition into the intense and rapid journey to His own death.

There is connection here to the story of His entry into ministry when Jesus enters the desert for 40 days and 40 nights of fasting and preparation for His Passion to come. In Luke chapter 4 we can read the story of ‘The Temptation of Jesus’. The devil comes to tempt Jesus in the desert. Jesus is tempted to turn stones to bread to satisfy his hunger, to accept the devil’s glory and most notably to falsely mimic his own crucifixion by dicing with death in Jerusalem. “Then the devil took him to Jerusalem and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, “He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you”.” Jesus resists the tempter. It is not yet time to go to Jerusalem.

Being in the wilderness is not a philosophical phase of the crucifixion narrative. The devil is not a brain teaser Jesus is playing with like a games console trying to through the levels to win the prizes. We’ll miss the power of the Cross if we rule out the reality of the devil, temptation and the wilderness. Indeed, even more, admitting that evil is real is not the same as confronting evil. No easy task. And it is important to know that Jesus enters the desert “full of the Holy Spirit”, just as in the previous reading and reflection it is important to note that Jesus instructs the disciples to pray to be prepared to face the time of trial. It seems to me it is part of the calling of this particular body of Christ to prepare for and recognise when times of trial may be at hand.

We have all, regardless of our socio-economic circumstances, become intimately familiar with a time of trial through the pandemic marked by the lockdown of March 2020. The Church in following Jesus, is tested to choose God even when the arid desert sands of trial seem to roll on and on. In this task there is much to learn from people of faith who understand readily what it is to choose God in the midst of the trial. People who have learnt to be ready when the power of darkness is at the door.

Among many losses for everyone, in the past two years for some communities perhaps most striking was the loss of access to free school meals. A major problem for families reliant on the square meal 200 free school lunches a year provides. My own parish of St George-in-the-East was involved early on in a local campaign to ensure that the affordable supermarket Iceland was included in the scheme alongside less accessible stores where a voucher does not go very far for families on low incomes. How bizarre that supermarkets like Iceland were not initially included. Footballer Marcus Rashford memorably pushed local campaigns like this one into the public eye.

The summer of 2020 was compounded in terror by the murder by a police officer of George Floyd in a Minnesotan street in full view of a watching public, the scene being recorded on film. This Black man’s killing sparked pain and protest across the globe, including here in London and across this country. For people who know marginalisation all too well here was a further stretch of testing desert.

The summer of Black Lives Matter caused many institutions including this one to consider ways to contribute contritely and effectively for justice. The rightful desire to be aligned on the right side of the debates was great. For any Christian, on any journey of friendship with anyone marginalised, I must learn to identify what is crucial, who is really vulnerable and when to reject the advances of fake glory.

A Black parent I know spent the summer of 2020 trying to contact her son’s school to access the meal vouchers she needed to help feed her teenager. She struggled to get any reply. She did however receive many emails from the school about their name change following the tossing of the Edward Colston statue into Bristolian waters. A woman of faith she tells this story and I repeat it now not to become embroiled in racial politics but to show the reality of marginalisation and indeed a prejudice that does not just involve West African women like her but people of little or less than a little means. The body of Christ follows Jesus’s body in acting for justice and the agency of people often overlooked.

In our text, Jesus acts on the crucial moments and identifies who is really vulnerable at every turn even as His most crucial and vulnerable scenario unfolds in real time. Jesus, having rejected the goods on offer from the devil in the desert, is aware of more “perverse” skulduggery when Judas approaches.

Jesus addresses his betrayer by name (the only time that is recorded in the Gospels) and seems to know what is afoot, “Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?” In a misreading of what to do next, one of those with Jesus takes action. The slave of the high priest has his right ear brutally cut off. With exclamation Jesus says, “No more of this!” and puts an end to the violence.

In Luke’s telling Jesus, so ready for this hour, immediately sees where the greatest need is. He heals this person as he has healed before; yet does so now even in the eye of a personal storm. His intervention allows God’s plan to unfold through His arrest.

Just as in the desert Jesus has begun to put himself where his body might break. For now, he must do so with great focus to eventually reach breaking point. He cannot allow the misguided violence of a friend to disturb or usurp the path he is now on. It is no surprise that the devil – the power of darkness – shows up; in Judas, in the chief priests, the officers of the temple police and the elders and in his misguided violent friend for whom Jesus reserves his most powerful intervention. Devilish behaviour always presses on the weakest moment of the most vulnerable person. In our text this is the slave of the high priest. Jesus’s friend is tempted to win fake glory as if this kind of bloody fight will bring real victory. He has not been praying, he has been asleep, he is not operating in God’s reality.

But Jesus has always identified with those who cannot skip to the end of the fight. To those who deeply submit before receiving blessed sustenance. Those who are living wilderness lives. Those who are enslaved. Those who know what it is to traverse the arid red landscape with nothing to drink and yet who keep faith in a God who knows them. Jesus wins the victory through the bloody Cross because He comes not as an ally to the least of these but because He becomes the least of all of us.

His body is willing to be forged in the exposing heat of the wilderness sun. If this particular body rejects devilish temptations it will one day live in the cool bright light of real Resurrection Power.

—

Let us pray:

Good Shepherd,
When the darkness appeared, your body invaded, betrayed with a kiss,
“no more of this” – Let this body go!
For the bodies who have been betrayed by those who invade it with fake love.
Fake love. Fake news. Fake life. – Let this body go!
For the wounds inflicted, the trauma, and the hurt of this body whispers “enough is enough”.
Breathe. Sigh. Cry. – Let this body go!
For mind and soul of this body that they may know what it needs to heal and what it needs to reject.
The image of God is shining through – Let this body go!
“no more of this” Great Comforter, you invade the pain, your presence surrounds this body,
and by your hand – “no more of this”
Guide this body great Healer and Redeemer – Take hold of this body.
Amen.

Luke 23.1-12

Then the assembly rose as a body and brought Jesus before Pilate.They began to accuse him, saying, ‘We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor, and saying that he himself is the Messiah, a king.’ Then Pilate asked him, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ He answered, ‘You say so.’ Then Pilate said to the chief priests and the crowds, ‘I find no basis for an accusation against this man.’ But they were insistent and said, ‘He stirs up the people by teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee where he began even to this place.’

When Pilate heard this, he asked whether the man was a Galilean. And when he learned that he was under Herod’s jurisdiction, he sent him off to Herod, who was himself in Jerusalem at that time. When Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had been wanting to see him for a long time, because he had heard about him and was hoping to see him perform some sign. He questioned him at some length, but Jesus gave him no answer. The chief priests and the scribes stood by, vehemently accusing him. Even Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him; then he put an elegant robe on him, and sent him back to Pilate. That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies.

This Particular Body Address 3 Handling Power

“But Jesus gave no answer”, is a sentence of such strength in the centre of this passage.

He has the opportunity to defend himself, to bamboozle his adversaries with parables or with the might of warring angels – and Jesus says nothing. In this act of deep reservation and penetrating wisdom Jesus turns the tables on the principalities of this story – of Empire and of Temple.

In so doing, Jesus identifies with and offers a guidebook to those who, in the words of Howard Thurman, “stand, at a moment in history, with their backs against the wall.” Multiple are the times when the poorest people live as if their backs are against the wall. How they handle the powers that they face and discover how to recognise and handle their own power is a question for the Church, founded by the suffering servant, of whom the poor are centrally part and to whom the Church is called.

Luke’s Gospel is commonly paired by authorship with the book of the Acts of the Apostles. The Acts of the Apostles is the account of the disciples of Jesus Christ, being filled with the Holy Spirit, carrying out acts of power in His name and the dynamic beginnings of the Christian faith among ordinary people far and wide.

In this passage we catch a helpful glimpse of the parallel between the action of the body of Jesus Christ in front of earthly powers – Pilate and Herod, surrounded by the accusing rulers of the Temple and the Roman trials of St Paul in the book of Acts. As Biblical scholar, Raymond Brown helps us, “There are clear similarities in such features as detailed charges involving violations of Roman law and of Caesar’s majesty, an indifference by Roman officials to the religious issues that are really involved, and the desire to let the prisoner go, or at most chastise him with a whipping.” In Luke and Acts the particular bodies of Jesus Christ and the body of Christ are adjoined.

Common to Jesus and to the Church is the challenge of handling power. Pablo Gadenz, in his commentary on Luke’s Gospel identifies the trial of Jesus as not one of justice but of “power”. Power is a word of such force that most powerful people and authorities deny their ordinary use of it and sometimes even its existence. Political candidates famously campaign in poetry and lead in prose, the flourish of the promises of change on the election trails is lost somewhere in entangling bureaucracy when it comes time to deliver. However, those who have suffered at the hands, plans, knees and boots of powers and principalities recognise it when it appears poised to cause humiliation and suffering.

Howard Thurman, evocatively describes the physical state of the marginalised as a “man and woman with their backs to the wall”. Nowhere to go. Seemingly between a rock and a hard place. The scriptures and the good news of Jesus Christ must have something to say to people in such a situation, for so many of our fellow members of society are in such a place. They need power.

What has Jesus shown us about power and its use?

The Jesus that Luke depicts shows that there is power within a body that chooses to act. He acts in the courts of Pilate and Herod by being unmoved by these powers and the nearby clamouring religious authorities. The parallel for the body of Christ, the Church, is inferred, when we consider the same author is responsible for what we find in the stories of the Acts of the Apostles. Where different Herod’s reappear in Acts to judge Paul for his missionary work, to seek to kill Peter and to martyr James the Apostle, known as James the Great.

But the good news of Jesus is that his action is a blueprint for us when bearing witness to Him brings opposition and ridicule. Power is not finite; held only by those who would subjugate them. It is within the abused too.

In my ministry I am fascinated by the reclamation of language that community organisers advocate. To manipulate in the physiotherapist’s room can be an act of healing. The word ‘anger’ shares etymological roots with the word ‘grief’. And power. Like anger or manipulation, such a loaded word.

I have learnt through practising community organising that power is simply the ability to act. This is not a social activist’s motto. It’s the definition in the dictionary. But its application among ordinary people is like a fuel that motors a vehicle.

In a community organising pamphlet on the body of Christ recast as a ‘People of Power’, we are pointed toward numerous examples in the Bible and Church history where God “raises up leaders from and not just for those who are oppressed.” In scripture, we meet Moses, Miriam and Esther through to Rosa Parks and Desmond Tutu, who are people who recognised they had the ability to act, some of them in strikingly similar ways to Jesus himself.

Closer to home, I saw a video of a speech made by a teenage Black girl in a school where one of her pupil colleagues had been stripped and internally searched by the police in a room by herself. In the video this girl stood on a stairwell in the school and she spoke out loudly against this act to an informal gathering of hundreds of her fellow pupils. After a while she began to run out of energy and then she said, “My voice is going but not my power.” It was true and prophetic. A moment of real power.

Power is not finite. In a world where our cities’ cleaners and porters are likely to be poor migrants and still have to ask for reasonable working hours and a living wage, the message of Jesus in the courts of power is like gold dust. It is music to the ears of the man or woman with their backs to the wall. While others revile and mistreat you, you do not have to say a word. When your voice is failing, when your strength is low, your power can go on. Jesus knows what it is to face such revulsion and mistreatment and retain dignity and the will to act as he chooses.

As the ‘People of Power’ pamphlet remarks, “All too often, Christians imagine Jesus to be gentle and inoffensive and regard tension and power as things to be avoided. Yet, in the Gospels, Jesus is powerful and disruptive. He is both able to love his enemies and confront them…” Jesus in handling his power in the face of great opposition causes the pieces of the story to fall into place, to reveal more of the story. The standing up by those who suffer for themselves is a clarifying power.

In both courts of Pilate and Herod they subjugate, mock or dismiss Jesus – they are enemies but their experience with Jesus bonds them. Luke leaves it open as to the reason for this. You might say it reminds you of the adage, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. One writer concludes the opposite, where the new friendship of Pilate and Herod shows how “once more Jesus has a healing effect even on those who maltreat him.” Whatever is right, Jesus handles his own power and theirs. And this simultaneous action of power and dignifying love is a threat to them.

Luke’s unfolding story of the Cross is at its heart a story of power in action offered as a gift of love.

The Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jr sums this up, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

—

Let us pray:

King of Kings,
The earth shakes with your silence
Your power overflows this place and the mighty are thrown from their thrones.
Your silence interrupts the silence on the things that matter to this body
In your silence you see the body, you hear the body, you feel the body:
The hurts of exclusion and prejudice are sent empty away
The lowly hears you and are lifted high
This body matters and hears the chains of freedom breaking
The hope of the poor is not taken away
The unspoken words are given a voice
Stir in our hearts and inspire each of us to work more faithfully for justice and dignity of life everywhere.
Raise our vision above all barriers
Give voice to the silence of our friends
Give us wisdom and courage to make this a better world.
Give us each day our daily bread that we may learn to rise as the body of Christ.
Amen.

Luke 23.26-38

As they led him away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him, and made him carry it behind Jesus. A great number of the people followed him, and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him. But Jesus turned to them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For the days are surely coming when they will say, “Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.” Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us”; and to the hills, “Cover us.” For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?’

Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. [[Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’]] And they cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!’ The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’ There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’

This Particular Body Address 4 Bodies break

Jesus has become fully public in the story. His crucifixion transfers the private teaching and instruction among his disciples – get up and pray! – into a public gift of salvation for all. And the people stood by, watching.

A faithful woman of the parish where I belong as their Priest, when asked about the Sunday Mass said, “to be honest I glaze over it all until the bread is broken.” Nothing grabs her attention until it’s time for His body to break.

Jesus is, in these verses, surrounded by the people. Not the characters of Herod and Pilate. But of ordinary people – Simon of Cyrene who carries the cross behind Jesus – an account that is corroborated by all three synoptic Gospels. Simon is followed by a great number of people, including women ‘beating their breasts and wailing for him’ and also with them two others, “who were criminals” to be put to death for the things that they had done.

And among this crowd Jesus is crucified.

In verse 33 of chapter 23 of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is being crucified.

And the people stood by, watching.

I am a parish priest at St George-in-the-East situated at the beginnings of the east end, bordering the City of London. I am privileged to have a public place among the people there. In the tradition of the church the Eucharist is central to our worship. And at various times the Eucharist has taken place daily, as it does now.

I recall once celebrating the Eucharist in the church during the week. As I stood behind the altar, I came to the Agnus Dei, which simply means Lamb of God. The words are familiar to those who attend Eucharistic services, the congregation repeats, Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. As these words were being said, I took the consecrated bread, the body of Jesus Christ, and I held it up for the small number of people there to see. And I broke it.

In my hands the sound it made was a crisp sharp snap.

The sharp sound of the snap caused me to pause longer than I would normally. I could see some shards of the material which had fallen into the chalice of consecrated wine below. I could see the bits floating in the liquid.

I had broken Him in the presence of the people. I was caught in the moment. And the people were standing by, watching.

There are several verses and three hours before Luke records that Jesus breathes his last, with the words, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Until then it is a public exhaustion and slow asphyxiation. The numbers looking on, no doubt hesitated there and dissipated. It is hard to watch for too long. There is no judgement in my tone toward those who are stood by. Indeed, of all the moments to bear witness this is it. Notice the contrast in verse 35. “And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him…” Luke subtly draws a distinction between the people – the crowd – and the authorities.

The weight of the numbers of those who have suffered and died in the grasp of Covid-19 in the past two years has exhausted health services. The lockdowns that punctuated the pandemic opened the eyes of many to suffering realities that are so often hidden. Our basic needs are met by frontline workers who are typically poorly paid working classes, vulnerable migrants and People of Colour. The poorest people in society had to put themselves where their bodies might break. Along with the suffering of those in residential care and the elderly the plight of these vulnerable people has been plain to see. It too is now public.

The lot of the weakest has been made public by the pandemic and in recent months the numbers of Ukrainian escaping Putin has dispersed them in their millions across the world to go alongside the peoples of Yemen, the Congo, Afghanistan and other places.

The nature of our standing by, watching, matters. We might be expectant, all else pointing to and culminating in that moment, as the woman is at the breaking of the bread. I am alert to the fact that bodies are breaking and have been breaking. Because they do break. And it can be too easy to be detached from the suffering of others. Especially when the stories are overwhelming.

In this light and unrelated to pandemic and Ukraine I share with you a brief story.

In 1997, I was 20 years old. In March of that year a childhood friend was found dead in a police cell in our London neighbourhood. At primary school we used to call him Marley, because his name was Marlon, and his skin complexion was similar to the reggae singer Bob Marley.

This year marks 25 years since Marley was found hanging in the cell. His death remains confusing and the circumstances leading up to his death unclear. Horrifyingly he is not the only young man with a background like his who has lost his life in unclear circumstances while in police custody. His body broke and his family still does not not know what happened or why. It is too familiar a scene where too many have consistently turned away.

So much can seem unresolved in such a story. And Jesus does not offer a magical answer for Marley’s suffering. Jesus undeniably suffers with him.

In his suffering Jesus reaches beyond human comprehension with the words, ‘Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.’ Eminent Biblical scholar, the late Raymond Brown, wonders whether this is a hint by Luke that the authorities are acting out of ignorance and not wicked planning. Such an understanding invites others to forgive those who do them wrong. But also, again to see, the greater reality of God’s love within which we are invited to participate. As Brown writes, “there are many who would come after Jesus, beginning with Stephen (in Acts chapter 7) who would find hope in facing unjust brutality by repeating the prayer of the Lucan Jesus.”

Jesus puts his body where it will break. He places himself in the hands of those who would break Him. There is hope in the breaking of this particular body. We do not need to be afraid of the broken pieces. The broken pieces are life itself. In the Eucharist the broken material that matters is consumed by the people, and it heals us.

There is an invitation in this passage to participate at the foot of His cross, among the people to enter into the reality that Jesus on the cross opens up for us.

The power that he holds is available to all those who stand by watching, bravely facing the truth of our own brokenness. Facing this truth is like being forged in the fire. Over time we become less afraid of our own broken pieces and they are brought into the light of a prayerful community where our weaknesses can be made strong, confounding those who would mock and revile.

Even in death he opens the door to victory. Not like a sporting victory but rather one that embraces all the broken pieces, rejecting the bland offers of a world which may seek to hide difference and turn us all into competing fragments. He in His cross makes this One particular body, without neatness, with death real and without the future certain.

It is a beautiful contradiction that there is a gift of life in the cross of Calvary.

—

Let us pray:

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
The body trembles, it trembles, it cries
Mother Zion, Daughter Jerusalem
Creation of the Creator, what have we done?
Creator God, make us holy.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Forgive us our sins.
Forgive the body who stood by
Forgive this body who stands by
Saviour of the world, forgive this beloved community.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
We know not what we do.
We, your children are divided,
Tear each other apart, mock each other
Great Counsellor, grant us wisdom.
I was there when they crucified our Lord.
For every generation was counted
Our children’s children future
Our ancestors stood with the saints
Gracious Lord, make us the Body of Christ,
Grant us courage to no longer standby.
Amen.

Luke 23.39-43

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’

This Particular Body Address 5 Offering gift

In the sermon I preached on Good Friday last year, I recommended a film.

It’s called Soul made by the animation company Pixar. I won’t give any of the important details away in case you want to follow my recommendation. I think it is an excellent piece of literature. It is the first Pixar film to have a Black character in the lead role. The character is a jazz musician. The director of the film, Pete Docter, has talked about how the team behind the film came to decide the main character would be a Black jazz musician.

Docter had heard a story from the great jazz pianist Herbie Hancock: “Herbie played with the legendary trumpeter Miles Davis. Miles was notoriously exacting and belittling in rehearsal. His band could not keep up with him and he would become exasperated with them.

So, the band was on a great tour and on one particular evening they were giving a brilliant concert. Then Herbie says, suddenly I played this chord that was so wrong. I thought I had ruined the whole show. But instead of judging me, Miles took a breath, and he made my chord right. He didn’t punish me. He took what I did wrong and made something new with it.”

Miles made it right. Consider any mishap made right… in a sports game, a bad pass made right in a football or rugby match or a fumble in the sprint relay, or in the kitchen where the recipe is saved by a little wise adjustment to the ingredients.

But also, in more serious situations:

When our start in life or a particular upbringing has left us as adults more confused or damaged than anyone deserves to be.

When within a prejudiced society the playing field where education, jobs and security is uneven in every respect.

When divisive ideological politics seeks to pit ordinary people against each other.

When we can’t get free from a habitual sin that just doesn’t seem to shake, a fear of our shame becoming known will cause us to be excluded, or a physical pain debilitates our spirit, when suffering grief that may only ease when we die ourselves…

We need someone who will take this discord and make it right.

The gift given by the brilliant Miles Davis was to take Herbie’s mistake and turn it into more jazz. There will be people here more expert than I, but my own experience with jazz of such improvisational force is that the listener too is invited to adjust to the sound as much as to receive and enjoy it. To learn with the musicians where the music will end up.

It is not so much that Miles makes it right as he makes it part of the story of the concert that night. There isn’t a pause in the concert as the players go back to do things as perfectly as possible. Indeed, next time the mistake or the take on the music will be different and therefore the journey will be different. As an aside, this is similar to liturgy, where the offering is the ‘work of the people’, which is where we derive, via the Greek word ‘leitourgia’, the word liturgy from. We are invited in our worship and liturgies into engagement with Jesus and with him a good future is possible.

Jesus Christ. He makes sense of the discord. He does make things new.

With him all things are possible. Even at the end paradise is fully possible for the criminal hanging next to Jesus. As Fleming Rutledge points out, the focus here is not on debates about the concept of paradise nor whether Jesus goes to paradise before the resurrection to come. The point is that paradise is ‘with the Lord’. Wherever Jesus is there is paradise.

My grandfather was a Godly man. By that I mean he seemed to always turn to God for an answer to all questions of character, of ambition or in reflecting on his years before he died in the mid-1990s. At the celebration of a significant birthday there is a tape cassette recording of him describing his long faithful Christian life: “I do everything as unto the Lord”, “Do things as if you are doing them unto the Lord”. Such a disposition instils in a person the expectation that Jesus is with us and that with him it is paradise – there is no need to be afraid of death or of questions of heaven.

This is what the particular body of Christ looks like. Christians walk this way. Rejecting the devil’s goods, handling power with love and with confidence, being where bodies might break and ready to offer ourselves as gift to others – doing everything as unto the Lord, for where the Lord Jesus is, there is the gift of paradise.

What is remarkable is that Jesus offers this gift on the cross. As Rutledge says, “imagine… giving yourself into the care of a man who has no power even to move his own (pinioned) hands.”

It is Luke’s Gospel distinct from Matthew and from Mark’s Gospels that introduces the penitent criminal on the cross – one who recognises his own sin and the innocence of Jesus. In the manner of one receiving a gift from a friend he addresses the Lord by his name ‘Jesus’ and as one with a ‘kingdom’.

The criminal has at the cross seen the light, and the burdens of his heart rolled away, it was there by faith he received his sight and the offer of eternal happiness. These two broken bodies make an exchange of faith for an invitation to God’s kingdom.

From these particular bodies the Church learns that our readiness to be a gift must always involve acceptance of our own vulnerabilities. This is not a sign of weakness – it is a gateway to the kingdom of God.

The theologian, Willie James-Jennings, makes this important point: “theologically, the problem is not a vulnerable body. The problem has never been a vulnerable body. The problem is the denial of a vulnerable body. And the refusal to honour the vulnerability of the body.”

We’ve often heard deathly illnesses being categorised by some public figures as an enemy we must ‘fight’. It is the pretence that operates in individual and institutional bodies that foolishly believe themselves to be invulnerable. This has provoked many to reply that this is a careless misunderstanding of the vulnerability of all bodies.

Let alone that through the gateway which is recognition of our collective vulnerability there might lie a productive conversation about which bodies to protect, how, when and in what ways.

There are many instances in scripture where it is the vulnerable who have revealed God’s plan working. For example, St Paul writes in his first letter to the church in Corinth, “God has chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise; and God has chosen the weak things of this world to shame the strong.”

This is not just vulnerability because of the oppression people face due to poverty, their race, their gender or sexuality. This is a vulnerability that all humanity shares, most present to us in our susceptibility to physical illnesses but more fundamentally as creatures before a Creator who becomes as foolish and as weak as we are. Given the gift of seeing God on a tree, one criminal derides him. One criminal rebukes the other fellow and repents. He recognises this broken body in the centre as the holder of the keys to the kingdom. This body is a gift.

About twenty-five years ago in Birmingham I heard the finest sermon I have ever heard. It was preached with power, authority and wisdom by Pentecostal Pastor Ruthlyn Bradshaw. The sermon was called ‘The bread is enough’. Pastor Bradshaw had arrived in the UK from the small volcanic Caribbean island of Montserrat. She was in the UK because a couple of years before I heard the sermon her homeland was decimated by a huge volcanic eruption. It rendered whole streets invisible – buried under rubble and lava.

Despite all this destruction. The scattering of her people across the globe including her. The disconnection those people felt at being separated by death and distance from loved ones – into this abyss the Pastor stared and concluded that in spite of it all, ‘the bread is enough’ for He is the living bread – that restores our bodies and our souls. That is the Jesus we need, the one who meets us in our darkest hour and offers us himself as a gift.

Jesus has no earthly seat of power to offer anyone. Nor does he protest endlessly against them. He dies as a poor brown-skinned Saviour of the poor and the authorities alike.

His eternal gift is his own body, his gift is himself and is recognised by diverse people drawn into the story of God in the world – from this criminal, to the women including His Mother gathered at the foot of the Cross to the Centurion who will speak shortly.

Might I accept and embrace this calling of vulnerability offered as a gift to the many who seek, await and need such a particular body. At the heart of the faith, the gift given highest honour is His body offered up.

The problem has never been a vulnerable body.

—

Let us pray:

Amazing grace, how sweet a gift, that saved such a one as me.
Thank you for the gift of forgiveness to the body.
Thank you for the gift that saved this body.
Thank you for remembering this body, as we come into your kingdom.
Thank you for choosing this body to be set free
Thank you for gifting this body a beloved community of diversity.
Thank you for the gift of paradise to a body such as mine.
You, O God, are to be praised because in the splendour of your love, the richness of your gifts, you have never forgotten us.
Amen.

Luke 23.44-56

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last. When the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, ‘Certainly this man was innocent.’ And when all the crowds who had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts. But all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.

Now there was a good and righteous man named Joseph, who, though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action. He came from the Jewish town of Arimathea, and he was waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then he took it down, wrapped it in a linen cloth, and laid it in a rock-hewn tomb where no one had ever been laid. It was the day of Preparation, and the sabbath was beginning. The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid. Then they returned, and prepared spices and ointments.

On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment.

This Particular Body Address 6 Do not forsake hope

Jesus’s final words in Luke’s Gospel are not the words of despair we read in the accounts in the Gospels according to Matthew and Mark, where they write, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ or the famous three words of John’s Gospel, ‘It is finished.’

In Luke’s telling his final words are, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ These are words of relationship and of future possibility. Here, we see how Luke writes with the Father’s eternal story clearly in mind. These final words recorded in Luke also point to the story that will unfold in the book of the Acts of the Apostles.

In other words, to a story of which we can be a part. In Acts chapter 7, the first martyr, Stephen prays on the cusp of his death that the Lord would also receive his spirit. The connection between the particular body of Jesus Christ hanging on the Cross and the body of Christ, the Church is made again. These words ‘I commend my spirit’ are repeated in the night prayers of the church known as Compline and conclude the death rites and conclusion of funerals aiding departure from this life to the next.

Luke invites us to commend ourselves to the Father at the very last. This is an instruction the liturgies of the church have adopted as darkness falls each day and at the end of our lives. The Father represents for the body of Christ a hope in a future beyond our telling and knowing. A trust in the omniscience of the Father that Jesus had as he breathed his last. In Luke’s telling we can sense hope on Good Friday. As in the words of the hymn writer, Isaac Watts, we can “survey the cross” now and call it “wondrous” as we are all commended to the Father by Jesus at the end. He has brought us completely with him and wherever he is, hope remains.

See how even the Roman centurion watching on is moved to praise God. His declaration of the innocence of Jesus is not from one with any power to change anything as Pilate might have. Instead, this reaction comes from the lips of an ordinary gentile who is compelled to praise God as Jesus dies. Jesus did not merely represent hope he had become hope for men and women like this and the only rightful response is worship. Hope has formed in Jesus. In a particular body. It can be held and can hold. It lives in Him.

Earlier this year on 27 January, perhaps like me you watched the BBC2 documentary which marked Holocaust Memorial Day. Seven Holocaust survivors were paired with and painted by seven leading artists as a permanent witness to their hopeful lives.

Portraitist Jenny Savile painted 92-year-old Zigi Shipper. Savile had this wonderful turn of phrase for describing her subject as she prepared to paint him. “The crevices of Zigi’s face, he’s got a lot of crevices, so those valleys and riffs in his face, just the structure of his head, there’s quite a lot in his flesh that’s going to communicate his thoughts.” I think the artist is seeking the closest possible connection to the hope that Zigi’s face does not just represent but has become. For her, somehow, it is in his flesh.

For people compelled today by the Cross we are being asked by this rendering of Jesus’s closing moments to not hope for things as if hoping were wishing. It is to learn to see Him afresh as hope itself. We are not to forsake hope for that is to forsake Jesus Christ. To forsake hope it to give up on who it is the body of Christ is called to be.

Hope is not like optimism. It’s grittier than that. It has valleys and crevices. To be optimistic, Roman Catholic Priest Emmanuel Katongole teaches, is to take a privileged position. Where one might feel they can influence things to work out well. Instead, we must be careful not to mistake the Cross as simply a cause for optimism rather than the central hope for the world.

The book of the prophet Jeremiah tells us that it is the Lord who “gives us hope”. It comes as a gift to us and when it forms in us, we must hold on to it. As First Peter puts it, “hope is in you”, rather than something projected out into the world with the wish that it might boomerang good things back towards us. Hope is not something we send out like good feelings in bad times but rather what we hold on to when bad times seek to crush us, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes, “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.”

This may all seem rather too light for reflecting on Jesus’s final words after three hours of Good Friday observation. But do not be fooled into thinking that living hope-filled lives is light and breezy. Hope is formed in the crucible where temptation burns, and powers threaten, where bodies break and when offering gifts is the least of our concerns. Lives where those elements come together are often found at the bottom of the heap, below the breadline and beyond the pale. What Jesus shows us in his body hung up on the Cross is that His death and life has transformed the world.

That lives of hope formed in dire circumstances are worthy of our attention. That in them as in Zigi Shipper in a concentration camp the hope everyone seeks can form in the body.

And yet it is not a super-power. It remains fragile. The people still watched helplessly and returned home beating their breasts. For they believed all hope had died. The German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, puts the reverse of hope like this, “Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription: ‘Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.’”

The early Church taught, and we say in the Creeds that Jesus ‘descended to the dead’. These words reach in hope that Jesus overcomes the hopelessness of hell. A reaching for a wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died. And reaching back towards us are the Father’s hands. The hands which received the spirit of Jesus. If He can trust him, then so can I.

So, brothers, sisters and friends, there is goodness in this Friday, his particular body says so, in the last cry, in the shallow breaths, in the wounded side, hands, feet and the blood poured out.

And we can hear more clearly the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews:

Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain or to put it another way, through his flesh. And since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our particular bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.

—

Let us pray:

It is finished.
O Breath of Life,
My God, My God
We pray You will never forsake this body.
As you breathed your last
I felt alone.
I felt anxious.
I was depressed.
I was lost.
In that hour when you breathed your last, no hope could be found.
Your body, my body felt lifeless, it was hopeless, it was defeated.
But in that same in the hour when you breathed in your last
There was victory when you breathed out to give life
My body finally knew –
Hope. You have not forsaken me.
So, we sing it loud for the rising Sun
Let it echo through, loud as the rolling sea.
With our breaths, and body filled with hope
It is not finished for we have a gospel to proclaim
Hope in the One we find our guidance,
Hope in the One whose Love we find our joy,
Hope in the One whose will we find our peace.
As Christ breathed his last this body was saved
Now the body rejoices for hope was not forsaken.
Amen.