Holy Week at South Bay Christian Church of Redondo Beach

Maundy Thursday: 7:30 p.m.

Easter Sunrise Service: 6:30 a.m.

Breakfast

Easter Celebration: 10:30 a.m.

All are welcome!

Sunday, April 9: Palm Sunday, Passion Sunday

Click here to read John 12:12-16.

This is the day that the Lord has made. This is the day the solemnity of Lent gives way to shouts of Hosanna. This is the day that Jesus enters Jerusalem through a gate of jubilant worshippers, crouching on his donkey beneath a canopy of tender palm branches.

And this is the day that we can neither deny nor ignore that the man celebrated as King of Israel is processing to his death. Today is Palm Sunday, but it is also Passion Sunday. The hosannas we proclaim today cannot be separated from the tears of mourning we will shed in the coming week.

We do not share the perspective of the crowd in this text. We do not hope against hope that this triumphant entry means that God has finally sent a King to shoo out the Romans and reestablish an Israelite Kingdom. We remember this joyful entry from the weathered perspective of the Disciples, who themselves only understood these events after the death and resurrection of Christ. Which is to say that we know where this is going.

We know that the good favor of this crowd will abruptly shift direction, and that within the week, the Son of God incarnate will be beaten and nailed to a cross.

One of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, made a confession a few years ago. “I don’t have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion. I’d like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday School who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside an open tomb: everlasting life and a box of chocolates.” I think Lamott speaks here for a lot of mainline Protestants. We don’t do well with bloodied crucifixes. We gather on Maundy Thursday, for sure, to commemorate the meal that is the marrow of our spiritual journey. But Good Friday— we’d rather stay home. Many years I’ve let Holy Week come and go without actually reading the texts that recount Jesus’ suffering and death.

I still haven’t seen Mel Gibson’s movie about the Passion of the Christ—in part because I disagree with his decision to explore Jesus’ death outside of the context of his life, but in part because I just plain can’t bear to see a man torn to shreds, even if the wounds are cinematic. Last week when the Los Angeles Times featured photographs of injured soldiers in an article about military medical care, I had to bury the front page under the classified section just so I could eat my breakfast. I don’t like blood, I don’t like violence, I don’t like death.

And yet, as the esteemed theologian Jurgen Moltmann proclaims, “Good Friday is the center of the world.” I don’t want to believe this. I don’t want to believe that the crucifixion of an innocent man is the nucleus of human life, that pain and more pain is at the core of existence.

But if we’re going to be honest, we cannot deny that suffering is persistent. We cannot pretend that every heart that beats will not eventually decelerate to one final cadence. We cannot make believe that people don’t abuse and exploit one another. We cannot pretend that life is all Hosannas when there is so much evidence to the contrary.

Last week, my sister’s friends lost their 9-month old son to a rare genetic disease. He became sick about a month ago, and despite all the best medical care, there simply wasn’t anything that could be done to save his life. In the midst of little Ethan’s brief and tragic bout with the illness, his two-year-old brother Andy fell ill with the same symptoms and diagnosis. The parents cannot simply return home in grief; they must stay on at the hospital to sit vigil with another sick child. What they have discovered, though, is that Ethan’s struggle with the disease taught the doctors a great deal about how to treat Andy.

In a message to concerned family and friends, the boys’ father wrote that they “have started to wonder if Ethan's purpose in his short life was to give us joy and Andy the gift of life.”

My heart has been heavy for this family. I cannot fathom the intensity of their grief. And yet I know who can. We know that Jesus suffered and died at Calvary. We know that his mother wept for his pain and sorrow. And I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that the One who released Christ into this world wept alongside her. The One who created the moon and stars lamented the death of his beloved Son with the same heart-wrenching and powerless grief that every parent who loses a child experiences.

But currents of hope are coursing beneath the surface of even the most senseless tragedies. The promise of a newly sung Hosanna survives even the darkest hour of Good Friday. The agonizing question of “Why did this happen” finally comes to rest on one muscular word: love.

Just as Ethan lived and died to give joy and the gift of life to his family, Jesus Christ lived and died to give joy and the gift of life to the whole world.

The paradox of this Holy Week is that the depth of God’s sorrow revealed the depth of God’s love. Suffering and death were at the center of the world long before that Roman cross was planted at Golgatha for our Savior to die. What changed on Good Friday is that God entered the heart of pain and infused it with pure and holy love.

I am afraid that this appeal to love has all the effect of a Hallmark greeting card. I am afraid that this word has been bankrupted once and for all. I am afraid that we are so jaded that we might dare roll our eyes at the wondrous love of Christ.

But if a grieving father can locate his dead son’s purpose in the gift of life he bestowed upon his brother – if God himself can stand in solidarity with humans by bearing the cross of ultimate pain and humiliation – perhaps we can trust that a profound and transformative love is darting around the periphery of even the most unbearable circumstances.

We cannot erase the cross from Holy Week. We cannot ride the sea of Hosannas to the shores of Easter morning. We cannot avert our eyes from the crown of thorns. The Palms become Passion, and there isn’t a thing we can do to stop it.

But in light of this wrecked humankind, I don’t know if we would give up the cross after all. What good is a God who stays on his heavenly throne when the world he created is overrun with evil? What good is a God who keeps a safe distance from death? What good is a God who doesn’t love us enough to share the burden?

Hosannas alone are not enough to redeem humankind. And in Christ Jesus, we have a King who will ride a donkey to his death to save even the ones who will betray him. We have a God who exchanges hospitality and Hosannas for suffering, sacrifice, and solidarity.

I pray that this week we will have the courage to face the cross. No one has a Good Friday personality. No one longs to sit vigil as death suffocates life. But the vigil we keep this week will not end in the grave. Easter is just around the corner. The resurrection is on the horizon, carrying with it the promise of new life for all Creation. So face the cross, sisters and brothers. Face it and witness God’s love.

Amen.

Sunday, April 2: The Hour Has Come

Click here to read Psalm 51, and here to read John 12: 20-33.

The hour has come.

The Jesus we encounter in today’s gospel reading is finally standing in the shadow of the cross. The unavoidable culmination of his life and ministry is mere hours away. Never in his life had so many people celebrated him. Next week we will recall the blitz of Hosannas that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem. Even the Greeks longed to see the Holy Man from Nazareth. According to the wisdom of the world, Jesus was at the top of his game.

Yet just as the loaves of bread had to be torn into pieces to feed the multitude, so too did the Son of Man have to be broken to draw all people to him. Again and again in this Lenten season we are reminded that the wisdom of God turns our common sense into dust. This talk of losing one’s life to save it just doesn’t mass muster with human logic.

The analogy of the seed should alleviate our bewilderment. The seed must be buried in the soil before it can produce new growth. The simple miracle of germination transforms tiny seeds into fields of wheat. But there isn’t a very clean comparison, biologically speaking, between a grain of wheat and a human being. For wheat, the ground is a fertile source of new life. For a man, the ground is the dwelling place of death, the realm of the grave. Yet Jesus would have us believe that falling into the earth and dying has the same fruitful effect as planting the year’s crop. Only the life that will emerge from this spiritual harvest will be eternal.

Eternal life in the presence of God. This is quite a harvest. And an invitation to this feast is issued to every last one of God’s beloved children. The cameo appearance of the curious Greeks is a testament to the scope of God’s intentions. The elect—those chosen to receive God’s full mercies—turns out include a whole lot more people than suspected. Indeed, it is in this scripture from the gospel of John that we catch a glimpse of the radical inclusivity at the heart of the gospel.

Jesus will be lifted up. He will be lifted up onto the cross in a humiliating scene of suffering and shame. He will be buried in a tomb for three days. But then he will be lifted up again to the great glory of God. And when he is lifted from the earth, first to die and ultimately to live, he will draw all people to himself.

I’m not making this up. St. John isn’t making this up. Jesus publicly proclaims this unexpected revelation to the crowd: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

All people—all people!—will be embraced by the outstretched arms of the Son of God. All people will find themselves in the awkward position of being loved by him, regardless of whether they ignored him, rejected him, or loved him back.




There will be a judgment. In fact, that judgment has occurred already, when Jesus was lifted up to his death. The depth of human sinfulness was displayed in all its gory colors the day that the Son of God was crucified. “Now is the judgment of this world,” Jesus says. “Now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” The whole of Creation was torn asunder by disobedience and corruption, and the whole of Creation is to blame.

But remember the good news— the Son of God was sent not to condemn the world but to save it. All people are drawn to Christ—all people face him as the rightful judge of a broken world. And all people will discover that this judge cannot bear to condemn a single soul. This judge surrendered his life to plant the seeds of the Kingdom of God in the temperamental soil of the human heart. Nothing we do can convince him to withhold his abundant, life-giving grace from us. There is no way to escape God’s insatiable love.

If we recognize the full depth of God’s love, if we experience the dizzying height of his mercy, we cannot help but respond. The life and death of Jesus Christ has to inform our own lives. An honest response to the wondrous love of Christ is to recognize that our lives are no longer our own. We cannot love our lives so much that we protect our energies for ourselves and those within our intimate circles. Our lives must be turned over to Christ. Whoever serves me must follow me, he warns.

There is perhaps nothing more terrifying than surrendering one’s life to God. The instinct toward self-preservation and self-service is deeper than any cultural habit. Here we are asked to do what seems impossible—to voluntarily assume the posture of servants. Here we realize that the new commandment to love, love, and love some more is drastic. We are supposed to love the way Jesus loves. And Jesus’ love for Creation didn’t win him an automatic pass to the Right Hand of the Father. His love pressed him down into the earth like a lowly grain of wheat.

There are so many reflections of Christ’s love among the Saints of the church, so many people who allowed God’s grace to transform them into servants molded in the path of Christ. Father Henri Nouwen was one of the most celebrated Christian writers of the 20th century. He wrote extensively about Christian spirituality, yet shocked his students by giving up his comfortable job teaching at Yale University to become a caregiver for persons with severe disabilities. He spent the final years of his life feeding and bathing mentally retarded men who couldn’t read a word he had written. Yet those men experienced the Christian love Nouwen had written about so profoundly.

Just yesterday, the Los Angeles Times featured the obituary of a woman who became famous for the humblest of vocations: she taught Sunday School for 80 years, retiring soon after her 108th birthday. In this day and age in which self-promotion and fame-seeking has reached a fever pitch, it is no small miracle that a simple church woman whose joy was to share the gospel with 2nd-graders made it into the big city newspaper. Even the world marvels at men and women who faithfully surrender their lives to the glory of God.

The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. And the hour has come for us to decide if we want to be a part of this journey through death into life. Can we die to selfishness so we can live in Christ? Can we echo David’s impassioned cry for God to do for him what he cannot do for himself? “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” All people are invited on this journey from cross to grave and from grave to sky. Are we up for the severe mercy of God’s compassion? Are we prepared to become as seeds, hidden in the fertile ground of God’s love? The hour to decide has come.