Doesn’t it seem strange to you how normal everything is today?
I mean, here we are at what it is arguably one of the most
holy days of the Christian year… especially when teamed up with Holy Saturday
and Easter Sunday for what we traditionally call the “Triduum” or “The Great
Three Days”… and yet nothing is different.
If I wanted to, I could have stopped at the bank, the post
office, and the grocery store on the way to or home from church. Maybe you will
too, buying last-minute groceries or stuff for the (grand-) kids Easter
baskets.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not here to rail against the
unpiety of the culture or some such righteous nonsense. My point is not to
shame people who have lives to live and very little time to get stuff done. God
forbid! As you’ve heard me mention before, I certainly remember growing up in
New England in the last days of the old Blue Laws where the state enforced the
closing of business on certain religious holidays. But this is not an exercise
in nostalgia, either. It’s just an observation. And one that I think is worth
noting.
Because, as much as some might say, this is not new. The
world has been going about it’s business while God has been doing God’s work
right before our eyes since time immemorial.
When I was a kid, my home parish, the Church of the Good
Shepherd in Hartford, CT, would take part in a public stations of the cross
with the other churches in the downtown of Connecticut’s capital city. It was
the 1960’s, and influenced by the civil rights movement and the peace movement,
the churches would do the fourteen stations of the cross around what was then a
bustling commercial, business, and governmental downtown, stopping at the
Federal Courthouse, the main offices of big banks and the headquarters of
insurance companies, the city jail and police department, the juvenile hall,
and so on. You get the idea. And even then, as we processed with our cross and
led by clergy in vestments, and reading scriptures and saying prayers, people
would bustle past us, buses would stop and go, horns would honk… the world was
going on about it’s business.
One of my favorite American artists, Allan Rohan Crite, the
late 20th century African-American artist from Boston, who was an
Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian, and he not only created the covers for my parish’s
weekly bulletins, he drew the passion a lot. And he typically located it, as
with all his Biblical scenes, in the middle of the city, in downtowns,
neighborhoods, and tenements. One of his renderings of the stations has stayed
with him since adolescence. It showed Jesus carrying his cross through a modern
busy city of the 1940’s, people rushing past to and fro, hardly aware of the
African American man carrying a cross, scarred and barely dressed, wearing a
crown of thorns.
And that is not far from the truth. Because in the busy
world of downtown Jerusalem, ruled by the Roman Empire, crucifixions were a
dime a dozen. They executed their condemned on the roads into the walled city
to attract attention, but they were as part of background every bit as much as
billboards are today. We see them, sort of… but few stand out, and mostly they
just block the view.
No, the crucifixion of Jesus was just the business of the
day. Except to his followers, friends, and family… and certainly Jesus…! It was
nothing special.
But not for God
It is precisely in the midst of the everyday… the everyday
business, the everyday boredom, the everyday cynicism, the everyday cruelty..
of human life that God placed Jesus and in the midst of such sin that we are so
used to that we hardly even notice, where God stakes a redemptive claim. Here
is where it ends. Here is where love conquers hate. Here is where it
ceases to divide us from God, each other, and ourselves. Here is where
death ends even on a cross planted on a busy thoroughfare where traffic buzzed
past.
This is where God does redeeming work: The Passion happens
in a busy city going about it’s business.
The sign of that victory will come on the third day.
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