April 15, 2022
Good Friday Year C – George Yandell
When I was a little boy in Mobile, my best friend Mikey lived next door. He was a year older than I. He had to lift me over the low fence when we went from his yard into mine. We played together nearly every day. On the other side of our house lived a girl who babysat for me. (I thought she was the most wonderful girl in the world.) Her father grew beautiful daylilies in his front yard. There were 100’s of them, many different colors. One day in the spring, Mikey suggested we pick a few of the daylilies. So we did. And we picked some more. And we picked more and more until we had picked every daylily in Mr. Hodges’s front yard. They were lying all over the ground. I knew we had done something bad. Mikey said not to worry, that no one would ever know how it happened.
Mr. Hodges came home from work and knocked on our front door. Mikey was there, playing with me in our back yard. When Mr. Hodges told my mother about his flowers, she was real upset. As I remember it, she brought Mr. Hodges into the back yard, and said, “Boys, Mr. Hodges has something he’d like to ask you.” I remember freezing up and being afraid. Mr. Hodges asked whether we knew anything about his flowers. Mikey piped up, “No, George and I have been playing back here all day.” I couldn’t bear the look in my mother’s eye,
April 14, 2022
Maundy Thursday – George Yandell
I’d like to offer a distinction, tiny in some ways, earth-shaking in others. The distinction comes from comments Marcus Borg made on the pilgrimage to Turkey that I took in 2006 with 40 other pilgrims. What would it be like for us instead of saying “We have faith in Jesus,” to say “We have the faith of Jesus?” Do you hear the fine distinction? To claim the faith of Jesus makes me, for one, sit up, take notice, and feel woefully inadequate. On this holy night, the faith of Jesus drives him to offer the most poignant goodbye in religious history.
In every thing he did, Jesus disclosed the character of God. Having the faith Jesus himself had in God means we have the passion for doing God’s will, as Jesus did. It means having the confidence in God that Jesus demonstrated the night before he was cruelly tortured and murdered by the Roman Empire. It means we participate in the passion for justice Jesus lived each hour of his ministry. For us it implies the same loyalty to God that Jesus lived up to the moment of his death.
There are many overlays in our remembering the last night before Jesus’ crucifixion. First, there was the foot washing. Peter balked, as we heard, at having his feet washed by Jesus. Peter thought it was too embarrassing, too demeaning for Jesus to do so. But as he washed the feet of his closest friends,
April 10, 2022
Palm Sunday – George Yandell
This day in our calendar is Palm Sunday / the Sunday of the Lord’s Passion. It moves from pageantry to horror. Our palm procession mirrors the excitement in Jerusalem 1,992 years ago. Jesus was entering the great city, the crowd was chanting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” His disciples were giddy, I imagine. Then so quickly the joy turns to sadness on Maundy Thursday, then disbelief and horror on Good Friday.
None of my feelings or thoughts pondering the events of Holy Week comes remotely close to what Simon of Cyrene experienced on the day he ventured into Jerusalem and suddenly found himself carrying a condemned man’s instrument of death. But they are similar, in that reality has intruded on the joy of palms and hosannas, and somewhere in that reality Jesus is going on to die.
We moderns feel helpless about the coarsening of our world. We endure it, we try small survival strategies, we wish for better, but in the end we lock our doors and hope that the angel of death passes by.
Jesus is just as helpless today as we are. The Christian era has witnessed humanity’s worst barbarism – entire populations slaughtered, peoples enslaved, compulsory ignorance made public policy. Lies have been treated as clever, thievery as necessary and cruelty as manly. Much of that barbarism has been done in the name of Jesus, as if he were an angry volcano-god demanding human sacrifices.
April 3, 2022
Lent 5C – Byron Tindall
Matthew and Mark record an incident in Jesus’s life similar to what we read in John’s gospel today. Both of the synoptics have the event taking place at the house of Simon the leper, also a resident of Bethany, rather than at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.
Matthew and Mark have an unnamed woman pour the ointment over Jesus’s head rather than on his feet. Both Mark and John said the anointing oil was made of nard.
Matthew, Mark, and John are not in agreement about who complained about the perceived costly waste of money by either Mary or the unknown woman.
For Matthew, it was the disciples. Mark reports, “But some who were there said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way?’” In John’s gospel, it was Judas Iscariot who raised the possibility of selling the nard. The complainers in Matthew said it could have been sold for a large sum of money. Mark valued the ointment at more than 300 denarii while John reported the cost that could have been obtained by selling it at exactly 300 denarii. The denarius was the usual wage per day for a laborer. Any way you look at it, that would have a tidy sum of money for the poorer residents of Palestine at that time.
John has Martha in her apparent usual place — that of preparing the meal and serving it.