It is Holy Week, and we are called to be Holy, and over the course of the week there are all sorts of ways to grow in holiness, whether it be the plethora of services that we have on, or anointing with oils on Tuesday and Wednesday evening, or helping with the school easter play on Thursday, or cooking for the weekend and shopping without shouting at people, or avoiding eating your chocolate eggs yet, or just putting up with people in general – all these things can help us to increase in holiness if handled well. If you have an idle moment in the next week, which is maybe unlikely (although it is exactly what we should all be doing!), you can wander the streets of Bethphage on Google Maps. It doesn’t seem particularly remarkable today and I doubt it did when Jesus arrived there on his way to Jerusalem. I mean no offence to Bethphageans when I say that it has the feel of a commuter town about it: most of the people there now probably work in Jerusalem, just a couple of miles away. But in Jesus’s time, things might have been the other way around. Many in Jerusalem would have had their eye on Bethphage, a place that had acquired an enormous significance in the expectations of the religious leaders and thinkers of Jesus’s day. Bethphage meant something unflattering like ‘house of the unripe figs’ but it was to be the place where the ripening took place, the scene of a great clash between good and evil, the stage where the Lord’s judgment would finally be pronounced. Bethphage, in all of its ordinariness, was a sign of an awaited liberation.St Matthew’s Gospel assumes that we know all of that – and indeed we should, we have neglected our Bible studying for too long. St Matthew mostly seems concerned to show that Jesus, for all of his surprise and subversion, did precisely what the Messiah was supposed to do, in coming via Bethphage. It is important that we know that He went there. Matthew stresses that in the humility of the incarnate Son there is no loss of majesty. Nonetheless, we can see something of the otherness of Bethphage playing itself out in Jesus’s triumphal entry into the Holy City. By faith, we do indeed see God in Christ carving a new pathway into our world, a pathway that will lead onwards through the Lord’s death and into the glory of resurrection. We do indeed hear the city rumbling, not with the sound of earthquake but with the sound of exultation, the raucous singing of ‘Hosanna’, the bustle and movement of bodies as they gather themselves and others around the Messiah. We can easily sense the excitement, the feeling of fulfilment, the pulse that now is the favourable time, the intuition that something is indeed ripening in their midst. Here is the fulfilment of ancient prophecy, here is the King, here is the Messiah, exactly as He should be. But not quite. We know—as the first readers of Matthew’s Gospel knew—that the crowds will turn on Jesus within a matter of hours. Things are not quite right; the signs and symbols are all out of joint. The victorious Christ does not arrive on the warhorse but on a donkey. Palm branches were liturgically suited to the celebration of Tabernacles rather than Passover. The greeting ‘Hosanna’ literally means ‘please save us’, but does it sound more like triumphalism or desperation? Did they think ‘well, we were hoping for something else, but we can work with what we have got’? But it might also be that this is some kind of deconstruction of the rituals of power politics, the unmasking of their utter absurdity in their fulfilment by the living presence of divine power himself.There is certainly something playful about this, but pantomime doesn’t quite capture it: Jesus is not mocking or jesting, or even simply pushing the boundaries; he is deadly serious. The crowd are swept up into his dramatic act of redemption, drawn to participate in the deconstruction of their own illusions and fantasies of political liberation. No longer mere observers, they are now participants in the process of ripening. This, of course, will have consequences that they cannot yet foresee. Who is this? What will happen now? Maybe Bethphage is far too dull a place for a messiah from dull Nazareth to come from, and what of the donkey anyway? And the palm branches? It’s all a bit wrong, and there is a fear that things are going to get worse, not better. But reject your expectations, what we are going to get is what God gives us, and it will help us grow in holiness and hope, and it shows the sovereignty of God, on a donkey, in a dull suburb, with unexpected people, and the cries of ‘please save us’ will turn to the knowledge that we are saved, if we live this week with Him.
You may have heard the phrase, “real men don’t cry.” For many years, particularly in this country, emotional restraint was worn almost as a badge of honour. Strength was measured by composure, grief was something to be mastered, hidden away, or carried silently. The so-called British stiff upper lip shaped generations. Thankfully, those assumptions are beginning to soften. Nowadays we understand that the ability to express emotion is not weakness, but honesty. That tears are not a failure of character or faith, but a truthful response to love and loss.In my pastoral encounters, especially in a hospital setting, I have often found that when people finally allow themselves to weep, it can be a profoundly healthy and healing release. Tears are not the problem, unexpressed sorrow often is. Weeping can come when words are no longer enough. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that one of the most powerful verses in all of Scripture is also the shortest: “Jesus wept.” In these closing days of Lent, as the Church enters Passiontide, the tone subtly changes, we are invited to look more steadily at the cost of love, the sorrow, vulnerability, and self-giving of Christ.There are moments when just a few words hold a lifetime of meaning. Those two words of Jesus have spoken powerfully into my own personal experience of grief. Again and again, at bedsides, in quiet moments with the dying and the bereaved, I have returned to them... ‘Jesus wept’... not as an explanation, not as an answer, but as a presence. As a reassurance that God does not stand at a distance from human sorrow, but enters it, fully, vulnerably, and without reserve. I think Jesus wept, not because he lacked faith, but because love cannot remain untouched by loss.On this Fifth Sunday of Lent, as the Church stands on the threshold of Holy Week, we are invited to linger here. Not to rush ahead to resurrection, not to tidy away grief too quickly, but to stay for a moment with sorrow, with waiting, and with love that aches. In today’s Gospel, we meet Jesus as he is deeply moved, stirred to the depths, this is not a serene or detached encounter. This is Jesus standing at the grave of his friend, feeling the full weight of what death steals from us… presence, voice, touch. Jesus weeps because death matters, love matters, grief matters.I think this is why today’s Gospel passage is so profoundly consoling. It gives us permission to grieve and it shows us that grief itself is held within the heart of God. And into that space of loss comes one of the most powerful declarations “I am the resurrection and the life.” Yet even knowing this, Jesus still weeps. Our faith does not ask us to choose between hope and sorrow, I think it holds them together. We believe in resurrection, and we still stand at gravesides, we proclaim eternal life, and we still weep. Tears are not a failure of faith, they are the cost of love. Ezekiel’s vision speaks into this same mystery. The prophet is brought to a valley of dry bones, whatever life they once held is long gone. And yet God speaks into that place, “I will open your graves… I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.” God breathes life into what seems beyond recovery.For those who wait in hospital wards, those who live at home with chronic illness, those who sit with grief that has no clear end, todays scripture, speaks powerfully of God who enters the places we believe are beyond hope. Saint Paul, writing to the Romans, speaks of the Spirit of God dwelling within us, this is a deeply incarnational vision of faith. God’s life does not hover at a safe distance, in Jesus weeping, we learn that he understands our fragile bodies, tired minds, and wounded hearts. Lent, especially in these later weeks, teaches us to live with these tensions.In my hospital ministry, I often meet people whose world has narrowed to a single room, a single bed, a bedside table, a place of uncertainty. Yet, again and again, I witness how alive love remains present, in the quiet squeeze of a hand, in a whispered prayer, in someone keeping vigil through the long hours of the night. These moments are holy. Jesus wept and in doing so, he revealed that God’s power is not opposed to vulnerability, indeed, it is revealed through it. God who calls Lazarus from the tomb is the same Lord who stands beside Mary and Martha in their grief.Here, at the Eucharist, this mystery is gathered and offered. Bread is broken, wine is poured out, loss and gift are held together. And we hear those astonishing, familiar words… “This is my body, given for you.” God takes what is broken and transforms it. The Eucharist does not deny suffering, it transfigures it. It gathers our grief, our longing, our fragile hope, and places them within Christ’s own self-offering. This is why the Mass matters so deeply, it is where tears and hope coexist. Where waiting becomes prayer, where the Spirit breathes life into those parts of our lives that feels dry and worn.So today, if you are grieving, grieving a person, a season of life, a body that no longer behaves as it once did, we can remind ourselves that our tears are known to God. They are not wasted, they are held. If you are waiting, or fearful of what lies ahead, hear again the voice of Christ, steady, compassionate, and close… “I am the resurrection and the life.” Not distant, not abstract, but present, standing beside us, weeping with us, and gently calling us toward new life.As we continue our journey through Lent, this week, may we trust that God is breathing new life where we least expect it. May we discover, that in the Passion of Christ, God himself has stood in our place's of grief and wept. Amen
There used to be a blog called ‘Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things’, I was a great fan. It showed the leader of North Korea being taken to see things, and he would look at them with a degree of interest, depending on the Thing he was presented with. Sometimes, one of his (rather obvious) body doubles would take his place, and their look of sheer incomprehension of what they were being shown could be telling, a little like when a mechanic shows me what is wrong with my car, I simply don’t know what these parts do, I do not wish to know, all I require is that they work and that is his job, not mine. I do not catch my own fish because there are fishermen, I do not start my own wars because there are people who enjoy that sort of thing as well. There are ways and ways of seeing, and ways and ways of looking. In today’s Gospel, a man born blind is given sight in a doubly extraordinary way. He is given by Jesus ordinary sight, except that this gift came to him in an extraordinary way. It was by way of a miracle. Receiving sight was also for the man a sign of something else, in fact, a sign about someone else. The man who had been blind is given by way of faith to see who cured him, in all his depth. Once he has the eyes of faith he believes in Jesus and worships him. As a man born blind, not as one who went blind, I suspect that he looked at things with a degree of intensity and incomprehension even great than that of Kim Jong-Il’s body doubles. And interestingly, we should focus on one element of the story – surrounded by that which is new and incomprehensible to him, He looks at the one who cured him and sees who he is, before he even so much as looks at himself. As the season of Lent unfolds, we are sharply aware of the clouds that gather around Jesus, how the darkness of his suffering and death increases. This man who brought light to the bling man is himself being enveloped in darkness. The increasing darkness is ominous of very dark deeds to come. ‘As soon as Judas had taken the piece of bread he went out. It was night’. In the Gospel we have just heard, Jesus says that the night will soon be here, yet while he is in the world he is the light of the world. Later in the same Gospel, Jesus will say that he has come into the world as light, to prevent anyone who believes in him from staying in the dark anymore. Nobody who walks in the dark knows where he is going. The effects of the light, we are told by today’s second reading, are seen in complete goodness, right living and truth, a truth recognised by the blind man in the Gospel.‘What has come into being in him was lifelife that was the light of men;and light shines in darkness,and darkness could not overpower it’.The One who is light is also truth. We cannot deny that there is a darkness even after Christ’s resurrection. It is a residual and lingering darkness which can dim the light for us though not extinguish it. Till Christ’s total radiance is definitively revealed, we live in a time when drifting clouds can obscure the sun. The sun is there unfailingly every day, but at times we go forward with less than clarity and with stumbling steps. More and more now, we are even misled by those who claim to know the light – the Gospel of Wealth, of Success, or becoming better people through Gnosticism rather than scripture alone, of Christian Nationalism. All these things are blinding humanity to the simple truth revealed in Christ. He is the light of the world, and there can be no other. The blind man knew this, we also should learn it.Not everyone rejoiced at what had happened to the blind man. Once healed, he was not believed by everyone and was driven away. For some, the man who had come from the margin of disability and poverty was still to be kept at bay, like Samaritans or other challenging people. When Jesus heard that they had driven away the formerly blind man, he went and found him. There was more light to be given to the man, the light of faith of which the giving of natural sight was a sign. The One who is light is also love.We often speak about coming to understand something we had not understood before as a ‘coming to see’: ‘now I see’ can mean now I understand. The cured man was brought by love to see not just the natural world, but also to see and share in the world being transformed in Jesus Christ. That transformation is offered to us this Lent and all the days of our lives, in Holy Mother Church, in the love we are called to by Him who alone can bring light to the whole world. And He does not just illuminate the mind and heart and eyes of this man born blind, He offers light and truth to every person in the world, though the church, through scripture and through the love we have for Him and each other. We do not seek the light, the light seeks us, and what He seeks, He will find. He has found you, He has found us, Laetare, Rejoice!
The Jews looked down on the Samaritans as religious and racial half-breed heretics. It’s hard for us to understand the animosity that existed between these two groups. If you think of the Bosnians and the Serbs or if you think of the Palestinians and the Israelis, you’ve got the right idea.So why did Jesus “have to” go through Samaria when the Jews either didn’t go there at all or passed through as quickly as possible? The answer is simple and profound: Jesus went because he intended to meet this woman. He knew she would be coming to the well at precisely the moment he was sitting there weary from his journey. Nothing happens by chance in this story. Every detail is part of the outworking of God’s will. The woman isn’t looking for Jesus. All she wants is water. But Jesus is looking for her.It wasn’t the normal time, and it was unusual for a woman to come to a well alone. But this woman was different. The Bible says she came from the tiny village of Sychar. We know basically where Sychar was. It was in Samaritan territory, nestled between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. Sychar was built at the confluence of two trade routes, one that came up from Jerusalem on its way to Capernaum, and one that came west from the Jericho region toward the Mediterranean Sea. Sychar was thus located at a very strategic point in central Palestine.The well was about one-half mile outside the village near the point where the two trade routes came together. It was called Jacob’s Well, after the patriarch who had first dug it some 2000 years earlier. In every way, it is part of the story of Jesus. Weary travellers from throughout Israel knew it as a place where they might drink from the spring flowing some 150 feet below the surface.As the woman looks at Jesus and he at her, four invisible walls stand between them. There is a religious wall, a gender wall, a racial wall, and a moral wall. Yet our Lord found a way through all of them. He found her … and then she found him!The desire for God is written in the human heart. We are created by him, but also for him. As the psalmist writes, like a deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is yearning for you, my God. The search for God is universal. Every human heart seeks God, but God is not outdone — he also seeks us. He draws us to himself like a thirsty woman going to fetch water from a well. She is going about the sixth hour when the sun is high in the sky noon. She is a woman of Samaria — a pagan place.She is surprised to find a Jew there, already waiting by the well, without a bucket. He says to her, “Give me a drink.” She is startled by this gesture. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? The romance begins.The woman is a world of her own — a universe of the heart, thirsting for love, looking for it in all the wrong places! She has had five husbands, and the one she has now is not her husband. Somewhere love has died — along the way, her bucket is empty. Love comes to meet her at the well — the thirst of the Father coming to meet us in Jesus Christ! If you knew the gift of God and who it was saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. It is an eternal love; it never ends! As Isaiah prophesied:Oh, come to the water all you who are thirsty; though you have no money, come! Buy corn without money, and eat, and, at no cost, wine and milk! (Is 55:1)The waters of God’s thirst flow through the heart of Jesus Christ! The woman at the well has met the heart of love! She will never be thirsty again: She has entered the bridal chamber. She has found what she was looking for all her life. He thirsts for our love. The woman has met love — love who would hang upon a cross that she would never thirst again, that she might have eternal life with him in the Father’s house. It is a wonderful love — a love the world has never known and it is yours in Jesus Christ! Come to the waters and never be thirsty again.The world is a wedding. Christ has come to bring us to the wedding banquet. Are we willing to give him one drop of our love, to enter into relationship with him, to begin to draw water from the well who is Christ, to continue the dance that this woman joins, this outcast of the outcasts who He searches for and finds? To search for more people to love and to be loved by them as well?
