Good Friday = Christmas = Incarnation 2023
John Shea tells the story of a midnight Christmas Eve
service in which the priest, an older fellow, begins his sermon in a barely
audible volume, people leaning in to catch just what he is saying. When all of
a sudden he is thundering like a freight train running down the center aisle,
“The wood of the crib is the wood of the cross!” Which is to say, Christmas and
Good Friday celebrate the very same reality – and that reality is what we refer
to as The Incarnation of God. God comes to us as one of us, as a person. Jesus,
who like all of us, was born imago Dei – the image of God. The wood of
the cross is the wood of the crib! [i]
As evangelist John begins the tale, “In the beginning was
the Logos, the Word; and the Word was with God; and the Word was God…” And
this Word comes to dwell among us – literally, the word for “dwell” means to
set up one’s tent to “tent among us.” Let the theologians try to explain this.
As my friend and mentor Walter Brueggemann often says, “Only modern liberals
try to explain all of this! We are meant to let these words, these stories,
work on our imaginations so that we might imagine that life as we know it
can be other than what it is!”
Whether or not you want to think of the Logos, the Word,
Jesus is God incarnate, or is the Son of God, as a kind of Imago Dei Incarnate,
or simply a young man who was capable of inspiring all kinds of people to live
their lives differently than what they had been before meeting Jesus for the
first time. Whatever Incarnation means for Jesus, for the rest of us it means
transformation – we come to Jesus and suddenly, inexplicably, we find ourselves
changed.
And one truly amazing dimension of all of this is this: we
can meet Jesus in others, in one another. Or, even in a stranger. Because Jesus
lives in and through us all. Because Jesus lives a life that, as he says the
night before he dies, he is returning to that place from whence we all come –
God. God which is Love, capital “L.” Jesus realizes in that crystalline moment
when he come up out of the River Jordan, and the ruach of God, God’s
Breath, God’s Spirit, descends and rests upon him “like a dove,” and he hears
the words, “This is my Beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.”He is
changed. A little later this voice adds, “Listen to him!” Good Friday is
the time to listen.
Sometime in the thirteenth century, a young woman left her
affluent family’s home in Assisi, Italy, to meet a young man named Francis. It
was like meeting Jesus for the first time. Until then Jesus had been a name at
church, a character in a bunch of odd and wonderful stories. But somehow or
other, Jesus was incarnate in Francis who had given up a life of affluence to
serve among the poor, the homeless, the halt and the lame. The young woman’s
name was Clare. She gave up all her family had to offer to spend her life with
Jesus. With Christ. With God’s anointed.
Other women joined her, meeting Jesus for the first time in
the kind of life Clare chose to live. They became an enclosed community of
women who live the life of Franciscans, the Order of Saint Clare, or the Poor
Sisters. All of which brings us back to the hard wood of the cross, which is
also the hard wood of the crib, the manger – an animal’s feeding trough.
The Roman cross upon which Jesus was crucified itself
represents the escalating violence of human history. In Genesis chapter 4,
Cain, a farmer, kills a shepherd, his brother Abel with a rock. From that
moment on, violence and weaponry advanced. In A Short History of Progress,
Ronald Wright notes: “From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron
took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only
3,000…Now is our last chance to get the future right.” [ii]
Getting our future right is represented by The Way of non-violence of Jesus.
The Empire, all Empires, know that they cannot survive were a movement of
non-violence to supplant the evolution of escalating violence that now seems to
be escalating at an alarming pace. Francis and Clare of Assisi are among those
of us who recognized the necessity to follow in the Way of Christ. A bare cross
without the crucified Christ does not allow us to see the whole picture of our
past and our hopes for a future.
This is why when people wanted to get closer with God,
closer with Jesus, and closer to their true selves, Clare urged them to spend
time daily before the Cross of Christ. A crucifix with the body of Christ on
the cross. Clare insisted that when one sits before the cross and looks at
Jesus, we can finally see who we really are created to be – people, created
imago Dei, as he was; people, who come from Love and return to Love, for God is
Love; people who are God’s Beloved with whom God is pleased; people who walk in
the non-violent Way of Christ.
Contemplating the cross of Christ, we can suddenly come to
see ourselves on that cross as people, who like Jesus, embody the Love of God
for all people and all creation. Clare would say that the Christ on the hard
wood of the cross is the mirror in which we can see who we really are – what it
truly means to be imago Dei.
One of the women in the thirteenth century who wrote to
Clare for support and insight on how one follows Jesus was a princess, Agnes of
Prague. Agnes, of course, is a name rooted in angus, Latin for lamb – as
John the Baptist would cry out, “Behold the lamb of God!” whenever Jesus
would walk by. As Clare’s life was nearing its end, or its beginning as she
would soon return to the source of all Love, Clare seeks to focus Agnes on the
goal to follow The Lamb, that agnus Dei, wherever he goes! And where he goes is
through the Golden Gate into Jerusalem to confront the Empire of escalating
violence. In her fourth and final letter to Agnes Clare writes:
“…you…are wonderfully wedded to the spotless
Lamb who takes away the sins of the world, for you have laid aside all the
vanities of this world.
She is certainly
happy
Who has been chosen
to drink at this banquet
In order to cleave
with all her heart to him,
At whose beauty all
the blessed hosts of heaven
Unceasingly wonder,
Whose love stirs to
love,
Whose contemplation
remakes,
Whose kindliness
floods,
Whose sweetness
fills,
Whose memory glows
gently,
Whose fragrance
brings the dead to life again,
The glorious vision
of whom
Will make all the
citizens of the Jerusalem above
Most blessed,
He is the splendour
of eternal glory,
The brightness of
everlasting light
And an unspotted
mirror.
Gaze into this mirror every day, O Queen, Bride of Jesus
Christ, and constantly see your own face reflected in it, so that you may adorn
your whole being, within and without, in richly decorated robes. Adorn yourself
as is only fitting, with virtues like flowers, and garments every bit as ornate
as those of the daughter and dearly Beloved of the Most High King.
For in that mirror, shine blessed poverty, holy humility,
love beyond words as – by the grace of God- you can contemplate in the whole
mirror.
Turn you mind, I say, to the border of this mirror; to the
poverty of him who was placed in a manger and wrapped in tiny garments. O
wonderful humility! O astounding poverty! The King of Angels, the Lord of
heaven and earth, rests in a manger…At the edges of that same mirror,
contemplate the love beyond words through which He chose to suffer on the Tree
of the Cross and, on that same Tree, to die the most disgraceful death of any….
Let us respond to Him with one voice, one spirit, crying out and grieving: I
hold this memory in my mind and my spirit faints within me. So may you always
catch fire more and more strongly from this burning love, O Queen of the
heavenly King.” [iii]
The hard wood of the manger is the hard wood of the cross!
As we gaze upon His Cross, what do we see? The babe wrapped in swaddling cloths,
looking up at his young mother? The young man who set out to transform a
warped, brutal and dangerous world of ever escalating violence into the world
of his Father’s Love? A young man hung among other criminals for daring to live
into what it means to be imago Dei, made in the image of God?
Can we see our true selves in Him? Mortal yet eternal.
Wayward yet ever seeking to walk in His Way. Do we look at Jesus on the cross
and experience our very own Belovedness? Do we see just how much God loves us
and is pleased with us? Good Friday is Good because we take this time out from
a world of escalating violence to look into the mirror on the Cross of Christ
and catch glimpses of just who Jesus really is. And just who we really are! We
have this time together today to do this. It is just a few moments in the scope
of our day. But it is enough. It is enough to transform us for a lifetime. And
in being so transformed, the world itself is brought that much closer to
becoming a world of God’s love for all people, all creatures, and the very
Earth itself
Life as we know it can be other than it is.
“So may you always catch fire more and more strongly from
His burning love.”
The wood of the crib is the wood of the cross.
Amen.
[i]
Shea, John, Starlight (Crossroads, NY:1992) p.148-149
[ii]
Crossan, John & Sarah Sexton Crossan, Resurrecting Easter (Harper One,
NY:2018) p.183
[iii]
Downing, Sr, Frances Teresa, O.S.C. (Tau Publishing, Phoenix, Az:2012) p.83-89
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