This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalms 6 & 12; Lamentations 1:17-22; 2 Corinthians 1:8-22; Mark 11:27-33

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (BCP, p. 88); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (Revelation 4:11; 5:9-10, 13, BCP, p. 94)

Collect for Tuesday in Holy Week. O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Without sugar-coating reality, the Bible carries about it an irrepressible hopefulness, a stubborn hold on a sense that glory and goodness will finally prevail, no matter what. The ugliness of judgment is always pregnant with the promise of redemption. Suffering inspires the singer. Punishment prompts the poet. 

The book of Lamentations begins with four chapters of acrostics, each verse or stanza beginning with successive letters of the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet (chapter 3 is a triple acrostic, so it’s 66 verses long). The last chapter (chapter 5), though not an acrostic, has the same number of verses as the Hebrew alphabet. 

Judgment, in other words, runs from “A to Z.” Judgment has a beginning. But it also has an end, as we will see in Good Friday’s reading. In the very center of Lamentations (in Hebrew poetry, the center is often the “crown” of the poem) we find this: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end… Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone” (Lamentations 3:22-33). 

On the torturous journey to “the steadfast love,” today’s verses from Lamentations acknowledge the guilt of sin and they bemoan the shame that attends sin’s guilt: “Jerusalem sinned grievously, and so she has become a mockery; all who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness” (Lamentations 1:8). 

As if in answer, the BCP’s Collect for the Day points us to the cross, “an instrument of shameful death” that God made “the means of life.” 

The shamefulness of Christ’s death on the cross lay, in the first place, in the fact that Jesus had been spurned by his own nation, and then had been turned over to pagan Romans for a degrading non-Jewish execution. Deprived even of the benefit of a “good” Jewish stoning or even a “dignified” Roman beheading, Jesus was given over to what Scripture had always thought of as a repugnant, cursed death for infidels: hanging on a tree (see Deuteronomy 21:23). 

The humiliation of Christ’s execution lay, in the second place, and almost in fulfillment of Jeremiah’s lament that Jerusalem’s mockers “have seen her nakedness,” in the fact that Jesus, according to Roman custom, would have been crucified naked. Victims of what Cicero called “the unlucky tree” were stripped, and then nailed or tied to crosses prominently displayed in public places. 

Even into the 4th century, Christians in Jerusalem would remember “the nakedness of Christ on the cross, who in his nakedness ‘disarmed the principalities and powers, and openly triumphed over them on the tree’” (Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, Mystagogy 2). The marvel is that such shame worked such grace, such rejection effected such fellowship, and such a curse won such blessing. 

We were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead — 2 Corinthians 1:8b-9. You can see Christ’s triumph in Paul’s life, when he talks about being “unbearably crushed” and having “received the sentence of death,” yet relying on “God who raises the dead.” 

You can see that same triumph in the likes of the 72 year old Italian priest, Don Giuseppe Berardelli, who, stricken with the coronavirus, maintained his greeting to everyone, “Pace e bene,” and then when it came time for him to go on a ventilator, insisted it go to another. “Pace e bene,” indeed: the eternal “peace and well-being” Jesus has secured through his death and resurrection. 

In the days ahead, Lord willing, your “sentence of death” will take a lesser form; but even something as simple as having to be cut off from loved ones can bring its own anguish. 

I pray that you and I, like Jeremiah of Lamentations, can bring a hope-tinged grace and beauty to the ugliness of the day. I pray that you and I, like the Apostle Paul and Father Berardelli, will discover the glory of Christ’s cross, and count our own share in its “shame and loss” as something gladly to be borne.  

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+