Holy Week – Peculiar Faith

Saved from Violence: Witness to Solidarity

I still remember rather vividly the O. J. Simpson case back in 1994. The former NFL football player and television personality was accused of murdering his wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman.

On June 17 of that year, Simpson refused to surrender to the authorities and led the Los Angeles police department on a low-speed chase in his white Ford Bronco, and did so for about 60 miles of southern California freeways.

The chase itself was televised live on NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN. An astonishing 95 million people watched it live! It was the highest-rated television broadcast of the year, comparable to the Super Bowl!

Back then, an NPR commentator captured an insight about that moment that seems to have become truer over the decades. Reflecting on the Simpson case—the car chase and the infamous trial that followed—the commentator noted how we have become “audienced,” rendered as passive observers by our media-drenched culture.

That passivity has only become exponentially worse since then: the advent of the Internet, and smart phones, and social media make it nearly impossible now not to be merely an audience. As we scroll through online reels, we might come across a clip of a stand-up comic in one moment and with a simple swipe, we are watching horrific episodes of genocide happening in real time, right there, on our little screens.

It’s hard to say whether our technology has changed us or whether we just have new tools to do what humans have always done. We might recall Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri back in 2014—he was shot by a police officer, who simply stood there and watched him bleed out and die, and many of us watched him do that on television.

Or we might go farther back to the era of Jim Crow segregation and the practice of lynching. Some of those violent episodes took place at church picnics, of all things, when faithful churchgoers shared food at picnic tables while “strange fruit,” as some have called those Black bodies, were hanging from nearby trees.

We can certainly go much farther back, recalling that early Christians described the Cross of Christ as a “tree” and the body of Jesus as its fruit, his blood watering the roots.

Is that how the street mob thought about it, the ones calling for the death of Jesus? Is that how the cohort of religious leaders thought about it? What about the disciples?

What kind of meaning do we make from the violence we witness? Whom do we hold responsible for the violence we witness? When do we cease witnessing and become “audienced”? What kind of people are in that shift? Who, then, have we become?

Public theologian Jon Paul Syndor has recently referred to these times in which we live as an age of “performative cruelty”: children ripped from their parents’ arms by government officials, immigrants warehoused in filthy detention camps, tens of thousands of children buried in the rubble of Gaza, hospitals and schools targeted for bombing—the violence of our age is stark, gripping, and dismaying.

How, Syndor wonders, do so many religious leaders, most of them Evangelical Christians, support such cruelty, visibly and vocally? Why would they ever do so?

Syndor is convinced it’s because of their religious interpretation of the Cross of Christ; they firmly believe that the death-by-torture of Jesus is the means by which God saves us, and so violence will continue to save us today.

That ostensibly pious supposition sounds traditional and even biblical, but I have become convinced that it is instead just bad theology; and bad theology is deadly.

To be clear, I do believe that the cross of Jesus Christ is a symbol of blessing and divine salvation; but I do not believe that God ever uses violence as the means to save anyone or anything. To the contrary, God is committed to saving us from violence, not with violence.

In today’s world of unrelenting violence it is all the more imperative for religious people to be very careful—especially religious people—not even to appear to embrace or endorse violence as a means to an end; as human history shows time and time again, religious faith adds a dimension of justification for the most brutal actions. So we must be as clear as possible about this instead: brutality and torture cannot heal us or anyone; there is nothing soothing, healing, or saving about brutality, whether we commit it ourselves, watch it being done by others, or proclaim it as religious doctrine.

We must never imagine God as violent lest we ourselves embody violence itself.

In my western Michigan parish along the Lake Michigan shoreline, we include an opportunity in our Good Friday liturgy to venerate an image of the Cross of Christ. The cross we use for that purpose is made from driftwood found on the beach near where the sanctuary sits—a tangible reminder that God is committed to saving us from violence not only in first-century Judea but also right here, today.

That moment of veneration must include, I believe, a commitment to stand firm in a shared rejection of violence, and to say clearly, in both word and action, every single day and at every moment we can, that violence will not save us.

What is soothing, and healing, and yes, saving, is the God who joins us in our pain and confusion, who stands with us in our foolishness and tragic missteps, the one who dwells among us and travels with us all the way to the cross, and from there to lead us through it toward a bright day of new life.

Christians are never an “audience” in our religious sanctuaries; we are rather witnesses and participants in an ongoing and still unfolding story of God’s own solidarity with us, and how this story shapes us to set aside our violent tendencies, and our brutal nightmares of vengenance, and even our petty resentments that can fester into bitter hositilities. Set all of that aside as we witness the Cross of Christ among us and live in deep solidarity with others, with the vulnerable, with the wounded, and the forgotten.

And that is how God saves, and that is what the Cross means: gracious accompaniment; tender presence; and bold solidarity.

Three Days and One Liturgy for a New World

It’s hard to know what difference it makes, if any. I fuss over sanctuary furniture and proofread too many liturgy leaflets while the world is literally on fire, wondering whether any of this really matters…and then, the three days.

The Christian religion in all its many forms and modes so often gets so terribly mired in institutional banalities, all the arcane terminology, the sheafs of coded language for the “insiders”—even I, with a doctoral degree in theology, have trouble sorting it all out…but then, the three days.

Even with all the complexity of doctrinal history, the multi-layered versions of rites and rubrics in countless prayer books, even in the midst of all that, three profoundly simple and deeply moving days reside right at the heart of Christian faith. We now call them Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Vigil of Easter (or Easter Day itself).

To be sure, these three liturgical days are just as complex and sometimes even more convoluted than anything else in our Christian traditions, but they do present what we might call a “divine starkness,” a laying bare of at least one singular kernel of divine reality: God’s own heart. (Graphic artist Martin French created the poster above for a modern dance company’s retelling of these three days—”triduum,” in Latin—for the sake of a more dynamic, we might say “grittier” narrative arc in which the flesh of God rises up from the truly human.)

I remember vividly the very first Holy Week I marked when I was still in college, which is now quite a long way back in that rear-view mirror. Those high-church, highly-stylized and complex liturgies quite literally changed my life: the ritualized gestures of that week invited me deeper into the rawness of human life and relationships, precisely where we encounter the embodied presence of God. Now, many years later, the planning and organizing and rehearsing that shape this one week feel both overwhelming and exhilarating all at once, which can still pose the question of why any of this might matter for a deeply wounded world.

So I pause just now to remind myself that performative perfection matters less than the textured hope this week might still offer. Surely with the world in disarray, the international order in tatters, Middle East oil fields ablaze, and climate chaos on track like a runaway train, surely now is the time when we need what Christians are on the brink of doing: gathering with companions to remember a final meal shared tenderly with friends, a torturous journey toward a cross of state execution, and the sweet hope that bubbles up like springs of water in a desert: not even a violent death can have the final word with the God of life.

Worship and prayer won’t “fix” things, but I do believe prayer matters—it releases energy and reshapes matter; liturgical prayer can form a people to do work they never imagined attempting; beautifully crafted prayer with multiple colors and sweet odors and lingering melodies can offer a beacon to the wider world, a cautionary light and a hopeful one, maybe even for a brand new and different kind of world.

In preparation for this very day, Maundy Thursday, I’ve been reflecting on a poem by Joy Harjo, the first Native American poet laureate of the United States, who writes about the kitchen table and how the world might end right there. All sorts of worlds come and go, and many of them right there, where we gather to eat.

Perhaps, if we learned better how to set a table with genuine hospitality and welcome, the world of hatred might end. Perhaps, if we stopped trying to monitor and regulate who gets to approach the table, the world of racial bias and gendered hostility might actually and finally end. Perhaps the Table we set in our sanctuaries can bring all sorts of worlds to their well-deserved ending—but what kind of world will come next?

“Last Supper–Passion of the Christ, a Gay Vision,” Doug Blanchard

We might hazard some guesses about the world still to rise up from those ashes, phoenix-like, but just as the risen Jesus was mostly unrecognizable by even his closest friends, the world yet to be born won’t fit in most of our present categories. But we can make room for the birthing—sweeping away all the lingering detritus of failed experiments and violent ruptures and reckless raiding of this precious Earth’s “resources.”

Three days.

My liturgy professor in seminary, Louis Weil, urged his students to think of the ritual observances of these three Holy Days as one continuous liturgy. It begins on Thursday evening, extends throughout the day on Friday, and over the course of a whole Saturday before we arrive to the moment when we declare once again that God’s love is strong, stronger than even death.

Three days.

There are so many ways to mark these holy days, from austere to elaborate. How we observe the one liturgy that stretches over these three days doesn’t matter nearly as much as the hope and intention we bring to them for a new world—for a world of healing, grace, and love. That intention itself in this holiest of weeks can shape how we live the rest of the year. And while I may not be sure of much, of this I’m certain: the wider world needs the shared witness of the Christian Church this week, our witness to the healing love and transformative grace of the Gospel of life.

Shelter to Storm, Crown to Cross: On the Road in Holy Week

We begin a symbol-rich journey tomorrow morning on the first day of the holiest week on the Christian calendar. Much of Holy Week can feel like we’re engaged in a religious version of historical re-enactment—tracing and “performing” the events of the last week of the life of Jesus—but if so, it’s certainly not chronologically tidy.

Biblical accounts of the Gospel likewise resist theologically neatness, too, which makes it almost impossible to focus on what we might want to believe about whatever it is we happen to be doing on any given day of this week—if you observe a service of Tenebrae on Wednesday, for example, you’ll likely be reflecting on the Cross, even though we haven’t had the Maundy Thursday observance of the “last supper” yet.

In addition to the biblical, liturgical, and doctrinal complexity, we now face the cultural chaos of the wider world: bombs falling in the Middle East; “No Kings” rallies around the United States; a new Archbishop of Canterbury “enthroned” for the Anglican Communion; and planetary ecosystems devolving into climatic chaos faster (much faster) than scientists had predicted (and that’s a short list).

The title of that wonderful 2022 film notwithstanding, we can’t think of “everything everywhere all at once,” but we can take one step a time, with biblical stories in one hand and liturgical texts in the other—and especially with the deep breathing and gentle accompaniment of companions to travel with us along the road.

Even more, I’ve realized over the years that the Holy Week journey is made richer by choosing just one image or a single vignette or a narrative arc among the many stories we’ll hear and then letting that carry me through the week into Easter Day. This year, I’m intrigued by the image of a road, and a particular one at that: the one from the village of Bethany to the city of Jerusalem.

The lectionary this year has been giving us a series of stories from John’s account of the Gospel on these Lenten Sundays, and last week’s was one of my favorites: the raising of Lazarus from the dead (11:1-45).

The small village of Bethany—just about four miles or so from Jerusalem along a road that crosses the Mt. of Olives—was apparently a place of rest and renewal for Jesus in the home of Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha. That quiet spot was sufficiently removed from the urban hustle-and-bustle of Jerusalem (including all the religious intrigue and imperial adornments) that I can easily imagine Jesus relishing that spot as a place to take a deep breath and leave his worries behind, at least for a short while, whenever he spent time with that family of friends.

Having lived for many years in the metro-urban San Francisco Bay Area, moving five years ago to Michigan in the lakeshore resort of Saugatuck felt luxurious. This beautiful shoreline region certainly qualifies as a type of “Bethany” for me, and I am so grateful to be living and working in a place that offers both comfort and renewal in so many different ways, not least the trees, and dunes, and the lake itself.

Tomorrow morning, Palm Sunday, the lectionary Gospel narrative pivots away from the Bethany of renewal toward the Jerusalem of confrontation. This particular day on the liturgical calendar, the one that begins Holy Week, carries a rather awkward liturgical title: “The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.” Well, which is it? Do we engage with the story of the suffering and death of Jesus (his “passion”) or his so-called “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem as people waved palm branches? Like so much else in Christian traditions, the answer is both.

Palm and Passion belong together, not as juxtaposed opposites but as mutually informing symbols—even though their convergence on a single is something of an historical accident. Back in the sixth century or so, when some Christians, especially in remote areas of the vast Roman Empire, could not attend Good Friday services, the story of the crucifixion was mashed together with the story of the palms on the Sunday before Easter, that way everyone could reflect on the death of Jesus before celebrating his resurrection.

Yes…and: the palm-strewn entry into Jerusalem is not really a victory lap, and the “triumph” is not removed or separate from the “torture” that soon follows. The historical “accident” of Palm Sunday is actually more closely attuned with the very heart of the Christian Gospel than it might at first appear: it speaks directly of God’s deep solidarity with us, not just in comfort but also in confrontation, not only in shelter but also the storm. (I love John August Swanson’s painting of this story, which he names only as the “entry” into Jerusalem, no “triumph,” which includes a stormy sky to greet him.)

“Entry into the City,” John August Swanson

As our liturgical calendar pivots this week from “shelter to storm,” leaving the safe harbor of Bethany behind and into the turbulent sea where religion and imperial politics mix, I’m particularly mindful of the importance of this shift for those of us (myself included) who live so comfortably, actually insulated from the wider world of pain.

As war continues and oil fields burn (on the far side of a vast ocean) and spring temperatures break all-time heat records (climate chaos all the way on the other side of this country) and the island nation of Cuba sits in the dark (still securely south of the U.S. border), very little of the world’s trouble seems even remotely close to the Blue Star Highway—the lovely two-lane road the marks a kind of border between this shoreline resort and the world “out there.”

Reflecting on that road—together with the one from Bethany to Jerusalem—the Sunday of the Passion is indeed Palm Sunday precisely because Jesus refuses earthly power of all kinds in favor of a costly solidarity with the most vulnerable—and in this case, those dominated and oppressed by imperial power; Cross displaces Crown.

I’ve actually walked much of that road between Bethany and Jerusalem myself, back when I was (much) younger and testing a career in archaeology. The terrain is hilly, the route curvy; when walking from Bethany, it’s not always easy to see the city around bends in the road or through scrubby olive trees, but one trusts the journey anyway.

We embark on the Holy Week journey knowing that Easter is just a week away—or rather, we know it’s on the calendar. Trusting the promise of Easter is another matter, and more difficult, and frequently fraught with all sorts of cultural and personal entanglements (I try to stay liturgically focused but can’t stop thinking about the canker sore on my tongue and an achy jaw from a long session in the dentist’s chair this past week).

“Kaleidescope Cross,” Kathy Manis Findley

I’m grateful for the liturgies of the Prayer Book at a time like this; I myself am not responsible for generating the words and gestures to evoke hope, much less joy—the stories and the rites bear that up, thank God.

But this much I must do, and not alone but with others: decide to walk the road, to leave Bethany’s shelter for Jerusalem’s storm. What will that ask of me and require of us, now, in these days? That’s the question to carry with us…

Legacy Language and Redeeming the Flesh

My allergy to “binary thinking” in a world of “either/or” choices began in early childhood, and then took root in adolescence when I was trying to grapple with the dawning awareness of being a gay man.

Looking back on those years, the whole world seemed organized with absolute distinctions, but I remember especially how the logic of Christian faith itself seemed to run on binary categories: Heaven and Earth; the saved and the lost; faith and doubt; and perhaps the quintessential instance of such distinctions, St. Paul’s rigid contrast between “flesh and spirit,” which shows up directly in his letters to the Galatians and the Romans.

Maybe no one back then liked bodies very much, or maybe they were told not to like them: It’s difficult to say which came first in my suburban religious subculture, bodily disdain or biblical blindness. Regardless of its origins, the deep suspicion of the “flesh” lurked everywhere. Quite apart from trying to deal with emergent gay desires in adolescence, everyone living through puberty—gay, straight, trans, or just generally unsure—likely struggled to figure out how in the world to live with a body that was apparently just “bad.”

When I finally did come out as a gay man in my senior year at Wheaton College (an adventure worthy of a book), I was presented with yet another binary choice: either embrace my sexual identity or my Christian faith, but not both. For reasons I cannot fully fathom (likely an effervescent mix of my mother’s German stubbornness and a healthy dose of divine grace), I refused to choose. I insisted instead on following a path of integration, of discerning how to live as fully human and gratefully Christian.

“The Valley of Dry Bones,” Gordon Miller

Part of that journey was finding alternative ways to read St. Paul, who almost certainly did not intend to denigrate human skin, bones, and organs—the very bodies God makes—when he cautioned his first-century Christians about the “flesh.” These Greek terms we translate as “flesh” and “spirit” instead stood as markers for ways of being in the world, realms of being or social structures that shape the decisions we make and the kind of character we cultivate. “Flesh” stands for a world marked by greed, hatred, envy, and sexual exploitation, among other things. “Spirit” marks the sphere of love, joy, peace, and self-control.

This coming weekend, on the fifth Sunday in Lent, we will hear that distinction from Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:6-11), a powerful example of what I would call “legacy language,” or ways of speaking that are so resilient in our collective consciousness that we can’t just talk ourselves free of them. I could, for example, devote my entire sermon on Sunday morning to a more lifegiving way to read Paul, but that wouldn’t matter one little bit for those who grew up hearing Paul declare (and their parents confirm) that “the flesh is death” and the “Spirit is life.”

That’s not the only bit of legacy language many of us live with, but that one certainly functions like a flashback portal to a world we had hoped to leave behind, or like a password that opens once again that chamber of revulsion in our brains toward our own bodies. Having spent time not only with my own ghosts of bodily shame but also with seminary classrooms of LGBT people, this is clear: that kind of painful flashback with legacy language is sadly common, even today.

In my wonderful little parish, we often use the First Nations Version (FNV) of the New Testament in the Lenten season. It’s a wonderful indigenous translation that helps many of us, myself included, read familiar biblical texts with fresh vision. This week was another reason to be grateful for that version as I was dreading having to deal with Paul’s Letter to the Romans. But then I read the FNV translation: “If we set our minds on the broken desires of our bodies, we will see only death. But if we look to the power of the Spirit, we will have life and walk the road of peace. … If the same Spirit that brought Creator Sets Free (Jesus) the Chosen One back from the dead lives in you, then that same Spirit will also bring your death-doomed bodies back to life again.”

I nearly wept when I read that translation, which felt like the next chapter of an ongoing story of liberation. To be sure, the language of “deadly desires of our bodies” carries the same potential risk of triggering shame as the more traditional language. But the emphasis has clearly shifted: it’s not my flesh that is the problem, but the desires that attach to it, which can come from a wide range of sources, including the social and political realities in which we live.

The dangerous desires themselves are not named in this passage, but we can quite easily think of some deadly ones today: the desire that fuels a consumerism sufficient to wreck Earth’s ecosystems; the desire to treat enemies with vengeance to the point of bombing children; the desire to dominate women that leads to trafficking girls; the desire to associate only with people exactly like us and exclude everyone else, with violence if necessary; and the list goes on. Again, the FNV translation makes clear that the flesh itself is not the problem but rather the shaping and forming of that flesh with the kind of desires that “doom our bodies to death.” As Paul then declares, the very same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will likewise bring our “death-doomed bodies back to life again.”

The Lenten lectionary this week takes me still further along this path of rehabilitating the flesh with the story of raising the flesh of Lazarus from the dead. I love that story from John’s account of the Gospel for many reasons, not least is the family of friends—Mary, Martha, and their brother Lazarus—who apparently meant so much to Jesus. He loved that circle of intimates, not just the idea of them, or their enduring qualities, or the fuzzy feelings they inspired, but their actual bodies, and their physical house, and the village where he found relaxation and respite.

There are multiple ways to read this astonishing story of raising a dead friend back to life, including all the tricks of navigating literary tropes and sorting through possible metaphorical treasures. But St. Paul has me focused on the odor coming from the grave in that story. Martha voiced that worry: don’t open the tomb! It’s going to stink to high heaven! What Jesus rescues from the grave is not just death but the stench of fleshy life I lived with for far too long.

There are some days when I relish the intricate metaphorical readings of these ancient texts and finding all the religious symbols lurking around the details these ancient writers included for our spiritual enlightenment. And then there are days when I set all that aside, days when I need Jesus to yank his dear friend from that smelly tomb with the sound of his grief-torn voice. Of course John the Evangelist would be the one to give us this moment, the Gospel writer who launches his whole account of the Gospel by declaring that the divine Word became flesh.

If you’re struggling with the legacy language of bad religion, this story is for you, for the redemption of your very own flesh. And this Gospel writer is for you, the one whose inspiration was largely drawn from (of all things) an even older collection of erotic love poetry known as the Song of Songs—poetry that affirms without any hint of hesitation the strength of love itself: it is indeed strong, stronger than even death (8:6-7).

The Holy Week journey begins just a week from this Sunday, a journey for which I, for one, will need the strongest love there is, not only for the annual sojourn toward the cross but to face a crucified world of intolerable pain and anguish with any kind of hope for Easter.

That’s my prayer: that we might find our own raspy, grief-worn voices rising with praise once again for a love that is still, and will always remain, stronger than death.

“Reaching — The Raising of Lazarus,” Michael Cook

On the Good Road into the Heart of God

“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.”

Those familiar words of course come from the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise in the very first chapter of Luke’s account of the Gospel.

Luke is the only one of the gospel writers to include this song from Mary, and he features it right up front, setting the tone for how he wants to tell the story of Jesus, especially to frame his telling with the dynamics of power.

Every human society, every community, all relationships exhibit in various ways those dynamics. The schools we attend, the money we make, where we live, the gender we manifest, whom we love, the color of our skin—all of these and more are infused with varying degrees of social and political, even religious power.

Modern Western society trains most of us to think of power as residing in just one place at a time. Many of us suppose that power is something like an object that passes from one location to another, like a football that gets passed from one team to the next so we know who the winners and the losers are in this game of life.

Power is obviously much more complex than that; it’s never merely a zero-sum game, as if when one person has power, everyone else has none.

Power is much more fluid, resembling a stream, or a river—always moving, always changing, sometimes showing up in the foaming cataracts of a waterfall and at others as a quiet eddy circling around a shallow bay.

Luke appreciates these complexities about power and repeatedly contrasts the power of empire and the power of God; he does this in nearly every encounter with Jesus, in nearly every parable Jesus tells, and in all of the relationships he chronicles.

Luke shows us how power can intimidate, control and dominate, even oppress entire communities with a coercive force. He also shows us another kind of power—the power to heal, to comfort and console, and perhaps especially the power to welcome and embrace, something we might call the “power of belonging.”

This power to welcome in a loving embrace hardly ever gets noticed like all the spectacular displays of coercive power. For Luke, “welcome” and “belonging” stand in stark contrast to imperial power—the kind that divides and fragments, the kind that creates categories of competition, rendering every encounter as a moment of exchange and potential aggression, even hostility.

I am always intrigued by the moment in Luke’s account of the passion when Luke rather casually mentions that the trial and torture of Jesus created a friendship between former rivals: Pilate and Herod—the Roman Governor and the Judean King (Luke 23:12).

Whenever we deal with Jesus, Luke seems to say—even when we stand opposed to him—an energy of “welcome” emerges, creating friends from enemies.

The holiest of weeks for Christians began just yesterday, with “The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.” That awkward moniker signals just how odd the day itself is, actually one of the strangest on the Christian calendar. This mashup of what seem like competing liturgical goals creates significant religious whiplash as we shift rather jarringly from the so-called “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem to the abject suffering on the cross.

“Jesus Enters Jerusalem,” Patrick J. Murphy

How tempting to suppose that such a shift yanks us from a moment of celebratory power to a moment of power’s absence. But Luke urges us to suppose otherwise, with different kinds of power circulating through these moments.

In the story about the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem (Lk. 19:28-40)—the iconic “Palm Sunday” story—Luke doesn’t give us any palms. There are no palms in Luke’s version of Palm Sunday. We might recall in that Mediterranean society that palm branches were often used to celebrate a military victory, and in ancient Israel, they marked the royal power of King David.

As Jesus enters the “City of David,” Luke narrates that entry with the conspicuous absence of any symbols of royal power. And yet, as Luke says, the crowd of disciples joining him on that road were praising God for all the “deeds of power” that they had seen in Jesus—the power to heal, the power to console, the power to welcome.

Switching our liturgical gaze to the scene of execution, we don’t see a moment of complete powerlessness; Luke would have us to see something quite different (Lk. 23:1-49).

In his tortured weakness, Jesus nonetheless exercises his power to pardon—he asks God to forgive all his executioners, and that moment appears only in Luke.

Luke is also the only gospel writer to give us the touching exchange between Jesus and the thief who was crucified with him. Jesus is dying and in the kind of pain we can scarcely imagine; and still, he declares with confidence to the thief, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”

There’s an old story about this Gospel moment, and it is told in various versions. The story goes like this: that thief showed up at the Pearly Gates and stood before St. Peter.

“So,” Peter says to the man, “did you earn a degree in theology to get here?”
“Oh no, sir, I never studied theology.”
“I see. But you do understand how atonement works for the sake of salvation.”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t know about such things.”
“Well, then you must have lived quite a virtuous life to be standing here.”
“No sir; I was a convicted thief.”
“Why then,” Peter says, “why are you here?”
“Because, the man on the middle cross said I could come.”

The power of “welcome” in the midst of weakness is at the very heart of God.

That’s where we’re headed on this road through the holiest of weeks on the Christian calendar: we’re going right into the very heart of God, where the power of love can change the world.

We speak often in the parish I’m privileged to serve about the importance, even the primacy of extending a bold hospitality as a vital component of our shared ministry. In our life together, we aim to welcome everyone, no exceptions whatsoever. And we do this because we are convinced of this: there is only love in the heart of God.

I was not raised to believe such a thing about God’s own heart; I fear very few were. The world would be a different place, nearly unrecognizable, if this were the “good news” of the Christian Church.

I’m grateful to Christian songwriter Zach Williams for that line from one of his songs, which captures with such elegant beauty what I have struggled for so many years to express and to live: There is only love at the heart of God—nothing else, only love—and the power of that love welcomes all, everyone, home.

The Unbearable Nearness of God

I wouldn’t call myself a monarchist, but I do admit to a certain fascination with the regalia of royal courts. The peculiarities of Mark’s account of the Gospel help me to understand why this might be: monarchs can be kept safely at a distance (mostly) but God remains surprisingly and (often) uncomfortably close.

Palm Sunday—and/or “Sunday of the Passion”—is always rather jarring as we pivot quickly from the cheers of a jubilant crowd to the jeers of an angry mob. This year felt even more unsettling with Mark’s version of the stories.

“Palm Sunday Procession,” P. S. Solomon Raj

The so-called “triumphal entry into Jerusalem” isn’t very triumphant in Mark’s version (11:1-11). Shockingly, there aren’t any palms being waved about; Mark gives us just some leafy branches on a dusty road out in the countryside.

This little parade with Jesus doesn’t even happen in Jerusalem at all but near the tiny village of Bethany; he enters the big city almost as an afterthought and then turns around and goes back to Bethany.

Noticing this made me wonder what kind of insights Mark’s distinctive features might offer. I easily began with Mark’s emphasis on Bethany, a village around four miles outside of Jerusalem. For some time now I have appreciated what each of the Gospel writers suggests about Bethany: this was a haven for Jesus, where he could breathe. This is where Jesus could relax with some of his closest friends—the two sisters Mary and Martha together with their brother Lazarus lived there. This village, that house was a place of intimacy and tender care.

In today’s lingo, Bethany was a place for framily—good friends who have become something like a family.

Skipping ahead to the “passion,” there’s another curious detail to notice from Mark. While many will recall “Simon,” a man from the city of Cyrene who carried the cross for Jesus, Mark tells us a tiny bit more about him: he was the father of “Alexander and Rufus.”

If those names don’t ring any bells, they shouldn’t. Today we have no idea who Alexander and Rufus were what became of them. But back then, Mark’s readers must surely have known those two brothers—you know, that guy from Cyrene, Rufus and Alex’s dad, that Simon carried the cross for Jesus.

When we know someone directly caught up in a drama, we feel caught up in it, too. That seems to be Mark’s point: this is not a story we can keep at a distance; we are all entangled together in it—including God.

By focusing on that tiny village called Bethany and telling us about Alexander and Rufus—you know, Simon’s boys—Mark invites us to see the nearness of God. What we mean by “God” is not restricted to remote mountaintops, in other words, or inaccessible temples. God is woven into the ordinary routines of everyday life.

Ordinarily, I’m happy and reassured to find God in the ordinary, but the “Sunday of the Passion” also directs my gaze to the violence lurking just beneath the surface of everyday routines. I used to think Palm/Passion Sunday overplayed its liturgical privilege with such a swift pivot toward the cross; but as Hannah Arendt would remind us, such evil is really quite banal indeed, and violence rather ordinary.

I wonder if this is why Mark seems so fond of God’s nearness—not only or even necessarily for the sake of hearing “comfortable words” but for the sake of finding God outside the ring of respectable relationships, even in scandalous encounters.

I’m sure Mark loved the figure of the Roman centurion for those very reasons. As Jesus dies on the cross, it’s not the religious insiders who see God hanging there; it’s the “unclean” outsider, the soldier, the colonizer and oppressor, the executioner who finally appreciates that Jesus somehow embodies the very presence, the nearness of God.

Mark appears to relish flipping “insider” and “outsider”—or I suppose it’s even better to say that Jesus relished this. The foundational elements by which human societies are almost always stratified—family, ethnicity, gender, wealth, geography, to name just a few—these are routinely cast aside at nearly every turn in Mark’s account of what Jesus said and did.

I thought about this five weeks ago, when Lent began with Jesus in the wilderness. Mark is the only Gospel writer who includes “beasts” with Jesus in that desert. Jesus is accompanied by those animals, Mark says, not attacked by them.

Not family, not ethnicity, not religion or status or power, not even species—none of these can dissolve the nearness of God. I’m glad for this—and then I wonder what it means for how I should live.

St. Paul’s letter to the Christians in Philippi is one of the earliest texts in the Christian Testament of the Bible. This letter to the Philippians includes a fragment of one of the very earliest Christian hymns, and we often hear it on Palm Sunday (2:5-11).

Early on in Christian traditions, what got Jesus killed is what Christians themselves tried to live, and that’s what that hymn is all about.

The Philippian hymn praises Jesus for refusing to exploit divine power and instead choosing to live as a humble servant. That’s the “mind of Christ,” Paul says, the posture toward social status that we ourselves must adopt.

Mark doesn’t give us a “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem; there are no palms, no emblems of royal power in Mark’s story. There are only leafy branches strewn about on a dusty road, apparently just recently cut by field hands—and that road leads to a cross.

All roads lead there eventually, toward death. But being on this road with Mark, during this week with the Church, and traveling toward that cross—I might actually live with the nearness of God.

Bury Your Theology

What is your theology?

People have asked me that question in various ways over the years, in many different communities, and for more than one reason. Eventually, I started responding with some version of “it depends”—on the daily news, my mood, or what the lectionary appoints from the Bible for the coming Sunday.

I don’t mean to be dismissive of the question, but I am increasingly skeptical of providing an adequate answer. Or rather, the kind of answer modern Western sensibilities recognize as sufficient. Holy Week quite naturally provokes the question in all sorts of ways, entangling so many of us not only in liturgical complexities but prickly and often unwieldy theologies.

I have always loved Holy Saturday for the respite it offers in this holiest of weeks, not only from liturgical fussing but also the theological wrangling that sends me grasping after theories to explain what cannot even be named. It has been occurring to me recently to take this quiet day as an opportunity to review the systems and doctrines I’ve inherited and studied, the theological ideas that have both vexed and inspired me, and then just bury it—all of it.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, for example, I live some of my days as a Johannine Christian, relishing the Beethoven-like thickness of the phrases in John’s account of the Gospel. Not only thick but also obtuse, such as the image of Jesus as both shepherd and sheep-gate (10:7-9; 10:11-14), or more unnervingly as a serpent on a cross (3:14).

On more spritely days, with energy running high and wanting just to get on with the work at hand, I embrace a more Markan Christianity. The shortest and bare-bones account of the Gospel rarely pauses for reflection—“immediately” is Mark’s favorite word, and he concludes his account with women running away in fear.

When my gay self feels a bit queer around the edges, I’m oddly grateful for Paul’s letter to the Romans where he describes God’s inclusion of Gentiles in the Church as an “unnatural act” (11:24). If God can act contrary to nature, then surely I can? Or maybe nature itself is just much queerer than most of us can imagine, as Paul himself describes a universe filled with earthly bodies and heavenly bodies and angelic glories, all of it contained in a bare seed that is sown in the earth (1 Cor. 15:35-41).

How tempting (nearly irresistibly so) to suppose that we must choose which of all the biblical options is the “correct” one. But when I do resist that urge and take this rich panoply of biblical tropes into the history of theology’s development, I find myself not unlike a fickle lover, enamored by Dionysian ecstatic mysticism in the morning and turning fondly toward Augustine’s self-excoriating disciplines by noon.

So much of this, I have come to realize, depends on exactly what kind of question I’m asking, which is often not entirely apparent. To the standard Evangelical question—are you saved?—I must at first respond, from what? And then eventually, for what? And of course, how? Holy Week gathers all these questions, and more, those countless and often repetitive inquires that have been building all year long and stacks them, one on top of the other, a virtual mosh pit of symbols and rites.

In a society of increasing isolation and fragmentation, and having recently lived through the severe touch deprivation of a global pandemic, having one’s feet tenderly touched and washed on Maundy Thursday can feel salvific. I pause there gratefully, but then realize that the Cross still matters to me, or perhaps that it should matter to me more “salvifically” than it usually does.

I recall Rowan Williams’ arresting insight about the cross in his interpretation of the resurrection narratives: “salvation comes from our victims.” I began to grasp his meaning far better by reading M. Shawn Copeland’s racial analysis of it and her heart-stopping image of what the Gospel demands from us. She interrupts my romanticized images of table fellowship with the Gospel call to orient ourselves “before the lynched Jesus, whose shadow falls across the table of our sacramental meal.”

That sentence cannot mean the same thing to me and in the same way it does to Black Americans in this white supremacist society. That’s why Copeland resists making the cross our saving symbol but insists that we cannot be saved without it, precisely because the whole arc of betrayal, suffering, death, and resurrection demands from all of us the kind of life that reflects the deepest possible arc of solidarity with the poor and outcast.

Old ways of living—the ways of violence and violation—those ways must die with Christ in order for any of us to be raised with Christ to new life. This, Copeland says, is the “divine praxis of solidarity” that offers a new way of being in relation to God, to others, to self— salvation, in other words.

All of this (and more) swirls around all the ritual complexities of the week we have just traveled together as Christians, and on this Holy Saturday I cannot help but consider whether theology itself needs to die with Christ as well.

As Meister Eckhart, the great Dominican mystic of the thirteenth century once uttered, “I pray God to rid me of God.” After all, even the word “God” can only point to what none of us can ever fully comprehend; and it can easily get in the way of actually encountering what it so feebly evokes.

I don’t mean our thinking and speaking make no difference, or that our theological ideas have no consequences. To the contrary, the stakes are high in what we say and do—bad theology kills (as the contemporary aphorism urges us to note); and this, too: good theology brings life.

Yes, and still, as John’s Jesus reminds us, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” How could this not apply to our theologies as surely as it does to our own bodies?

So perhaps as gently and respectfully as we can, it’s time to bury our theology with all the nails that keep tidy systems pinned to institutional walls and let our wounds breathe some fresh air.

I need to bury much of my own theology, even the most cherished bits, the ones that “make sense” and feel cozy, those beloved propositions and religiously fine-tuned mechanisms; without my realizing it, they’re blocking my path.

Perhaps this could be a shared Holy Saturday exhortation: Bury your theology, and then let it rise with Jesus, unrecognizable but strangely alluring, oddly familiar but fresh and new.

A Broken Symbol for a Tattered World

I fell in love with the foot-washing ritual when I first saw it as an undergraduate (many years ago now). I then resisted it, and actually rejected it for quite a long time. In recent years, I have fallen back in love with it, have found myself re-enamored with its tender arc.

That’s a rather volatile history with a liturgical rite, but not terribly unusual for that particular rite. I’ve never met a liturgically-minded Christian who stays neutral about washing feet on Maundy Thursday. Some belong to the Necessity Camp (“I can’t imagine Holy Week without it”) while others roll their eyes at the mere thought of it (“oh please, no more manicure parades”).

My resistance to this rite over the years stemmed not so much from the awkward logistics of taking off shoes and socks, and the sudden exposure to public intimacy such a moment carries—religion, after all, shouldn’t always feel comfortable and cozy. My hesitation about the rite was instead rooted in how religious symbols function.

This topic is of course hotly debated among religion scholars, and there is certainly more than one way to conceive of how a religious symbol “works.” This holiest of weeks on the Christian calendar invites precisely this kind of reflection, a week brimming with a whole panoply of rich and interlocking symbols.

On Maundy Thursday, for example, we remember the final meal Jesus shared with his closest friends. The liturgy on this day qualifies as among the most complex of the entire Christian calendar: we remember not only the institution of the “Lord’s Supper,” or Holy Eucharist, we also remember the provocative and tender act Jesus offered in washing the feet of his friends—something a teacher or “master” should never do for disciples. We remember still more: the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, the poignant prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the arrest of Jesus in that garden by soldiers; the altar is stripped at the liturgy’s conclusion as a sign of desolation.

Sorting through that now-classic narrative and embodying its key moments in liturgical gestures illustrates especially well an approach to religious symbols that I find helpful. The most effective symbols draw from the common, ordinary stuff of life as a way to convey divine presence. In Christian theology, we might note that Jesus himself is this kind of symbol par excellence—a fully human life as the means to encounter God’s loving grace.

This approach to religious practice suggests why the Eucharist continues to be an effective symbol of the communion into which God invites us—we readily recognize what a shared meal is around a common table; no further explanation is needed about what a “meal” is or a “shared table.” And that right there is why I resisted the foot washing ritual for so many years: we don’t actually wash each other’s feet in our modern Western world.

The dusty roads of first-century Mediterranean societies populated by people with sandaled feet made foot-washing both an ordinary, quotidian practice and also one that made the social dynamics of cultural power more visible (whether because of rank or gender or both). We see a trace of those dynamics in the shock expressed by his disciples when Jesus started to wash their feet (Peter exclaims, “you will never wash my feet!”).

The astonishment Jesus provoked had mostly to do with the inversion of cultural power in his actions, which his disciples recognized immediately. No further explanation was needed about the kind of love Jesus wanted them to model; all he had to do was wash their feet.

For all these reasons, I consider the liturgical rite of foot washing a “broken symbol.” It rarely conveys what it was originally meant to inspire as the cultural chain of meaning-making has been cut over time (not least because of the invention of fully enclosed shoes!).

In recent years, however, I have wondered in some fresh ways whether the fumbling awkwardness of the rite and even its broken character as a religious symbol might be exactly what our fragmented world needs. Modern Western society may keep its feet covered but it still lives with the wounds of powerful social hierarchies. Race, gender, sexuality, class—all these and more fragment our world and sustain painful alienations and isolations.

Maybe what we need in our religious spaces is more awkwardness, not less. Maybe our liturgical rites and religious symbols ought to reflect more directly our fumbling attempts to figure out how to be human with each other and live more peaceably and sustainably on Earth. Maybe blundering our way through a cumbersome rite, the meaning of which seems fraught and obscure, can highlight the frayed seams of our social institutions in need of healing.

When a religious symbol just doesn’t seem to “work,” it might help us see and name how severely the world around us no longer works the way it should—if it ever really did.

We could start rather modestly: if we can practice at least a moment of bodily tenderness with each other (shyly, awkwardly, no manicures needed), even just briefly and simply through a religious symbol, we might stand a better chance of doing so in the public square.

Flawless religious practice isn’t possible or even desirable. Flawed religion, replete with broken symbols, can invite us into a space where healing can happen. And I think that’s one of the reasons why religion was invented in the first place.

Audienced

“Hosanna” is a shortened form of a Hebrew phrase, a plea that means “save us, deliver us!” Christians hears this word every year on Palm Sunday, and this year from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (Mt. 21:1-11).

Jesus has come from Galilee and has just crossed the border into Judea. He has brought a large crowd with him, and as they march into Jerusalem together, the crowds cry out: Hosanna! Save us! Deliver us!

How very strange to see these jubilant marchers become a hostile mob shouting “Crucify!” The jarring shift happens every year at the beginning of Holy Week; in Matthew’s account, these crowds were no longer marchers but bystanders (Mt. 27:11-66).

I remember hearing, many years ago now, an NPR commentary about the news coverage of O. J. Simpson’s infamous attempt to flee policy custody in a white Ford Bronco. The commentator linked the development of cable news shows to that June afternoon in 1994 as people lined Los Angeles streets and sat glued to their television sets.

“We are becoming,” that commentator said, “audienced.”

As if gathered in bleachers to watch the big game, or perhaps more comfortably at home, safe on our couches, we now view the world from a distance.

This all sounded a bit melodramatic to me back then. But the situation has only grown more severe: the Internet, the World Wide Web, smart phones, social media. We can watch acts of gendered violence or racial hatred on our phones, as if going to an afternoon matinee, and then head out to dinner. Migrants and refugees, shooters in schools, factory farms and ecosystem destruction—for all this and more, we are more surely bystanders; we have become “audienced.”

I thought of that analysis as I pondered Matthew’s stories for Palm Sunday. Rather than wondering how the crowd could turn so quickly from adulation to accusation, I suddenly realized instead that these were not the same people; these were different crowds.

Some of the people in each crowd probably overlapped, like a Venn diagram. But by and large, those marchers and those bystanders were not the same people. This startled me; it was like seeing a black-and-white movie rendered into brilliant Technicolor. It changes so much, nearly everything.

So who were these people who processed with palms into Jerusalem, who marched with defiance into the Holy City so long ago?

Once you start asking that question, Matthew readily supplies the answer: they were not the clergy, like me, the religious leaders who worried about proper piety and strict observance of religious standards; nope, they weren’t marching.

Neither were the wealthy merchants who worried about disrupting the business cycle and shrinking their profit margins. In the very next story, Matthew shows us the moneychangers who stayed in the temple; they weren’t marching.

The Romans were certainly not out there, not the soldiers or the imperial officials; they were worried about a riot and disturbing the peace.

All of these—or at least most of them—audienced themselves that day; they chose the sidelines; they decided to be bystanders, simply to “stand by” as the parade passed by.

Well, then, who exactly were these people who marched so audaciously with Jesus into Jerusalem?

Mathew’s pretty clear about this throughout his whole account of the Gospel: the marchers were most certainly the poor—or to be clearer, the ones with nothing left to lose. They ripped palms off the trees and tossed them in front of Jesus like a party had just come to town. And the working classes and day-laborers were out there with them; not today’s electricians or plumbers but the stable cleaners and fishnet-menders. Let’s not forget the prostitutes and sex workers (all those “dirty” people), and probably a good number of tax collectors, who usually didn’t have any friends—these were the ones shouting Hosanna!

“Save us!” they cried, as Jesus rode a donkey into the Holy City, as if he were a king.

These were the ones who had come with Jesus from Galilee, the ones who had shared meals with him (even though they weren’t supposed to); the ones who got into boats with him and sat on hillsides with him while he broke bread and multiplied fish and had finally found their place, with him.

Hosanna!

These parade-goers were the “outside agitators,” the trouble-makers who had nothing to lose if the empire fell, or the system collapsed, or the banks crashed; to the contrary, they had everything to gain from the coming Kingdom of God—and they had already tasted it around tables of shared meals.

Hosanna!

As I think back on every congregation I have been in over the years, including the one I am now privileged to serve as rector, all of us have quite a lot to lose; it’s unlikely any of us would have been in that parade. And this isn’t accidental.

There are powerful forces in this world—imperial, corporate, moneyed—forces that will not relent in trying to “audience” us, to make us passive, acquiescent, and comfortable. That’s how they make profits and secure their power—it really is as crude as that, and it always has been, which is why the Palm Sunday narrative is a classic.

I am now plagued by another question: who am I in the Gospel story? Or more importantly, who do I want to be? (Just being able to ask such questions is itself a pricey privilege.)

As most Christians around the world enter our holiest of weeks, do we want to be mere bystanders—audienced—in the Gospel? Or, do we want to be “discipled”?

To live the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to follow a road toward the Cross, not merely to watch from the curb. It’s not an easy road to travel, not at all (even though it’s carved by an unimaginable grace). We can’t take very much with us on this road and we have to leave a lot behind; it’s pretty scary.

And I’ve come to see (far too slowly over the years) that the only way to travel this road is to do so with others, with companions—a lovely word that refers to those with whom we break bread.

Of all weeks, this one just now beginning is the time to resist that worn-out and utterly toxic supposition of modern Western society that we must always fend for ourselves, buck up and undertake arduous journeys on our own strength.

Traveling with others not only—as the old cliché has it—makes the burden lighter, it’s also how we learn why love is worth the truly hard work and also just how much we’re willing to risk for it (the answer is everything).

Yes, this road to the Cross is a hard one, and it’s scary. This also is true: it’s the only road that leads to Easter.

So let’s walk it together.

Follow the Jackass

I never thought much about donkeys growing up. I mean, why would I? It’s not like I saw many—or any—in the western suburbs of Chicago. But I did think a lot about horses; they were in all my storybooks about heroes and adventures. Horses seemed quite obviously more noble than donkeys.

There are some cultural reasons for these biases: Donkeys are usually the butt of jokes, they provide a convenient stand-in for the outsider, or the underachiever, or simply the useful nuisance we keep around to do the stuff we don’t want to do ourselves.

Let’s not forget the MTV Television series called “Jackass” and the ridiculous movie spinoffs it generated (I may have seen one). Those movies were about stupid humans, but the film’s title betrays the deeper human disdain toward the lowly donkey—the jackass.

Today there are roughly 40 million donkeys in the world and the vast majority of them—more than 90%—are found in rural societies and serve as pack animals, for transportation, and in roles of agricultural labor. Working donkeys are most often associated with those living in poverty, rarely ever with the wealthy or the powerful.

Every year on Palm Sunday we celebrate a “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem as if a hero had mounted a white horse to ride into our lives and save the day. But that is not the story that launches us into the Christian Holy Week.

The donkey, all on his own, makes perfectly clear that Jesus is not a military commander, nor a rival of the Roman Emperor or even the provincial Governor. So why were the crowds cheering his arrival? Let’s be clear: they were not mocking him but cheering him.

It has taken a very long time for me to let go of the “triumph” of Palm Sunday and appreciate what the donkey teaches (I wish so desperately to know that dear creature’s name). Here’s the lesson I need to learn: Jesus on a donkey is an image of God’s deep solidarity—with the laboring classes, with the downtrodden and forgotten, with those oppressed by Empire.

More specifically for our own day, that image signals God’s solidarity with migrant farmworkers; with women of color who are single mothers working two full-time jobs; with the indigenous people of this land who are still unable to find justice with our own government.

Those are the ones lining the streets of Jerusalem and cheering the arrival of Jesus on a donkey. Perhaps, they think, just maybe, God has not forgotten them, maybe (hope beyond hope) God is standing with them.

But there’s still more to say about this story: God is also in solidarity with the donkey. After all, this beast of burden plays a starring role in this opening chapter of what we Christians call the holiest of weeks.

A donkey leads us into Holy Week!

So after we shout our “Hosannas!” it’s time to follow the Jackass into new life.

What might that look like?

Let’s start modestly. Let’s remember that this so-called “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem features a city whose holiness is shared by at least three of the world’s great religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The calendar this year all but begs reflection on those religious intersections. Even as Christians enter Holy Week, Muslims have already begun observing the holy month of Ramadan, and Passover begins this Friday—Good Friday.

While religious folks pray for peace in the world—and rightly so, and especially right now for Ukraine—religious folks have our own peace to make with each other. We need to work for peace with other Christians, with our Jewish neighbors, and with Muslims all around the world.

It matters that Jesus entered Jerusalem, that Holy City, not on a warhorse or as a general leading armies or in the garments of victory, but on the back of a donkey.

It’s long past time for us Christians to stop referring to this moment as “The Triumphal Entry”; this story should be called the “Parade of Solidarity.”

Poet Sylvia Sands writes so beautifully about this, about Jesus riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. All over the world, she writes, donkeys are beaten, starved, tortured, and worked until they drop.

And Jesus chooses that creature to accompany him on his entry into Jerusalem, to lead the “Parade of Solidarity.”

This is how our Christian holy week begins, not in triumph, not even with a whispered hint of domination or any kind of “victory” but rather with the lowly, humble, usually disdained little donkey plodding his path into an ancient city.

The Church has mostly forgotten this but queerly retains it in our lectionary texts and calendar images: the holiest of weeks marks a path of new life for us, if only we would follow the jackass.

Another poet, Steve Garnaas-Holmes, prays in precisely that direction: “O God, give me courage to follow the Foolish way, / to go the way the world discourages, / the way of love.

“May Jesus,” he writes, “riding into a set-up / on his little donkey, lead me.”

The donkey is leading Jesus where we must follow if we wish to live. It’s where God desires to be in communion with us, where God is always already in solidarity with us and with the whole of God’s creation.

Those are lofty ideas and rather far removed from how most of us live day-to-day—but not so for the donkey.

Sylvia Sands poetically imagines that one, first-century donkey being so grateful for that one man’s gentle touch on his reins; and for that one man’s sweet voice on the road; and for that one man’s improbable invitation to join him in the work of redeeming love.

We are invited to that same work of love, to travel along that same road, and to take our lead from a donkey.