Here we are. We have participated in the telling of our Lord's final meal, his betrayal and arrest, and his trial, his torture, his death on the cross. We are beginning the most holy week of the year for those who have chosen to follow Jesus Christ as our Savior. We know that a week from today we will celebrate Jesus' bursting from the tomb. We know the resurrected Jesus will transform his dispirited disciples. We know through the power of God he will triumph over evil and death.
Yes, the joy of the resurrected Christ will come, but not today. Today we are asked to live into the mystery that surrounds an important question: What does Jesus' suffering and death, his passion, mean? Or another way of asking this question is: Why did Jesus need to suffer and die?
At first today we heard and sang “Hosanna!” Then we heard ourselves calling out, “Let him be crucified!” We heard Jesus' anguished cry, feeling abandoned by God, and the centurion's recognizing Jesus as God's Son. And finally we heard about the new tomb holding Jesus' broken, dead body being sealed shut.
What purpose lay in all these distressful events? What is the mystery into which we have to live to understand them?
That mystery is the mystery of God. On this day and through this week, we have the possibility to go deep. To come to know the Holy One who sustains us, who loves us, who came to live as a human being, who obeyed and offered himself in love to defeat the power of death-dealing evil.
The mystery of God cannot be found in theology or in Bible study or even in preaching. All these inform our journey into the mystery, but they are not the mystery. Experiencing the mystery of God—our Creator who redeems us and sustains us—comes from encountering the living God in a moment out of chronos, out of human time. It comes in kairos, a moment in the time of God.
Jesus sent his disciples to secure a place where they could share the Passover meal by telling them to say, “Go into the city to a certain man, and say to him, 'The Teacher says, my time [kairos] is near.'”
Was participating in the dramatic reading of Matthew's passion gospel a kairos moment for us, an experience of the mystery of God? It may have been. Will receiving the body and blood of Christ at the Eucharist be such a time? Will it come some day this week in prayer or in worship? It may.
May God grant us such moments this week. For in these moments our lives become caught up in the mystery of God. Words may fail us, but we will know . . . we will know.
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