Gracious God, help us to follow your way of the cross which is the way of life. Amen.
My favorite type of movies are psychological thrillers. Movies like The Usual Suspects, Inception, Memento, or Interstellar all have a twist at the end that force us to go back and reinterpret everything that we had assumed about the plot of the movie. The same thing is true of the end of the Chronicles of Narnia series – the final chapter makes us reconsider the whole story. Well, the story of the God of Israel belongs in the category of psychological thriller in that sense.
This
Holy Week, the sermons have been focusing on a different way of thinking about
the cross of Jesus and tonight we consider the cross as recapitulation. To recapitulate
means to tell the story anew – in light of the conclusion, we reread the entire
story and see new depths of meaning throughout. The story of Israel is radically
reframed when we see that the story is consummated at the crucifixion. An executed
Messiah forces us to rethink what is even meant by salvation and redemption. If
we expected a mighty and victorious Savior who would conquer then when we meet
Jesus who is rejected, betrayed, and conquered we must look deeper to see how
it is that the cross is what makes sense of the whole story.
Recapitulation
is one of the most ancient ways that the Church has understood the cross. Irenaeus
was a 2nd-century bishop who wrote about this way of understanding the
cross. Irenaeus was a student of Polycarp, who was a student of St. John. So Irenaeus
is closely linked to an apostle who witnesses these events first-hand and the
lens through which he came to see the cross is that the cross retells and completes
the story of Israel.
The
story, as it had been received, was that God made a covenant with Abraham to
bless not only the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, but the whole world would
be blessed through them. But there was a problem – their offspring ended up
enslaved in Egypt. The people had no way out of this oppression or slavery. But,
as God so often does, God made a way out of no way and liberated the people.
This event is known as the Exodus and became the central story of Israel. Who
are the Jews? They are the people that God brought out of slavery in Egypt and
into the Promised Land.
This
liberation is what is remembered at the Passover celebration which we heard
recounted in tonight’s first reading. What caused Pharaoh to relent and let the
people go was the plague of death that killed all of the first-born children of
Egypt. But the Hebrew people were spared this death, as death passed over their
homes that night. This further cemented them as God’s chosen people and deepened
the covenant – God is the one who saved them and they were to respond with
loyalty and faithfulness to God.
Just
as we fall short in our relationship with God, so too did the people of Israel
fail to maintain their relationship with God. They neglected to worship God, as
they worshiped false gods instead. God identifies with the least and the lost,
and by neglecting the poor, the widows, and orphans, the people turned their
backs on God. Though God was faithful to the covenant, the people were not. As a
result of this brokenness, the people opened themselves to the consequences of
living without God at their center. The Babylonians came in and destroyed the
Temple and send many of the people into Exile in Babylon. Their story, seemingly,
was over.
But
through the prophet Jeremiah, God had a word of hope and comfort to speak. God
tells the people that there is a new covenant in place, not like the one that
the people broke, but one that will be embedded within their hearts and very
being. God recommits to being their God and claims us all as his people. The
word here for “new” does not mean that the former covenant is null and void,
rather the word means something like rejuvenated, restored, or refreshed. God
meets our failure not with rejection or giving us one last chance to shape up,
rather God meets us with mercy and grace. No longer is the law a burden for us
to keep, but God’s teaching is put into our very being. As Christians, we understand
this as the Holy Spirit – that gift of God’s abiding presence with us.
All
of this, Exodus, Exile, and restoration, need to be kept in mind for us to hear
the full impact of Jesus’ words: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” In
calling us to remember, Jesus is making present the steadfast love and
salvation of God. When Jesus says “this is the new covenant,” yes, he is
quoting Jeremiah, but it is just as true that God’s prophecy through Jeremiah
was anticipating the moment in which the whole story of Israel would be recapitulated
and culminated.
Through
the lens of the cross, we see that God’s salvation was not only about death
passing over the people on the night before the Exodus, rather God intends for
us all to pass over from death into eternal life in his love. God not only desires
for us to know about the teaching of our faith, but God plants this desire to
grow closer to God within us. It’s why St. Augustine said that our hearts are
restless until they rest in God – because Jeremiah’s prophecy is exactly right,
God has written the law of love on our hearts, and when that love is neglected,
we feel empty. And so we are given the Holy Spirit to assure us of this love
and guide us in walking the way of love.
For
most of Israel’s history, the way a covenant was enacted was through a
sacrifice of some sort, which involved the bloodshed of an animal. Well, the cross
is God’s signature on this renewed covenant. The reason why we can know and
trust that these words are sure and certain is that they have the blood of
Jesus behind them. In the cross, we have a demonstration of the fullness of God’s
love and mercy for us. And just as the Exodus from Egypt made the people into a
nation, the cross transforms us. Irenaeus, the early bishop who first spoke
about the cross as recapitulation put it this way – God became as we are so that
we might become as he is. Our story is summed up in the story of Jesus and we
are perfected by being made a part of his story.
This
notion of recapitulation is rooted in Romans 5 where St. Paul writes, “Therefore
just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of
righteousness leads to justification and life for all.” In other words, the
script has been flipped. In Adam, which is just a way of saying that we are
humans, we are subject to Death and captive to Sin. But there’s been a plot
twist. A new Adam has stepped onto the scene. And this new Adam, Jesus Christ,
reframes what is possible for humanity because he changes the story. No longer
is death final and no longer are we subjects of Sin. We have been shown the
most excellent way of love which is more enduring than Death and more definitive
than Sin. It means that death is not the end and that we are not our mistakes.
Rather, we are given eternal life because we are loved by God and this love is
given to us by grace – it is not something we have to earn or keep, rather it
has been written on our hearts by the One who made all things.
The
story of brokenness and exile that began with our disobedience does not end in
our annihilation or death, but rather in God’s gracious and redeeming love. Our
murder of God on the cross does not collapse creation or condemn us to chaos,
rather it becomes the seed of Resurrection. And as a sign and token of this surprising
and amazing grace, our Lord has given his body and blood for us. On Maundy
Thursday we remember that on the night before his crucifixion, Jesus took bread
and wine and showed us they are doorways to a deeper reality. This is the bread
of heaven and the blood gives us eternal life.
God promised through
Jeremiah to put this new covenant inside of us and the Eucharist is one way
that God has chosen to do this. The Eucharist not only reminds us of the
Passion of Jesus which tells the story of God’s love in a new way, but it also
gives us a foretaste of that day when we shall feast at the banquet of the Lamb
around the throne of God. And because we know that is how the story ends, it
means that our lives take on a whole new direction. The cross recapitulates the
story of our faith and our lives. We do not belong to Sin and Death, we do not
belong to what we might have done or should have been, we do not belong to the past.
Rather, we belong to the future, the future of a peace and love that we can
only begin to imagine, a future in which all things are made well by the cross
of Jesus. The gift of this grace is that we live knowing and trusting that we
belong to the story of love.
