Wednesday • 3/27/2024 •

Wednesday of Holy Week

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 55; Lamentations 2:1-9; 2 Corinthians 1:23–2:11; Mark 12:1-11

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 14 (“A Song of Penitence,” BCP, p. 90); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92)

Collect for Wednesday in Holy Week. Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Had I come upon this cluster of passages at any other time than Holy Week, my reflections might have gone in a different direction. But here we are, in the middle of this Week of weeks.

…had it been an enemy who vaunted himself against me, … But it was you, a man after my own heart, my companion, my own familiar friend. — Psalm 55:13,14. During this week, who cannot not read about King David bemoaning being betrayed by a friend, and not think of the Friend of Sinners who is turned on by one of his closest friends, Judas Iscariot (a “familiar” enough “friend” to have been entrusted with the moneybox!)? Just to think about Jesus “loving his own to the end” so much that he would stoop to wash their feet, knowing that one of those whose feet he was washing was just waiting for his chance to slip out into the night to ready a fateful kiss: “So, after receiving the piece of bread [Judas], immediately went out. And it was night.” (See John 13, especially, verse 30).

 The thought stings. It stings when I ask what kind of friend I am—to Him, and to those who count me friend. Lord, have mercy.

 The Lord has become like an enemy… — Lamentations 2:5. In the first chapter, Lamentations portrays Jerusalem/Judah violated & kicked to the side of the road. It is a pathetic, pitiable sight. In the second chapter, Lamentations turns to a different subject: God. The picture is jarring. Yahweh has “bent his bow like an enemy, with his right hand set like a foe… he has poured out his fury … he has demolished without pity” (2:4,17). He “withdraws his right hand from” his people because of emotions that are difficult for us to accept: he is angry, merciless, wrathful, burning like a flaming fire, furious, fiercely indignant, scornful. (See the cascading terms in verses 1-4, 6-7.)   I wanted to avert my eyes in chapter one. I want to close my ears in chapter two. This is supposed to be the loving, rescuing, redeemer God, right? Instead, this sounds like the “fire and brimstone” God of caricature that keeps people away from church—like a cosmic tantrum-throwing, petulant child, who’s had a toy taken away.

 But then … if God isn’t at war with that within us which is at odds with him, we are lost. The long story of redemption is one of God’s implacable enmity towards the sin that destroys us. That’s what I need to see when I behold the bloody mess of this Holy Week’s cross.

 “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone…” — Mark 12:10. Thus, there is so much packed into Jesus’s quote of Psalm 118. The One “whipped and his face…spit upon,” as today’s Collect puts it, is God-in-flesh, absorbing the wrath his “enemies” deserve, so that, by some mysterious divine reckoning, God-in-heaven reconciles us to Himself, and counts us friends (Romans 5:10). Christ, have mercy.

 But if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but to some extent—not to exaggerate it—to all of you. … [Now]…you should forgive and console him, so that he may not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I urge you to reaffirm your love for him. — 2 Corinthians 1:5,7. Somebody in Corinth had caused a crisis in the church. The congregation has dealt with it to Paul’s satisfaction, and the person has repented. Some, though, are not ready to let it go. Paul says: I’ve forgiven him, so you need to as well. In Christ, we have been reconciled, so we become reconcilers. Forgiven, we become forgivers.

 Hard times expose us to the best and the worst in each other. Irritations mount when the world feels like the movie set for a surreal horror flick.

 All of which makes the days we are living through an especially important time to tune in to each other’s emotional well-being, and to be, as James puts it, “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19). To be especially ready to extend forgiveness and to ask: Lord, have mercy.

 Be blessed this day,

 Reggie Kidd+