Lent 5, Year C
The Rev. Nigel Taber-Hamilton, Rector
Isaiah 43: 16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3: 8-14; John 12: 1-8
Have you ever watched surfers? I remember watching surfers I was on the North Shore of Oahu about seven years ago. Oahu is the island where Honolulu is located. Rachel and I happened to be there when they were having some "big water" come in.
The waves that come in on the North Shore are usually quite big anyway, but there are places around the world which, from time to time, get really big waves up to 50 feet high - "Big Water"!
Learning to ride the waves is obviously an art, and being willing to ride the really big ones takes courage as well. You can rupture your ear-drums, or take too long to surface and get pounded by the next huge wave.
No one, seeing waves like this, would think of wading out into the water and simply standing and facing the incoming surf. Or, at least, if they did they would likely find themselves heading the list of Darwin Awards! For those of you who don't know, this is "dark humor." the "Darwins" are the awards that are given to people who, in the mind of the judges, did the best to ensure the "survival of the fittest" by doing something so unutterably stupid that they managed to kill themselves.
I have often thought of change as being like surf. Waves that come inexorably and repeatedly onto the shore, unstoppable by any human device or design.
Yet we human beings love to try, don't we. Like King Canute there is some part of each of us that believes that all we need do is to command the tide to stop coming in and it will do so. To borrow another metaphor about water, Sometimes we think that "denial" is just a river in Egypt!
Which brings us to all of today's readings.
If there's one phrase that sums up all of them it's this one, from Isaiah. God says: "Behold I am about to do a new thing: now it springs forth, do you not perceive it."
That "new thing" is good.
- It's about pathways in wildernesses - do not fear being lost ever again, God says.
- It's about rivers in deserts - you will never be thirsty ever again.
- It's about stunningly unexpected bounty, abundance unlooked for and, perhaps most importantly, unexpected.
Like the "Big Water" there can be no question that this "new thing" is going to happen. It isn't an option. We won't be able to say, "not today, thank you, I'm kinda busy right now."
We might love it or hate it, this "Big Water" from God, the readings tell us, but our feelings are beside the point.
This "new thing" is going to happen, and it will require of us a profound willingness to embrace it as "of God", as a gift from the Ground of our Being, as the irresistible acts of God.
That also means letting some things go.
Isaiah reminds the Israelites of their past experience of God. The normal experiences that they had of the created order were continually turned on their head. Their old world - the desert world of the wandering nomad that was the hallmark of their ancestors - was continually subverted. That way of life - of the wandering shepherd - had to change. If their ancestors had not embraced the change then they will simply have faded away into nothingness. The newness of settled agriculture that was the Promised Land beckoned them, and they embraced its newness with celebration and joy.
For Paul, the letting go was of everything he had been up until now: "a Hebrew born of Hebrews, a Pharisee, a member of the house of Israel." In other words, a perfect Jew, a perfect person of faith.
All of that, Paul said, simply got in the way. Obsessively practicing the rules and regulations of the Law had become a barrier to a more profound faith predicated on relationship, on "knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord." So powerful was this desire for Paul that the word he used to describe his old life can bring us up short. The translation delicately says: "I regard [my past identity] as 'rubbish'", but actually Paul used the expletive for "dung"
Likewise in the Gospel there is an experience of newness and change. But it wasn't Jesus who was doing the modeling this time, it was Mary Magdalene. Her actions - repeated in all four gospels - prefigure Jesus' actions only a few days hence at the Last Supper.
From the Gospel record it's clear that a leadership struggle followed Jesus' death. In John it's between Peter and the Beloved Disciple, with Peter losing out. In Luke it's between Peter and Mary Magdalene, and this time Peter emerges as the leader. In the extra-Canonical "Gospel of Mary" the same struggle sees Peter relegated and Mary as the leader of the disciples.
The message is essentially the same: Mary is not only a disciple, but an important one at that. Yet she is willing to wash Jesus' feet - an action that wasn't even required of a slave, but rather, expected of the person themself.
God's wave of change sweeps away even Jesus' preconceptions, and the "new thing" again comes into being: it is Mary who is the model disciple, and it is not, therefore, at the Last Supper but here that the servant ministry of Christians is born.
These stories have enormous repercussions for the Church. God is constantly challenging our willingness as a community of faith to accept that God is constantly doing "a new thing".
For instance, Not all the decisions we make should be predicated on the way we've always done it, as Jesus reminds Judas - and us - in this story. Sometimes - always - the gestures of love and compassion are more important than counting beans.
Which is, of course, simply another way of reminding us that what may appear to be prudent is not always right, and what can appear to be decisive may in fact be destructive.
In every case there is one thing that aids us in our decision-making: it's that everything is predicated on relationship, on who we are with and for each other, on authentic community.
As we approach the greatest week of our Christian year, and reflect on the profound implications of cross and empty tomb, we are, above all, invited into that experience of the "new thing" that God is about to do, into resurrection and new life, and into the authentic community that it birthed.
May your experience of resurrection transform you into this new life.
Amen
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