50.4–9a; Hebrews 12.1–3; John 13.21–32
WHERE THE BUCK STOPS
Once more we look to ‘the servant’, to the one who – so said the prophet-poet – would suffer to set God’s people free. The prophet hears the servant speak: ‘I gave my back to those who struck me.’ The servant lets them do their worst to him. So does Jesus. He absorbs all that shames us – not least our anger, the anger that one social commentator tells us is ‘the defining characteristic of our times’.
I think of Michael. Michael was a huge small child, a morbidly obese ten-year-old, in a children’s club I ran when I was a curate. Michael was desperate for love but he didn’t get much, because he didn’t smell nice. One winter’s evening, as the kids were going home, Michael was in a terrible state, in floods of tears, shuddering with grief. He’d lost a coin, presumably fallen from his pocket. I see Michael now at the door of the church hall. There was bicycle there, leaning against the wall. Michael noticed it. Suddenly he stopped sobbing. He reached out and wrenched the front lamp from the bike. He switched the lamp on and shone its beam into the night sky. Then he shouted angrily up into the darkness: ‘It’s all your fault! You up there! It’s all your bloody fault!’
Michael knew where the buck must stop. He turned to the crucified God to absorb and quench his anger. As we all must, unless we want those bush fires in our belly to burn for ever.
The servant continues, ‘I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.’ We are invited in our second reading to ‘consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners’. The writers use past tenses, talking as if the suffering is done with. But today we ask whether Christ’s face is still exposed to our insults, whether to this day he endures our enmity and anger.
Peter Abelard was one of the great Christian theologians of the middle-ages. He held the world in his hands. But because of his love for Heloise and what that had led to, he was a broken man. The novelist Helen Waddell tells a story about him. Abelard was surviving in the forest with his one servant, Thibault. One day they hear a terrible screaming. At first they fear it is a child. They rush to where the screams are coming from – and find that it is a rabbit caught in a trap. Abelard releases the rabbit and it dies in his arms. It’s all too much for him. ‘I’ve deserved all I’ve suffered. But what did this one do? Is there a God at all?’
Thibault notices nearby a tree that has been felled. Its trunk has been sawn through, exposing all the growth rings. ‘Look,’ says Thibault, ‘that dark ring there. It runs the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. Perhaps Calvary is like that. It is the bit of God we see. But it goes on.’
It goes on. There is a cross – present tense – in the heart of God.
In our Gospel, we hear how Judas Iscariot left the upper room, intent on betraying Jesus. Why did Judas betray Jesus? Perhaps there was anger there, anger that Jesus had not proved the kind of Messiah that Judas had hoped he would be. If so, there is much of Judas in most of us. Like Judas, we have asked great things of God but our prayers have not been answered, and we are angry too. Our anger still burns, however piously we pretend otherwise. Better to let that anger out and to direct it towards the one place – we shall reach it on Good Friday – where it can be extinguished.
Jesus Christ, the suffering servant, still gives his back to those who strike him. The First World War army chaplain Studdert Kennedy witnessed men being slaughtered like cattle. That experience blew to bits his complacent faith in a God somehow above it all, untouched by our misery. There in the trenches he became convinced that if Christ’s passion tells us anything, it tells us what God is like.
Father, if he, the Christ, were thy revealer,
Truly the first begotten of the Lord,
Then must thou be a suff’rer and a healer,
Pierced to the heart by the sorrow of the sword.
Then must it mean, not only that thy sorrow
Smote thee that once upon the lonely tree,
But that today, tonight, and on the morrow,
Still it will come, O Gallant God, to thee.
(‘The Suffering God’)
One word more about Judas Iscariot. John does not resolve the paradox of Judas. Satan has ‘entered’ Judas and he does what Satan requires of him. But what Satan requires of Judas is also what Jesus tells him to do. If Judas was angry, that was not the whole story. That story is unfinished and its loose ends remain. Better to live with the loose ends than to try to tie them up too soon.
Maundy Thursday
Exodus 12.1–4 (5–10), 11–14; 1 Corinthians 11.23–26; John 13.1–17, 31b–35
GETTING DOWN
On the 5th July 1941 the troopship HMS Anselm was struck by a torpedo. The torpedo hit the hold on C deck where scores of men were sleeping. The hold swiftly began filling with water. The ship was soon listing. At any moment it might sink. The stairway had been blown away. There was no means of escape for all those trapped. At the entrance above, a man in a dressing gown joined the others looking down into the hold. He asked to be lowered into the hold. They tried to dissuade him, but he insisted. He said that he must be with his men. His name was Herbert Pugh. He was an airforce chaplain. So they lowered him into the hold. Those above saw him praying with the doomed men. Then they fled to the boats. Moments later the ship plunged and sank. Herbert Pugh was awarded, posthumously, the George Cross.
One image from that story has stayed with me since I first heard it – the image of one who chose to go down into dark waters and to let those waters engulf him. Jesus chose to do that when he was baptized. He sealed that choice on the first Maundy Thursday, when he refused a last chance to save himself, when he consented to go down into the dark waters of our sins and our sorrows and to let those waters close over him.
In Holy Week we are with Jesus on his journey. That journey began long before Palm Sunday; long before he began his ministry; long before he was born or conceived. The journey of Jesus began in the heart of God before time began. From all eternity, God was in Christ on his way to win us back to himself. ‘Love came down at Christmas’ – yes, but that love was coming down all along. That is what love does. Love comes down. That is love’s trajectory.
Tonight we watch one moment on the journey that began in the heart of God. Jesus gets down. All along, that has been the direction of his journey; the journey that took him from his father’s side, the journey that brought him to our broken earth, the journey that brought him to birth at Bethlehem, the journey that dragged him down beneath those lethal waters at his baptism, the journey that led him to Jerusalem, the journey that brings him tonight to a dirty floor, where dogs scavenge for scraps, where slaves kneel to wash filthy feet.
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