It’s not Monday any more, but the scent still lingers in the house when they awaken, and Lazarus is grateful for the distraction; he hardly knows himself these days, still amazed at the complicated gift of life. The echoes of yesterday’s prayers whisper through the statehouse rotunda. In the garden of Gethsemane, millennia of olive trees bend low to the ground, patiently awaiting the promise of peace.
This is the reflection I had the honour of offering last evening, on the Monday of Holy Week, for a prayer vigil of the Episcopal dioceses in Ohio:
a bruised reed God will not break,
and a dimly burning wick God will not quench;
our God will faithfully bring forth justice. Isaiah 42:3
I’ve been thinking about the palm branches, strewn yesterday across the ground, trodden by the colt and trampled by the following crowds. Symbols of joy, of welcome, of worship, bruised by the realities that quickly set in of a world that is far from gentle.
When everything seems broken, and the powers of this world would reclaim even the cries of welcome and of worship for its own purposes: for the purposes of pride, of vainglory, of war: Do not let it.
Now, it is Monday, and Mary is anointing Jesus for his burial (John 12:1-11). She knows that he is borrowing time. I wonder what conversation he has had with Lazarus about that, about those days spent on the plane of the dead.
Powers and principalities would like Lazarus to have stayed dead. It is not right, they feel, for God to reverse the engines of entropy, which are so efficient at keeping the world at war, its people in confusion. The powerful are ravenous for more power, while the poor grow ever more hungry.
But God will do more than to preserve the bruised reed. God will do more than refrain from extinguishing the flame from a dimly burning candle. God can and will do more than we dare ask or imagine.
Where the palms lie bruised and bleeding from their leaves, I imagine the people who gather their fibres to weave baskets for bread. They will not let the worship go to waste nor the songs of praise wither. They refuse to give up on hope.
Even where the flame sputters and dies, all hope is not lost. Lazarus, with his final breath, must have thought it too late for Jesus to come; it wasn’t. His disciples may have thought it was too late for him to defeat the powers of death, of this mortal and immoral world; it wasn’t.
Not through might, nor money, nor armies, nor even angels, but through love. That was the way of Jesus. His tenderness to Mary, his truthfulness to Pilate, his faithfulness in prayer, cleaving to the psalms, even at the point of death: Jesus knew a better way to be defiant, and to remain undefeated by the world.
And in our prayers, our songs, our lived and living faith, may we remain lovingly, peaceably, indefatigably defiant of anything that does not reek to high heaven with mercy, resound to the depths of the earth with compassion, fill the room, the house, the world with the community of love, the beloved community of God, until all are gathered in.
In the name of Love, in the name of Mercy, in the name of Justice, in the Name of Jesus. Amen.
over the water 
