Good Shepherd Sunday: no other Name

Posted on April 21, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for St John’s Episcopal Church, Canandaigua, NY

I bring greetings to you all in the name of love from the Diocese of Ohio and from the Church of the Epiphany in Euclid, my home parish.

Ohio is my home, but you might guess by my accent that I didn’t always live there. I grew up in England and then halfway through my childhood our family moved to Wales. If you know anything at all about Wales, it likely has to do with sheep. There are sheep, and there are more sheep, everywhere you go. There are sheep on the roads and in the hedgerows. There are sheep on impossible ledges on the mountainsides, and at the bottoms of impossibly steep valleys. Coming back from church one rainy Sunday I saw a whole dozen or more sheep crowding into a bus shelter to get out of the weather. They get everywhere.

You rarely see a shepherd, but each sheep bears the mark of someone who has claimed it, named it, and who has the ultimate responsibility and care of it.

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd.” He says that his sheep know his voice, that they know, we know, who cares for them and who keeps us. He is the shepherd who guides us through the valleys of deep shadows, who will not let our foot slip on that steep ascent back into the sunlight. He is the shepherd who not only lays down his life for us, but who takes it up again, returns to the scene of the crime in resurrection, so that we may know the abundance and persistence of God’s life and love for us.

There is, Peter says by way of the Holy Spirit, no other name given among mortals that will save us, that will heal us, that will make us whole.

This scene, in the fourth chapter of Acts, is still following on from the miraculous healing of the man beside the Beautiful Gate the previous day, in the previous chapter. Perhaps you already talked about him here, but if not, he had asked Peter and John as they were passing for money, and Peter told him, “Silver or gold have I none, but what I have I give you: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.”

There followed, you may imagine, quite the commotion around the temple, and we heard last Sunday how Peter upbraided his fellow Israelites, saying, in effect, “Why are you surprised? God has always been active among us, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and now see how God has glorified Jesus, the Christ. It is by his name that this man has been made strong. It is by his name that we are made whole.”

This, by the way, as the Lectionary Lab podcast reminded me as I was studying this week; this is in no way a rejection of God’s promises to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, nor to any of their inheritance. It is in perfect consonance with those covenants that Jesus would lay down his life for the sheep of every fold, and it does not undo the continuing covenant that God has with the Jews, nor with all flesh, as God covenanted after the Flood and the Ark and the rainbow.

Rather, Peter says, you need nothing more. You need look no further, you need no one else to show you the wholeness and healing power of God’s life-giving mercy.

Still, the authoritiesd came and arrested them and imprisoned them, as they did with Jesus, because they were afraid of the power that had erupted in their midst. And now the next morning they ask, “What is this power? Where does it come from?” And Peter again tells them, “It is Jesus Christ of Nazareth.”

It is no secret power, no special magic. There is no trickery here. This is exactly what it looks like: the resurrecting power of the risen Christ making whole, healing and transforming the lives left behind. Jesus is still the Good Shepherd, gathering up the lame sheep and restoring it to green pasture, still waters.

We, on the other hand, have a tendency, as chief priests and elders and lawyers, to look for power that we can control, that we can wield, that we can own.

You know that I was invited here this weekend to talk about gun violence, and the ways in which we as people of faith can counter its inculturation among us – and, by the way, that’s why we are wearing orange stoles today. Orange is the colour that hunters use to say, “See me; don’t shoot me,” and it’s the colour chosen by a group of young people in Chicago to protest and lament the death of a friend, which is now used to represent our lament and our commitment to ending gun violence around the nation.

We talked yesterday about the statistics that tell us that there are more guns in the United States today than people – millions more. We have tried to take the power of life and death into our own hands, into our own homes, with frankly devastating results.

We discussed yesterday how nearly three-quarters of guns in civilian ownership were purchased or kept for personal defense, when the numbers tell us, all thing being equal, that a home and its inhabitants appear to be less safe with a gun than without one.

We had a surprisingly hopeful conversation about all that yesterday. We talked about economic solutions and research-based solutions and interventions based in health and equity and law, and all of it was good and valid and hopeful, because there is never nothing that we can do. Because with God nothing is impossible, there is never nothing we can do.

But first, yesterday morning, we spent significant time in prayer, in scripture, in the intentional presence of God, because if we turn to our own devices, instead of leaning on the rod and the staff of the good shepherd, and following his lead through the valley of deep shadows, how will we find our way back into the light? Because unless we remember where our healing comes from, unless we remember how we are made whole, unless we remember who is our shepherd, we will stray, each to her own way, and become scattered, and less strong, and less whole.

The author of the letter of John writes, “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

The truth is, I am tempted to say, Let us not pretend that there is any name – Smith, Wesson, Glock, Remington – by which we may be saved, but only the name of Jesus. Let us not pretend that there is any power in us to save ourselves, except the power of love that Jesus has demonstrated for us, to lay down our lives, little by little, piece by piece, for our neighbours, for love, for the love of God.

And when we are tempted to protest, “But this is the real world; let them disarm first,” I am tempted to say, let’s remember that Jesus did just that, in the garden, when they came to arrest him with swords and clubs, and he responded with mercy, and the disarming of his disciples.

He did not run away like a hired hand, neither did he leave them to the wolves, for here he is, still speaking, still acting, still healing through Peter and the Holy Spirit.

I am tempted to say all of that, but I know, I know that sometimes we feel more like the sheep huddled in the bus shelter, dripping with rain, wondering when someone is coming to take us home and dry. I know that there have been times when we have waited in the valley, wondering how long it will take for the light to break through and show us the way out. I know that sometimes, we are afraid that the rod and the staff will break if we lean too hard upon them with our prayers.

They will not break.

For here is God, once more spreading a table before us in the face of all that troubles us. Here is the Good Shepherd, once more gathering us as a flock, through water and oil, reminding us to take strength and courage from one another, to encourage one another to hear his voice. Here is the wine, the cup running over with the mercies of God. Because, like those impossible sheep on the mountainside, no matter where we find ourselves, we are marked and claimed and cared for by the one who has called us each by name, and by whose Name we are made whole.

Amen.

  Lectionary texts

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Give me something to eat

Posted on April 10, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

Of course they had fish – remember who they were.
Like little boys with their little loaves
and a few small fish, watching his hands
as they broke the flesh pierced by their hooks
into pieces; they fed him
as a small child feeds his mother,
learning from her how to love.

Jesus himself stood among the disciples and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. (Luke 24:36b-42)

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For fear

Posted on April 7, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Church of the Epiphany, Second Sunday of Easter (Thomas Sunday), which coincides with the six month anniversary of the October 7 attacks and the beginning of the war in Gaza

Thomas cried out, “My Lord and my God!” He recognized in the face, the voice, the wounded body of Jesus the love of God that would not leave him wondering, or doubting, or alone. But more than that, he identified Jesus with God’s own self.

This is why the doors were locked. This is why the disciples were afraid of their own countrymen, of their own community, of their own congregation. Because to name Jesus as God was a departure. It was a fracture. It had to be painful.

A few weeks ago one of you noted the uncomfortable way in which John the Evangelist writes about “the Jews,” reminding me that we really do need to talk about John’s language, and what it means, and what it doesn’t mean.

Let’s start here: whenever you read something like, “the doors were locked for fear of the Jews,” cast your mind back to chapter four of the very same book, where Jesus meets the woman of Samaria beside the well. Remember what he says to her: “Salvation is from the Jews”! For all of its “us and them” feeling, the Gospel of John is clear that Jesus is also one of them. He is a Jew.

He is the Lamb of God, the Word of creation, the light of the world, rabbi, Messiah, the King of Israel, the Son of God. He is steeped in the traditions of his ancestors. He is on fire for the purity of the Temple. He attends every Jewish festival. He dies and is buried according to the customs of his people, the Jews.

So when John writes the phrase, “the Jews,” he doesn’t mean by any means to undermine the covenant that God has made from long ago with God’s first-chosen people.

The phrase may mean different things in different contexts throughout the text; clearly Jesus’ assertion that “salvation is from the Jews” comes from a different place than, “the doors were locked for fear of the Jews.” In the first instance it no doubt is more universal; in the latter it is clearly narrower.

The context of the writing is one factor; the context of the reader is certainly another. We do not hear John’s words in the same way as his community did two millennia ago. We have an awful lot of history and cultural accretions that colour our understanding and complicate it. Raymond Brown, a formidable scholar of John’s Gospel, argues that John’s first readers would more readily recognize “the Jews” of the Gospel as the people they knew as their proximate neighbors, members of the same synagogues, who were hostile to their innovative and, to the ears of many, blasphemous proclamation of Jesus as “my Lord and my God.”[i]

For all of our contextualizing, the language remains uncomfortable for us in the western world of the twenty-first century. There is good reason for that. Anti-Jewish interpretations of scripture have been used to justify the worst atrocities, and we know that the conspiracy theories and the dangers to the Jewish diaspora were not ended by the treaties of 1945. It is unthinkable that the Christ, who healed the ear of the one who came to arrest him and who rebuked the disciple who wielded the sword; Christ, whose dying prayers were from the Psalms of David, and who rose again to put all violence, all cruelty to shame; it is unthinkable that such a Christ would allow such hatred from his followers. He is the life of God’s love in the world after all.

It is also difficult for us in this moment, in our history, to hear John’s antagonism toward those he labels “the Jews” and not to think of the continuing brutality of the war in Gaza, which was not unprovoked, but which has claimed far more than an eye for an eye, and which continues to break the teeth of the children of Palestine with famine and destruction. Again, there is a difference between Jewish ethnicity and the politics of Israel. The Jesus who drove the marketeers out of the Temple was no less Jewish for his resolute adherence to religious values over the economy and ease and exploitation of the political classes. We cannot let righteous outrage over the unrighteous devastation of Gaza become fuel for a broader brush with hatred.

In fact, Jesus himself may be our best guide and interpreter of the language of John’s Gospel that we find hard to hear and understand. Jesus, who taught his followers from the scriptures that he knew the best that the way of God is love; that the promises of God are faithful; that the mercy of God endures; that the justice of God does not set a sword between peoples but sacrifices itself for their reconciliation.

Jesus, who breathed peace upon his disciples, who were locked up for fear of their own shadows. Jesus, who came back for Thomas, because he would not leave the doubtful, the denying, any beloved child of God longing for the sight of him and unfulfilled.

This is the Jesus I have known and try to follow: my Lord and my God.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i] Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the Gospel of John (Doubleday, 2003), 166-172

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Easter 2024

Posted on March 31, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio, Easter 2024. The prelude to the sermon was a children’s message regarding Adaiah, the Easter bat, who witnessed the stone rolled away from the tomb from the inside of the cave …

The rock has been rolled away, and Jesus is risen. But do you know the really odd thing about this Easter Gospel reading? Jesus is not in it! The promise of him is there, and the evidence of his resurrection, the messenger angel reminding the women that he has already said that he will go ahead of them to Galilee, that he will meet them there, at home. But we do not, they do not physically see Jesus, in this account. 

Perhaps if they did they would be less afraid. As it is, in this original ending to the Gospel of Mark, those women disciples are so awe-struck, so wonder-befuddled, that it frightens them. They were so overwhelmed and overcome by the thought of Jesus’ resurrection that it terrified them. Hope can be a scary animal. 

For the women, for Mary, it might have seemed safer to stay with grief, with bewilderment, with confusion. At least we know what that’s like, right? But this, this miracle, although anticipated, although predicted, although expected; this is like nothing that has gone before. This is beyond experience. This demands a whole new level of trusting Jesus, of believing in what God can do through and in Jesus. And this, a scant sabbath’s rest since they dried the tears they shed on the foot of the cross.

Hope, under such circumstances, while Pilate’s soldiers still hold sway in the city, and their own authorities are suspicious of their association with Jesus; hope, when everywhere they go it seems they see crosses, hope seems not only risky, but almost … disrespectful?

Yet here is an indisputable angel, sitting outside a tomb opened up and emptied of its dead, telling them not only to believe that they will see Jesus back at home, but to share that hope with others.

I think we can relate to their fear, their terror. So much has happened to bury our faith, our hope lately, under the rubble of war, in the river beneath the bridge, under the shattered memories of broken relationships, in the grave. It seems risky to hope, almost disrespectful to announce our hope. Not only that, but there are few enough angels out here giving out good news; if one showed up, we would have to wonder if it had been conjured up by generative AI. Truth is hard enough to find, so hope?

And yet here we are, with the women, approaching the tomb and finding that the stone has been rolled back, and the grave is empty, and that Jesus is risen, and has gone ahead of us. Because that is what we believe, isn’t it? That God has defeated death, and more than that, has given us a new life, with and in Christ Jesus.

We believe, without the benefit of angels or appearances, that he rose from the dead, that the Roman Empire, greatest superpower in history, could do their worst to kill him, but that they could not destroy him. 

We believe that in the midst of trouble, in the midst of unrest and unease, in the midst of our lives, there is no grave that can hold God hostage. We believe that Jesus is risen, and hope has been unleashed.

Because if Jesus is risen, anything is possible. If Jesus is risen, the kingdom of God is truly at hand. If Jesus is risen, injustices can be reversed, violence does not have the final word, mercy can overthrow oppression, humility, humanity is stronger than the imaginations and machinations of mighty and military empires.

And so despite the powers of the world, despite the clouds, despite everything that conspires to make us afraid, we will hope. A friend reminded me last night that the angel’s message from Jesus makes a point of naming Peter; Peter, who we last saw weeping after his denials of Jesus, and the crowing of the cockerel. We hope, because Jesus’ love and forgiveness know no bounds, and because nothing we can do, nothing have done, can stop Christ’s resurrection. We hope because if we can believe in a world where Jesus’ love reigns, where resurrection happens, then perhaps we can help bring it to hand.

We do not see Jesus in this morning’s Easter reading, but like the women at the tomb, we don’t need to see his risen body to know that it is true: that God’s life, God’s love for us – for us! – cannot be destroyed. 

The rock has been rolled away. Jesus is risen. Hope has been unleashed, and love has been set free. Do not be tooafraid to tell of it.

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Good Friday: the rock

Posted on March 29, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

The Passion Gospel is read.

Then, they rolled a stone across the entrance to the tomb.

These were his disciples, his followers, his confidantes; he had told them that this would happen, and that it wouldn’t be the end. But they had seen him helpless on the wooden gibbet; they had seen him mocked and pierced; they could not leave him defenseless against the elements or the wild beasts, be they animal or human. They rolled a stone across the entrance to the tomb.

I don’t know if it was an act of faith, expecting that if Jesus were to rise from the dead, rebuild the temple of his body in three days, that he would at least be able to cope with a rock, or whether it was an act of doubt and despair, a walling off the hope that had attended them as long as he was with them, now crucified along with him. I do think that in the moment, it was an act of love, of tenderness, of care for the body they had known. In the moment, caught between grief and wonder, wrenching hope and twisting despair, they did the only thing that they could think of to honour the love they had shared: they rolled a stone across the entrance to the tomb.

However we come to the Cross tonight, there is a reason we come here, to sit in its sorrow together instead of alone, to watch the shadows gather and hear the silence that follows the death of God, made all too human on the cross. Whether we come to hollow out our despondency, whether we are trying to scrabble together hope, whether we are bringing a heart of stone or a bleeding side, there is tenderness that awaits us here.

There is a tenderness that doesn’t insist that we see the Cross only as prelude to Resurrection. There is a love that rolls the rock across the entrance to the tomb in order to protect our grief, to honour our sorrow, to keep out the wild beasts that have no mercy. 

There is a tenderness that persists in hope on our behalf, knowing that even when God is dead and buried, God is not gone, that eternity cannot be so easily ended as by our devices. That the rock is no barrier if God should choose to move it.

The emptiness of the Cross that night seemed hollow to those who had not yet witnessed the emptiness of the tomb. Yet even in his absence, Jesus called out of those who tended to him the kind of love and mercy, the kind of persistent insistence on the goodness of God that he had embodied. They rolled a stone across the entrance of the tomb, aching to hold on to him, knowing that in order to do that, they must go home, and light the candles for their sabbath prayers; to keep the faith, however shadowed with doubt it might become, to say a blessing, and let the rock, the rock of our salvation, be its seal.

For God alone my soul in silence waits;
For Christ alone is my rock and my salvation. (based on Psalm 62:1-2)

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Maundy Thursday: love

Posted on March 28, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

It doesn’t look as though it was necessarily planned this way. You would think that if Jesus wanted to wash his disciples’ feet, he would do it on the way in, not in the middle of the meal, while they were all sat around the table. It feels awkward, that interruption to the last supper they will enjoy together. But perhaps the awkwardness is at least part of the point.

I wonder if it was as they were sharing their meal, their memories, their hopes and fears for this Passover festival, with all of its history and all of its danger, and knowing that his time with them was about up, that Jesus remembered Mary. Only last weekend, they were all at Mary’s house, with Martha and Lazarus, still fresh from the tomb. They were already making jokes about Lazarus’ body odour when Mary broke open the jar of nard and poured it out over Jesus’ feet, its scent filling the house and its inhabitants, silencing them, at least most of them; love having the final word over death.

And if he remembered Mary, wiping up the rivulets of perfumed oil with her hair, he could not but remember that other woman, at Simon the Pharisee’s house, who washed his feet with her tears; the one they called a sinner; the one that he said loved him the most. 

And in the next heartbeat he was on his feet, filling the bowl with water, stripping off his robe and rolling up his sleeves, because he knew that if he was to leave them knowing how to love, he needed to show them the depth, the humility, the profundity of his love for them.

“You see what I have done to you?” he asked them. “Now do that to one another.” He told Peter, “You don’t understand it now, but one day you will.”

Because he understood that in this moment, the love that the women had poured upon his feet was completed, by his love, by his passing it on to his disciples.

Lavishing love on those who do not understand it; it is the story of the Gospel, the story of Creation, the story of our lives, and of the love of God.

Returning to the table, Jesus took the bread, and broke it, and told them, “This is my body that is for you.” He knew that in the moment they would wonder what on earth or in heaven he might mean, but soon, after his body was broken, and his blood spilled with water upon the earth, when they came back to the table they would remember, and they would know that this, too, was love beyond measure, and he trusted that we would know what to do; how to let that understanding lift us from the table, ready to pour the love we have known upon each other, upon our neighbour, upon the world.

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What we learn from one another

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A poem towards Maundy Thursday

Some days later, stretching out his hand 
to pluck an olive to his puckered mouth 
he remembered her hands and her hair, 
how the scent of nard filled his mind, 
overwhelming the taste of the food 
with the sweet and bitter tang of love; 
his mother and the oil she used 
to anoint her firstborn son. 
He arose, stripped down like a child 
playing around the feet of the adults 
at table, began to wash them,
wondering at how time callouses us all, 
however much tenderness is folded in. 

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:35)

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Palm Sunday 2024

Posted on March 24, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Palms and the Passion; John 12:12-16(9-19); the Passion according to Mark

Either side of the palms passage we heard from John this morning, quiet in the background, is Lazarus. Lazarus, we are told, is the reason that such a crowd has gathered to greet Jesus. More: the people who witnessed Lazarus’ return from the tomb have told everyone what they saw, what they smelt, what they heard, what they felt when the tomb was opened and Lazarus emerged from his grave clothes. Mystery and magic are in the air, along with rumours of a Messiah, and the people flock to see what will happen next.

What happens next is apparently the reversal of Lazarus’ miracle. At the beginning of Palm Sunday, the authorities are looking to put Lazarus to death because they cannot comprehend how a dead man can walk, and they are frightened and confused at what this means, that the boundaries between death and life have been breached. And by the end of Holy Week they have hung all of their insecurities and outrage around Jesus neck, and the Romans, with the power of life or death over anyone they choose to occupy, have obliging crucified the people’s Messiah, putting to death not only the man but the miracle, and the magic, and the mobbing of the crowd.

I wonder if all who passed by, demanding that Jesus save himself as he had saved others, were mocking him, or whether some still held out hope that even now, as he had raised Lazarus, he could bring down this cruel system of execution around the ears of the Romans and all who supported the violence that they called peace-keeping.

They still did not understand the breadth and depth of Jesus’ transgression of those boundaries between life and death, that in order to defeat death not only for Lazarus but for all, in order to reverse the injustices not only of the Romans but of all corrupt powers, in order to be fully human, and to reconcile that with his divinity, he had to harrow hell himself, within his own body and blood.

I’m not sure we’ve fully understood it yet.

There is a part of us, isn’t there, that still wants magic; for Jesus to wave his hands and turn water into wine, or wine into water; to take away not only the sting of death but the ache of grief that it leaves in its wake; to come down from the Cross so that we don’t have to walk that way. Otherwise why cry, “Hosanna!”?

Yes, I can get behind that turn in the crowd, that shouts for joy at the raising of Lazarus, and is dumbfounded by the crucifixion of Jesus. “Why don’t you save yourself?” How can you save us, they mean, if you die?

The late theologian Alan E. Lewis puts it this way: 

“The world we know is one in which unjust oppressors too regularly hold sway; in which the innocent suffer through disease, disaster, greed, and war; in which the lifelong threat of death, and the pervasiveness of evil, conspire to make belief in a God of love and power impossible.”[i] And on the Cross it looked as though that evil had defeated God. Yet, says Lewis, after St Paul, where sin abounds, God’s grace abounds all the more (Romans 5:12-21).[ii]

To put it another way, when the forces of evil, sin, and death increase so far as to destroy God on the Cross, God does not squash back but expands to encompass even this with grace, with forgiveness, with love. Because it is the nature of God to love, to forgive, to overwhelm sin with grace, it is only by engulfing even those forces that would deny God’s grace with grace that God acts.

So where does that leave us? We are standing in the crowd still, our palm branches in our hands, Hosannas still hovering on our lips, and we are as confused as the next person about how this way of the Cross makes sense. His disciples did not understand these things at first (John 12:16). Turning to Lewis again, he writes, “At the time, not even the closest of his disciples could tolerate or understand the thought of such a denouement to the ministry of Jesus. But faith’s perceptiveness came finally to see that his suffering, cross, and tomb were Christ’s glory and his triumph, the very source and form of his rule and judgement of the world.”[iii]

If we are still looking for a military ruler, or a magician, or a mighty Messiah, we had better look elsewhere. What Jesus offers us is merely the humility, servitude, self-sacrifice, self-abandonment of an all-encompassing, death-defeating love: the creative, life-giving, all-absorbing love of God that will not let us go, nor let us down, nor leave us alone.

I suspect that if there was one person in the crowd who understood, it was Lazarus. He alone had made that journey to the grave and back again, had seen his sisters’ grief and disbelief, had witnessed the wonder and anger of the crowd that saw the boundaries of life and death broken open before them. He understood their bewilderment, since he had experienced things no mortal can properly process. And he knew what Jesus was doing: that he was ready to take Lazarus’ place in the tomb, so as to sanctify even death with his love; so that Lazarus need not be afraid to die again, even if his enemies had their way, because Jesus had overwhelmed their evil designs with his grace, such that even the centurions were won over in the end, their eyes opened and their hearts broken by the knowledge that this, indeed, was the Son, the life of God, that they had nailed to the Cross.

[i] Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross & Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Wm B. Eerdmans, 2001), 97
[ii] Lewis, 96-97
[iii] Lewis, 116

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And what of the colt?

Posted on March 22, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

It knew, as animals do,
more than the crowd,
felt beneath its hooves
the blood of the branches,
stones slickened with sap,
the vibrations of voices hungry
for release; heard the heartbeat
of the man astride its back,
how it skipped at times
with fear, at times with joy,
how it lured the beast’s own beat
into its dance. Hosanna,
brayed the donkey:
Saviour, save us!

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Lazarus campaigns against the death penalty

Posted on March 20, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

This is a #preparingforSundaywithpoetry prologue post. At last evening’s Bible study, we noticed the “Lazarus framework“ to John’s Palm Sunday story (if you’re using Mark, another poem from the pov of the colt is coming). No wonder, we said, authorities of all stripes are worried by Jesus. If you can’t even rely on people to remain dead, you have lost your ultimate power over them …

Lazarus campaigns against the death penalty

Imagine an angel in the corner
of the death chamber, wheels
and wings and eyes clothed
in a demure white coat,
seeming to pick at its nails with fire,
murmuring as though anyone might listen:
You cannot kill what God has created.
Watch: they will not stay dead
for long. Scan your night dreams
for signs of life: the smell
of empty grave clothes
amid the whiff of bleach;
the expertly executed sons of man
set free despite you.

When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many … were deserting and were believing in Jesus.

The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting,

“Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—
    the King of Israel!”

Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written:

 “Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion.
Look, your king is coming,
    sitting on a donkey’s colt!”

His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him. 

So the crowd that had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to testify. It was also because they heard that he had performed this sign that the crowd went to meet him. The Pharisees then said to one another, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!”

John 12:9-19, NRSVUE

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