Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Between our journey through Holy Week and today, we’ve gone from being ritual participants in the Passion of our Lord to what today’s Gospel labels as “those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” On Maundy Thursday, we were there in the upper room at the Last Supper where Christ instituted the Eucharist. In the chapel of repose, we were there in the garden with the disciples struggling to stay awake and stay attentive with Christ for just one hour as his hour approached. On Good Friday, we were there at the foot of the cross as we gazed in contemplation upon the dead body of the Son of God. And at the Easter Vigil, we were there in the pitch black of the tomb, as the light of Christ returned from death, from hell itself, and gradually illuminated this whole space which might as well have been the world world, because it kind of was.

​But now, a week later in the Easter season, the elephant in the room is that despite all of our profound liturgies, we were not, in fact, there. And we are not there now either. We are caught between an experience that we did not have and a belief that we do have nevertheless. We have not seen and yet we have come to believe. Or at least we try to believe or think we should believe or something. But then again, belief is a hazy business. Is it merely a code word for “thinking hard” or “certainty excused from evidence?” Indeed, it’s not difficult to hear Christ’s blessing on the rest of us as a kind of sympathetic consolation prize. “Aw, look at all these Christians: they didn’t even see anything and they believe anyway -- bless their hearts.”

Just three weeks ago, Emmanuel announced that we had purchased past due medical debts throughout Central and Southern Illinois in order to forgive them. We worked, as you will have heard, with a charity called RIP Medical Debt to do this. It was founded by two former collection agency executives who had a change of heart, and decided to use their skills to abolish people’s financial burdens rather than add to them. RIP buys “portfolios” of medical debt from health care providers and from the secondary debt market, which allows them to write off thousands of people’s debts at once for pennies on the dollar.
 
With medical debt being one of the main causes of bankruptcies in America, we wanted to make in impact in this area. So in January our vestry decided to use part of the surplus from our Centennial wishlist campaign to work with RIP on forgiving medical debts locally, just to show a whole bunch of strangers unconditional forgiveness of the kind God has given us. Now, we had no idea how much we could do. RIP said, how about a countywide initiative? So we asked them to look at Champaign County for us. We thought the $15000 we had to work with might actually be enough to wipe out all the available past due medical bills here in our own county.

Good Friday resists interpretation, because there is something about the death of Christ that speaks for itself. It’s why we read the entire Passion narrative rather than the usual brief lesson that’s meant for commentary and reflection. Instead, today’s reading is for our total immersion. We are not spectators here; there is no where to stand “outside” the text, which is why we disperse the voices of the characters amongst ourselves. There is only this all-embracing narrative and our places within it. The pace of the plot is hurried. It reads like someone is trying to explain an emergency that’s come up while grabbing their things and getting out the door. An extended period of time in which to reflect on the situation, to understand what it all means, is precisely what we don’t have right now. All we have is a string of facts that together comprise an event. First there’s a garden across the Kidron Valley that Jesus and his disciples decide to go to and the next thing you know, there’s a tomb nearby, and they laid Jesus there.

​ Good Friday is what it is.

“The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live; when I see the blood I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.”
 
What makes this night different from all the rest? Those of you who have attended Passover celebrations recognize this question which is traditionally asked by the youngest person in attendance. What makes this night different from all the rest?

The Triduum offers many answers to this question. Each night our liturgy contains some parts that are familiar and ordinary but many more that are unique to that once-a-year service. If this is your first Maundy Thursday I encourage you to let the entire experience wash over you. In other words don’t try to figure it all out at once—it will overwhelm you.
​
 Actually, if this is your tenth or twentieth time that may still be good advice. Part of the beauty of liturgy and of scripture is that once in a while, occasionally, there may be something this particular time that you don’t remember having heard before. Even for the seasoned veteran of multiple Triduums there might be something that catches your attention, gives you food for thought, which leads to a new understanding. 

There’s no experience more central to the Christian year than the one we begin today. The events we make present and live through together this week are the heart of the Christian way of seeing the world and of living in the world. Holy Week is the center of spiritual time, and it is the center of the story by which disciples of Jesus understand the world and our own lives.    

We just read the entire passion story from the Gospel of Luke, the Gospel that Episcopalians are reading together Sunday by Sunday all year. On Good Friday, we will read the entire passion story from the Gospel of John. These events are so important that we tell them and tell them over and over. Jesus’ death on the Cross and his resurrection on the third day is mentioned in nearly every chapter of Paul’s letters. We never celebrate Eucharist without recounting that same story over the bread and the wine. It is on page after page of the Bible and page after page of the Prayer Book. Why? Why do we Christians center ourselves on the Cross like this?

Well, we might want to ask first, where else could our center be?  I can think of two candidates, actually, that are proposed all the time. I’m sure you’ve heard people suggest that religion really boils down to principles, general ideas like “peace on earth” or “you should value diversity” or “there is always hope” or “God is everywhere.” All of those are good enough principles, and in fact, I agree with them.  But they are not where Christianity grounds itself. They come later.

And I’m sure you’ve heard people suggest that religion really boils down to efforts to improve human behavior, either our own or somebody else’s. That our mission is to inspire people to be nicer, to be more accepting or more mindful, to fight racism and sexism, to help the poor. All of those are good things to do, and I support them, too. But they are not where Christianity grounds itself either. They too come later.

Christianity can’t be reduced to a set of principles or to a self-improvement or world-improvement program. As long as you try to approach it that way, you will never understand it. Christianity is grounded in the announcement of what God has accomplished in Christ on the Cross and in the empty tomb. It makes the claim not just that the events we live through again this week constitute the center of all history, but that in them God has offered liberation, forgiveness, and fullness of life absolutely free to anyone who is humble and honest enough to accept them.  

At Baptism we always ask the candidates questions about turning to Christ, and one of them is “do you put your whole trust in his grace and love?” Much of the time, let’s be 100% honest, many of us would have to answer that question, “Well, sort of.” We put some of our trust in his grace, and other parts of it in what we can do, or the principles and values we stand by, or the family or economic class or ethnic group we come from. We put some of our trust in his love, and others in the kinds of love and esteem that get given to us via our skills, our in-group, or our behavior.

But that’s not what God calls us to. God calls us to a life where we do not look elsewhere to justify our existence, but where we put our whole trust in the grace and love that are given freely through the work of Christ on the Cross.

So one of the reasons we tell this story over and over is that it’s so very hard for human beings to do that. We fail, over and over, at surrendering everything to God. Or we do it, but immediately grab some parts of life back to manage ourselves. So we need to hear it over and over again: the work of Christ in his Cross and Resurrection has already accomplished all that needs to be accomplished for us to be liberated, forgiven people, going about life with a kind of fullness that’s not available anywhere else. And the work of Christ in the Cross and Resurrection hasn’t accomplished that just for you, or for me, or for churchgoers. It’s accomplished that for all creation.

Do you put your whole trust there? Even if you fail regularly at putting your whole trust there, because we all do, is that where you intend to put your whole trust? Is that where your trust returns, when you come to your senses and realize you’ve started looking to something other than Jesus to make you enough? Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love, or are you hedging your bets?

Principles are fine. Improving human behavior is fine. But the events of this week, the experiences we will re-invoke and walk through together, through the amazing power of the liturgy, have changed human history. They’re going to change the whole cosmos. And if you step in and put all your weight onto them, your whole trust, they will change your life. Thanks be to God for his glorious Gospel.

 
Here we are on the last bit of Lent—how did it get to be Lent V already? Palm Sunday is next week. In fact our palms arrived this past Friday! From this perspective it seems like the season has gone by quickly though maybe that is because collectively we have done much to bring God’s love to the front of our minds. I hope it has been a productive Lent for you and if you don’t think so just yet, we do have one more week.

One of the community actions we have taken through the season has been to read passages from the Gospel of John each day. Following the pattern of the daily lectionary we are currently beginning the ninth chapter of John. Though we won’t finish the gospel before Easter it is a discipline that we can continue. When we began this Lenten journey Mother Beth talked about this particular gospel in comparison to the other three. From these comparisons I was reminded of something I learned a long time ago in counseling classes. That is, there is a difference in relating what has happened and how those actions affect us. The goal of a good counselor is to go deeper than the action. John’s gospel does this; it goes deeper.

The synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are often like news reports, relating the facts of what occurred. Mark in particular loved to tell one thing after another. “This happened and then immediately this next thing happened.” Of course each of these gospel writers has a slant on Jesus’ story by when they wrote and the audience for whom they wrote. We get a lot of our familiar Bible stories from these three gospels. John, though, is different. From its beginning John is trying to connect the news of Jesus life to its meaning. John writes in a more personal way and asks a more personal response. Using my analogy you might say that John is the op-ed writer while the other three give a more front page straight forward story.