Hebrews 2:9-10

Holy Thursday Morning Prayer always feels to me like a breathing space.  Lent is officially over.  (I will be forever grateful to Paul Covino for this liturgical tidbit.)

Yes, Lent is over and we have these few hours before we belt out tonight perhaps a bit too triumphantly, “Lift High the Cross, the Love of Christ proclaim.”  And our Triduum will have begun.

Triumphalism aside, that opening line captures the central paradox of our faith, doesn’t it?  This morning’s reading opens out that paradox even more.  In Chapter 1, the author described Jesus as the exact imprint of the Father, through whom God created the world.  In today’s reading we hear that Jesus actually lived in history, that he suffered, tasted the bitterness of death.  In short, he was fully human.

Hebrews is not really a letter but a sophisticated argument that is difficult to excerpt.  The words are poetic and dense.  One might prefer the economy of say, a Terence, writing in Latin one hundred years later when he wrote, I am human; nothing human is alien to me (Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto).  It is as true of Jesus as of Terence and of us.  I am human; nothing human is alien to me.

The author of Hebrews is writing for Hellenistic Jewish Christians who are discouraged.  They may be being persecuted.  The promised parousia was clearly not coming soon.  So now they needed to accept a long process of learning to get along with the very ones who were persecuting them.  Sound familiar?  The story of Jesus seemed n to be serving their needs as they faced their suffering.  You might say that the wonder had gone out of their everyday redemptions.

So how does the author choose to encourage them to hold fast?  Oddly enough, he doesn’t go for divine intervention talk.  Rather, he refreshes them about what it meant for Jesus to be fully human. Jesus was their high priest, yes, but compassionate, sympathizing with our weakness.  This was a Jesus who prayed with loud cries and tears and reverent submission to his Father, as we will hear on Friday.  Most important for these hearers, Jesus was tested by what he suffered and therefore able to help those who are now being tested.

The author reassures them that Jesus was made perfect—read whole or complete or mature—through his suffering.  To paraphrase Terence:  I am human; suffering is not alien to me.  The implication is that we who share Jesus’ humanity can come to our wholeness through our suffering.

But there remains a problem.  We all know instances where suffering does not make us whole.  So what is it about Jesus’ life, suffering and death that pioneers our own way through repeated bouts with depression, rounds of chemo or a son’s suicide?

Now suffering itself is a great mystery so I want to tread lightly.  But I keep coming back to that question.

Last Sunday as I listened to the Luke’s passion, I found myself riveted to these lines:  The cock crowed.  The Lord turned and looked at Peter.  Immediately I started to wonder if this being made whole through suffering doesn’t have to do with a quality of presence that Jesus has.  I the time it takes to breathe a breath that line from Luke tells the whole story.  Jesus’ presence was a forgiving presence.  It was a faithful presence.  was a self-forgetting presence.  This quality of self-forgetful presence may be the best of what it is to be human, ironic as it may seem.

My father was by nature a self-forgetting person who had suffered a good deal.  (The rest of us need, as Rowan Williams suggests, “the discipline of prayer and ritual to pry us loose from our little universes of which we are the fixed center.”)

One of my favorite memories of that self-forgetfulness of Daddy happened on the first Holy Thursday I can ever remember.  I was a second grader chosen to be one of those who walk in the procession.  We were to come in our first communion dresses from the year before at 6:30 a.m.  We would have flowers put in our hair.  We would be strewing rose petals from baskets ahead of Father McCarl as he carried tie ciborium to the altar of repose.  (The service we have now at 8 p.m. was at 7 a.m. in those days.)

Well, as it happened my mother had gone into labor and went to the hospital in the middle of the night.  My sister was off to work and my father was left to get me ready for church.  I’m sure my mother was calling out instructions from the gurney.  Daddy dressed me in the white dotted Swiss dress.  He fastened the buttons on the black patent leather shoes.  But then he came to my hair. Now if you think the Ganley children had wild hair, you should have seen the tangled mess my mother had to transform into long curls every morning.  And you haven’t seen powerlessness until you see my father gathering all this long hair in one hand and wielding a perfectly useless hairbrush in the other.  He gave it his best shot, drove me to church, and walked me up those steps to the classroom.  Fortunately the flowers in the hair covered a multitude of tangles.

Through the freezing cold schoolyard we walked in two perfect lines over to the church at ten of 7.  All because Mother had said I would be there.  Daddy waited patiently in the back pew.  He later remarked briefly on the length of the service, drove me home, fried us two eggs each.  Soon afterward the phone rang.  It was news from Doctor’s Hospital that my mother had delivered a seven pound boy.

In the midst of all this my father had given me breathing space.  I can imagine how frenzied I would have been in similar circumstances.  Of course Daddy had been up all night.  Things were not going easily.  But he was patient and tender and uncomplaining and faithful to what he—or my mother—had committed me to do.  He surely was worried sick about her, but he never took his eyes off me.  Not only did I not feel pushed aside for this truly greater event happening downtown on I Street.  Rather I felt like the only person in the world.  I was the beneficiary, in Ignatius’ words, of Love that shows itself in deed and not words (Sp. Ex. 230).  What’s more, that special self forgetful presence my father was to me has been with me every Holy Thursday of my adult life.

We each have those clouds of witnesses like my father surrounding us.  Like Jesus, they are the pioneers in our history who blazed the trail for us to stay connected with God and with our fellow human beings, especially in tough times.  I loved Anne Koester’s quote in the parish newsletter after her home was turned into an “aquarium” by hurricane Isabel.  She said she could only pray, God, please receive the prayer of others as my own.  What a testimony of trust in her fellow human beings!

This quality of self forgetful presence is no small thing.  Just try it.  See how long you can go in the day—maybe even today—without catching yourself having one of those mental conversations with yourself that instantly reveals yourself as the fixed center of your own little universe.  Try being totally attentive to a conversation with another without adding your own parallel story or cliché about how everything will be fine.

And there you might find an empty space where there are no words.  Sometimes this breathing space is comfort, sometimes world changing and not so comfortable.   This could be a breathing space where a long-held value might suddenly break open.  It is a life’s work, but it can begin with a day’s experiment.

It often strikes me that both in our personal lives and in public life we spend more time trying to be God than being human.  That we find the divine infinitely more appealing than the human.  In this breathing space today, perhaps we could observe and savor the gift of being human.  Then tonight we might just lose ourselves in the larger story of the One who became fully human so that we might be transformed into truly human beings.