As we come to Holy Week and Easter we have come to the climax of the Great Story of the holy God rescuing a rebellious world. Thinking about the Story, I see that in one telling it begins with irony. In the Garden our first parents try to seize the very prerogatives and nature of God as their own. What was it that the Serpent told them? “Take and eat. Surely you will not die, but you will become like God.” The irony is found in the fact that what they would take by force or claim by right God had intended to give to them all along. Think of the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son: “all I have is yours.” God had intended to share his glory with us as those created in God’s image. And what we seize rather than freely receive, we pervert.
In a way, the whole sorry history of the world can be seen in terms of laying claim to what should be God’s gift. We long for the power of God’s Kingdom, but we use our power to dominate others. We seek a life of the abundance of God’s blessing, but we are caught in the endless pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and comfort. We yearn for an eternal and unconditional love, but we do not love as we have been loved, expressing love that is all too often intemperate and transitory. All we seek is to be found in God and his gifts, but we would claim these blessings by right, taken by force, on our own terms.
It is this ironic history of seizing the gift that finds its climax in Jesus’ death and resurrection. It is here that the cycle of enmity and avarice is stopped, and a new possibility for history begins. For the one who could claim the glory as his own sets aside his prerogatives, that the gift of God may be that again, sheer gift. As Paul told the Corinthian Christians, “Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.”
Here on the Cross his self-emptying comes to its fullness. All of this tragic history unfolding since the Garden is placed on his back. Yet he claims no right, no power, in the face of his tormentors. At the edge of the abyss, he trusts only in the God of grace, without any sense of entitlement: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Jesus relinquishes all to his father, and in that our enthrallment to the irony of history is broken.
But what has been accomplished for us, Jesus has also done in us. In a rapacious world, driven by the pursuit of happiness, power, and wealth, we can stop and say to our God, “into your hands we commend our spirits.” And in thus dying to our sense of entitlement, we are also raised in him into our original inheritance received once again as gift. We taste the glory of resurrection, coming to the True Vine and receiving the Fruit with open hands and receptive hearts. And doing so we hear the words or grace, “Take and eat; this is my body, this is my blood.”
This week, however, the task is to follow Christ and ask where I need to die to my own sense of entitlement. Where do I have to say, “Into your hands I commend my spirit”? As we do, Christ’s new history begins in us, and through us, into the world.
Labels: Holy Week, meditations
