Dear People of St. James’,
Holy Week is hitting us hard this year. No palms. No footwashing. No Eucharist. No gathering to walk the Stations. No gathering in the dark at church and moving into light during the Vigil. No flowering of the cross. No Easter Egg hunt out by the classroom buildings. No Alleluias in community. A lot of loss.
I had originally thought to write about the importance of mourning these losses because Jesus was right to say, “Blessed are those who mourn.” When we mourn loss, we take our pain seriously and allow ourselves to feel it, because mourning a loss, rather than indulging in frustration, bitterness or denial, is the difficult way forward to healing and restored fullness of life.
That’s all still true, but last night, as I write to you this week, I sat down to the news that as many as 240,000 Americans could die from Covid-19 in the months ahead. That means we are all going to be touched by the deaths of people we know and love. It means that any of us could be among them. That’s a loss that requires more than a Beatitude.
That’s a loss that takes us straight to Good Friday and the cross. Two days from now, we won’t need special services to put us in mind of the crucifixion. We’re already there.
Like us, Jesus too was separated from his friends at the end, powerless to save or even help them. Like us, Jesus too did absolutely nothing to deserve what was happening to him. Like us, Jesus too saw those in government wash their hands of him while asking, “What is truth?” Like somebody we love—possibly even ourselves—Jesus too weakens until he can no longer support the weight of his body on the cross, slumps, suffocates and dies.
God almighty, in Jesus, has been exactly where we are all going.
So, when Jesus took the bread and wine at the Last Supper, it wasn’t just his body and blood. It was ours, too. Paul said that we are the Body of Christ, and nowhere are we more the Body of Christ than in the time of suffering and death. As John writes: Jesus in us, and we in him, that we may be perfectly one.
Let’s push it even further. Jesus’ love is boundless, reaching to all of God’s creation. I believe that the bread and wine in his hands are not only his body and blood, but also the body and blood of the victims of Holocaust, of prejudice and lynching, of war and violence, of domestic abuse and rape, of Black Death and Covid-19. Jesus might as well have said, as he broke the bread, “Haec sunt meus corpus”— “These are my body.”
Though we have no bread and wine this Maundy Thursday, we don’t need them.
We are the Eucharist. Though we have no community to walk the Stations of the Cross side by side, we are crucified.
Though we have no “alleluias” to shout together on Sunday, we will rise.
So, banish the temptation to ask, “How could God have let these terrible things happen to us?” That’s exactly the wrong question.
The question to ask is, “How can we possibly get through what we now face without God?”
God is not a puppet master beyond the sky, manipulating viruses and able to steer disease vectors toward us or away from us. God is here, deep within us, suffering everything we suffer in this imperfect world where viruses flourish, and Chief Priests crucify people. God is deep within us bursting with love for us every painful step along the way. When the bread that is our body is broken and this life on earth has stripped away all else, we will have nothing left but God, who was always within, waiting for us to come. And God will be more than enough.
The Rev. David Hoster
