Phone Call

I got an unusual phone call yesterday.

Of course, in my line of work, most of the random phone calls that I receive are unusual in some way.  On occasion, people I have never met will leave messages on my voice mail asking questions ranging from my thoughts about to Scripture to my opinion on the godlessness of the latest Hollywood blockbuster.  I love responding to these messages, because I am always fascinated to hear people wrestle with their faith.  Needless to say, I am also entertained by people’s creative and often surprising interpretations of Scripture and theology.

The call I responded to yesterday started out like any of these other phone calls.  A woman left a message wondering where to find the story of Easter in the Bible.  Thinking it might be a quick conversation, I dialed the number and prepared to give her a simple answer to what I thought was a simple question.  But, when I tried to give her the simple answer (Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20, in case you’re curious), she said “I don’t have a Bible with me.”  It quickly became clear that the call was not what I had expected.  The woman proceeded to ask me, not about Easter, but about Maundy Thursday.  She kept asking, “Why did Jesus have the Last Supper with his disciples?”  I tried to explain the liturgical, theological, and historical significance of the Church’s Eucharistic celebration, but it wasn’t making sense to her.  It seemed that I wasn’t going to be able to help her.

But when I was about to end the phone call, to tell her that I had to attend to other matters, she asked very cautiously, “Do you think that God loves me?”  Oh.  Suddenly I realized that this woman did not call the church to find out where the story of Easter is or why Jesus instituted the Lord’s supper.  She called because she had come to doubt that she was in relationship with God.  While I could have responded to her with Scripture passages and theological treatises, I called her by name and said simply, “Yes.  I know God loves you.”  And then an amazing thing happened.  Through her tears of joy, she professed that she understood everything that had mystified her only a few minutes before.  The stories of Easter and the Last Supper suddenly made sense because she had been reminded that God loved her.

Ultimately, this is what we are called to remember this evening as we celebrate Maundy Thursday.  We remember that Jesus Christ took bread and wine, called them his body and blood, and gave them to his disciples, essentially telling them, “I love you so much that I have given myself to you, not only in this bread and wine, but also in my very body.”  None of our celebrations this week make any sense unless they remind us of God’s deep and transforming love for the world.  I pray that as we enter the next three days, we will remember that love which transforms us and helps us make sense of who we are.

Stations

Over the past several weeks, members of the Church of the Heavenly Rest have been participating in a Lenten program on Wednesday night called “Near the Cross: Exploring the Passion through Many Lenses.”  Every week, we have looked at the death of Jesus from a different perspective, including Scripture, visual art, and music.  Last night, we gathered in the nave of Heavenly Rest and gained a liturgical perspective of the Passion by doing the Stations of the Cross.

The Stations of the Cross is an adaptation of the custom of offering of prayer at a series of places in Jerusalem traditionally associated with our Lord’s passion and death.  In most cases, the congregation processes around the building to designated places in the church, each of which represents a different event from Jesus’ final hours.  There are, for instance, stations that mark the moment when Jesus is condemned by Pilate, the moment the cross is laid on Simon of Cyrene, the moment when Jesus’ dies on the cross, and so on.  Interestingly, there are also stations for events that are not attested to in Scripture: the moment that a woman wipes the face of Jesus, the moment when Jesus falls, and the the moment when Jesus meets his afflicted mother.  While the idea of commemorating events in the life of Jesus that do not occur in Scripture may make some uncomfortable, the Stations of the Cross is not about giving a factual presentation of the Passion, it is about allowing participants to experience how the Passion might have felt.  In this regard, the Scriptural allusions selected for the Stations are not quotations from the gospels, but draw from the entire bible.  The station where the body of Jesus is placed in the arms of his mother (one of the non-Scriptural stations) is a good example:

All you who pass by, behold and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow.  My eyes are spent with weeping; my soul is in tumult; my heart is poured out in grief because of the downfall of my people.  “Do not call me Naomi (which means Pleasant), call me Mara (which means Bitter); for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.”

In this station, the words of the Lamentations of Jeremiah and Naomi’s lament from the book of Ruth are put on the lips of a mother who has lost her baby boy.  Though we cannot know what Jesus’ mother was thinking as he was crucified, the Stations of the Cross invites us to imagine how we might feel if we stood in Mary’s place.

I’ll be honest; I have always found the Stations of the Cross to be challenging.  Not only have I been uncomfortable with commemorating non-Scriptural events, Stations of the Cross also has a tendency to make me physically uncomfortable.  By the end of the devotion, the small of my back begins to ache and I start limping on account of my bum knee.  And in some ways, this is the point of the devotion.  The Stations of the Cross connects us to the death of Jesus in a deeply physical way; it invites us to bring the Passion of our Lord into our bodies.  I don’t mean to suggest that our aches mirror the pain that Jesus suffered; rather, our embodiment of the Passion helps us to understand it on another level.  This is part of the reason that we are invited to fast during Lent.  When we make Lent part of our physical nature, we have the opportunity to connect to God’s love for us in a new and different way.  Rather than attempting to understand it, Lent invites us to feel the grace and love of God.