God, who we see

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S EAST BENTLEIGH

MAUNDY THURSDAY

(THURSDAY  31^st March) 1988

 

Where are you Lord? Sometimes it seems I battle on for weeks and months, there have been years, without the feeling of your presence with me. I have yelled in the darkness “Come to me” and all I hear is the echo of my own voice fading in the night. Where are you Lord? It would be so much easier if there were at convenient times a sign, my own private pillar of cloud by day or fire by night that I could follow in the knowledge that you, Lord, were there. Sometimes I see a rainbow and my heart leaps, until the voice of rationalism within me explains that it is, after all, only the spectrum of white light passed through a prism.

Is it only I, Lord, who cries out to see your face? “Sir, we would see Jesus,” requested some Greeks of the disciples. And Thomas, even poor doubting, human Thomas, at least got to place his hands into the wounds of the risen Lord so that he could know for himself that the resurrection was no fairytale. Where are you now Lord, so that I may touch your wounds?

I wonder if your chosen people, the Jews, ever cried – or cry – out to find you in the darkness. Isn’t it strange, even those who did have the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night as they wandered through the desert rebelled and deserted you. Is it so strange that I should cry out and doubt you in the deserts of my life?

And what of the later Jews? Or of the Jews today? They will be celebrating Passover this week. As they celebrate, each household will believe the events of the original Passover to be recreated and made present in their home. They will know again the slaying of the first-born sons of the Egyptians and the merciful passing over of their own first-born. They will know again the passing through the Reed Sea and the closing of the waters behind them, their escape with God’s help from their pursuers. They will know again the joy of salvation, of liberation from oppression. All those years. All those centuries. So long a time has passed since those events of the Exodus and yet they continue to celebrate, continue to re-create and to re-joice in the event today as though they were there.

And in a sense they were.

Even Jesus celebrated the Passover. Matthew, Luke and Mark tell us that the Last Supper was the Passover meal. John sets that final meal on the night before the Passover, and we must accept and understand that each author had his reasons. But certainly Jesus as a Jew and as the first-born son in a Jewish household would have participated in, and, after the death of Joseph, presided over the celebration of the Passover. Is it an accident that John tells us that Jesus knew that he had to “pass over” from this world to the father”? It’s uncanny. That was the night that poor, misguided Judas betrayed him. And Jesus washed the disciples’ feet that night. My goodness, he must have known what was about to take place. And Jesus somehow seemed to know that his own passover  had come, his passing over from life to death, and in him the passing over of the world from death to life.

The disciples must have wondered what was going on that night. John tells us that Jesus is saying that it is an act of perfect love to wash the feet of a sister or a brother. God is love. Does God wash feet? When Mother Teresa cradles the grimy body of a dying child in Calcutta is that a taste of love, a taste of God? And Jesus also seems to be saying at the Last Supper that one must be washed by him in order to be a part of him. Is that a reference to baptism?

Ah, if I could but see and talk with Jesus. There would be so much that I would ask him. Then surely I would weep, knowing fully my blindness and my shortcomings, confessing my doubts and my more than occasional despair. It’s strange, too, how traditionally this day, Maundy Thursday, has been a time of readmission of penitents back into the folds of the church. Many, countless people must have wept tears of grief and joy on this day as they re-entered the communion from which they were estranged. They must feel a little like the prodigal son, returning to the father in shame, only to receive the fatted calf, and to be clothed in the best of jewellery, clothes, and shoes.

I suppose every time we see an act of forgiveness like that we see something of the face of God, something of the loving nature of God?

And there’s another thing, too. It is from communion from which those estranged from the church are barred. John doesn’t tell us, but our reading from Paul does, and so too the accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke: on that last night with his disciples Jesus took bread, and blessed it, broke it, and distributed it amongst his disciples, and took wine and did likewise. He called it a memorial. A memorial of him. It’s funny that he uses the same word that the Jews use of the Passover celebrations.

More than merely remembering the events, but actually making them present, making them happen again whenever and wherever you participate in them. Does that mean that every time a priest in our midst re-presents those actions of Jesus that we can really know Jesus in our midst? That we can truly see Jesus? No wonder that Paul tells us that each time we perform these actions of taking, blessing, breaking and giving that we are proclaiming the death – and I guess too the resurrection – of Jesus to the world. Could it be that the very Eucharist itself – or Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion, or Mass, it doesn’t measure what we call it – could it be that the very Eucharist itself is an act of evangelism, a telling to the world that Jesus is risen, that he is alive, that he is Lord?

So then, in the washing of feet, in the reconciliation of penitents, in the Eucharist, do we not see Jesus? And does not Jesus himself say that whoever has seen him, whoever has seen the Son, has seen the Father? No wonder the centurion cries out, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief”!

Where are you Lord? Sometimes, yes, I will feel you there beside me. But most of the time I do not. And yet I cannot leave you because I see your face. I see your face each time I see an act of love like the washing of feet or the cradling of a dying child, or the healing of a broken body. I see your face each time I see a person forgiven or know the remarkable power of forgiveness in my own life. And – and for me this above all – I see your face each time a priest takes bread, blesses it and says your words “this is my body,” and takes a cup and blesses the wine, saying your words, “this is my blood”, and each time I and others present answer “Amen.” Yes, I thank you Lord that when I cannot feel you I can see you.

Blessing and honour and glory and power are yours for ever and ever. Amen.