Hope!

Hope

We all want the Good News of the Gospel. We all want to have hope, to dream.

As we enter into the middle of of Holy Week it is easy to forget that the week begins with Hosanna!!!, then quickly turns to Crucify Him, Crucify Him!!!

It is a difficult task to hold these two realities together in our hearts. Our human inclination is to hold onto the Hosanna and the hope of Resurrection without the truth of the Cross and the Crucifixion. It is natural for us all to want to move from the palms of Hosanna to the empty tomb of resurrectin.

We miss the lessons of betrayal on the part of Jesus’s closest friends, the lesson in humility in the washing of feet, and the violent retribution of the empire when we jump from Sunday to Sunday and miss the opportunity for spiritual growth and transformation that Holy Week offers. It is a time of invitation for each of us to look honestly towards the human predicament and the Holy work of God. It is a time when we hold in tension the palms, the cross, and the empty tomb.

To hope is to dream and hopefully we are not done dreaming because God is not dreaming for us to be one human family.

John17: 20 “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

If we can lose the eyes of our dualistic, extremely binary way of seeing the world, then we may move from believing, to knowing, to understanding, and experiencing the deep meaning of Holy Week. With the gaze of that indwelling Holy Spirit, we may come to understand that hope without lament and truth, becomes empty prosperity.

As we gaze upon the cross with our spiritual eyes, we may be able to see the sins of humanity in the body of Jesus that was crucified.

You see Resurrection Sunday without the truth of the Cross becomes nothing but an Easter bunny. The empty tomb sits in the shadow of the cross and in the tension of the human predicament as a symbol of the paradox of humanity: beautifully created within a loving relationship together with the ability to do great harm to one another.

Just as the ideal of America, which is still being realized, sits in the shadow of our violent history. The hope of America becomes empty and sinful prosperity for only a few when we fail to hold in tension the dream of our nation and the truth of our actions towards the first nations people, (the indigenous first inhabitants of the continent)’, and the original sin of slavery. The hope for America is only found when all know and can see and realize the hope of a new day, the freedom to thrive, and the ability to dream. We cannot slogan our way towards the one human family that Jesus prayed for in the Gospel of John, nor one united America. We cannot jump from the palms to the tomb, no more than we can leap over our honest history to America the Beautiful.

We all must face up to the truth that we, humanity, did that to the person of Jesus. We all hold the ability to seek new life or crucify. We all hold the ability to shout both Hosanna and Crucify Him. We all hold the ability to tear down or build up the Beloved Community. We all hold the ability to build walls and barriers or work to co-create the new Kingdom that Jesus tells us God is working on in our current time and place in history.

This is the lesson of Holy Week.

Hope without lament, without truth, becomes empty prosperity.

But alas!

The Tomb sits empty, and God has taken the violence of the crucifixion and has put the Body, which humanity broke, back together.

The body is broken,

The spirit has been spilled,

The Tomb sits empty.

Even in the shadow of the cross.

God says NO!!

You cannot take My love out of this world.

Holy Week is not a jump, or a leap, but yet another invitation into and within the journey towards transformation and spiritual awakening. It is the journey from the Cross to the Tomb. Within the journey is the deeper experiential knowledge of the expanding God of the universe who knows us by name and will never leave our side. Even if we think They look like the gardner.

Now that is hopeful! That is Good News, which we all carry within ourselves.

May we all know the voice of God who calls us, who beckons us forward towards our most beautiful selves.

Most of all we carry the message of hope for all those who feel forgotten and unheard.

May we all know that in the middle of the pain of the Cross, the healing has already begun.