Thursday • 6/9/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days, while I teach with my friends at the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies. In our Daily Office Devotions this week, we are consider several aspects of worship: corporate and personal. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office next week.

An audio or video version of this devotional can be found here: Apple Podcast, Spotify Podcast, YouTube

Lifted up, with Hands Outstretched

Twice in John’s gospel, Jesus insists, “My time is not yet” (Jn 2:4; 7:30). It is only when “Greeks” approach Philip and say, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus,” that Jesus finally exclaims, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” explaining that that means he will lifted up from the earth (on the cross) and “I … will draw all people to myself” (Jn 12:21,23,32 NRSV). 

The image of Jesus being lifted up and thus drawing people to himself was a compelling one to Athanasius, 4th-century bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius pondered Jesus’ dying, lifted up “with hands stretched out”: 

[O]nly on upon the cross does one die with hands stretched out. Therefore it was fitting for the Lord to endure this, and to stretch out his hands, that with the one he might draw the ancient people and with the other those from the Gentiles, and join both together in himself (On the Incarnation 25). 

Athanasius himself lived in a place of hard intersection between hostile people. He persistently and stridently insisted that the church’s worship of God was only possible through a Jesus who was 100% divine and 100% human (as Shai Linne might put it: “Jesus both God and man, two hundred percent, yeah”). He did so to the frustration of those who thought Jesus would be more comprehensible – or marketable – if we thought of him as not quite 100% divine. As a result, during his 46 years as bishop in Alexandria, he experienced exile 5 times, for a total of 17 years. Throughout, he saw himself offering outstretched hands, in cruciform fashion, to his enemies and to the gospel’s enemies. He believed, in the end, that Christ’s hands were strong enough to reconcile us to God – and to one another. Happily, he lived long enough to see most of his own opponents reconciled. 

It’s not very romantic to stand in that place of intersection: to hold on to God with one hand and to resistant people with the other, or to hold on to one group of people with one hand and their opposites with another. 

Many of us live and minister in cruciform fashion. Missionaries live far from “home,” labor for years to master difficult languages, and take on uncomfortable customs, often only to build bridges of relationships for a harvest in the next generation. Musicians make hard choices about when to challenge their congregation’s narrow bandwidths, and when to set aside their own aesthetic for the sake of their congregation’s. Privileged people marginalize themselves for a Jesus who is hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick, and imprisoned (Matt 25:35-36). Church leaders fight cynicism, but won’t abandon Christ’s Bride when they see her falling prey to theological confusion and post-biblical morality. May we know Christ’s sustaining power, hope, and love.

For the sake of us all, hardly a day passes when I do not pray this prayer, written by Episcopal bishop to the Philippines and Western New York, Charles Henry Brent (1862-1929), and no doubt inspired by John and Athanasius:

Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen (Book of Common Prayer, p. 101).

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ikone_Athanasius_von_Alexandria.jpg