Shattered illusions of love - Good Friday 2017

Holy Week is a sleep deprivation phenomenon for clergy. When the guard of being rested is down, it’s interesting how the Holy Spirit can sneak through with something surprising. For me this year, that’s the hook from a song from the 1970’s. To be sure, the song isn’t one which makes a whole lot of sense and does have references to illegal drug use which generally isn’t something one would associate with a Good Friday homily. But taking the bulk of the lyrics aside and just focusing on the hook, with a slight tweak to one pronoun, and … well, it was exactly what Good Friday was all about.

Did he make you cry, make you break down, and shatter your illusions of love? Is it over now, do you know how, to pick up the pieces and go home?

Yes, the hook from Stevie Nick’s song Gold Dust Woman which was on the Fleetwood Mac Rumours album and, for those of you old enough to remember, the pronoun was originally “she.” But no matter … just focus on the word of the paraphrased hook for a moment: Did he make you cry, make you break down, and shatter your illusions of love? Isn’t that what is happening here? Isn’t Jesus doing exactly that?

Last night we observed the first day of the Sacred Triduum – Maundy Thursday – in which Jesus takes the role of a slave and washes the disciple’s feet. He then wraps it into a teaching of the “New Commandment”: Love one another as I have loved you. According to this commandment, love is a verb and love is to set aside our egos and serve generously without regard to reciprocity or judgement. Today, Jesus takes this love all the way to the cross – to death.

When we hear the word “love,” I suspect we do not think of the battered body of Jesus hanging on a cross as our first image, do we? It’s because we all carry around illusions of what we think love is. We often find our experience of human love to be fickle and with strings attached. We experience love as conditional – something we get as a kind of reward if we are good little boys and girls but which is withheld when we misbehave. At times, the very people who say they love us really do so in order to manipulate or even abuse us. Oh, we human beings love, but even at our at best we do it imperfectly.

We also give our love and our hearts to people, ideas, and things which really are more attachments or addictions than anything else. We love our possessions, our families and friends, ideologies, and even our egocentric concept of who we think we are. We have difficulty loving beyond the familiar and the safe. So this is why, on this day, every single notion, every illusion of love we carry is shattered at the cross.

Did he make you cry, make you break down, and shatter your illusions of love? Is it over now, do you know how, to pick up the pieces and go home?

This man, Jesus of Nazareth, an innocent man convicted by the corrupt powers of his day and time who saw his teachings a threat to their love of power and control, shattered all of our illusions as his life poured out in love for the whole world. Not poured out for a few of his friend, or only for believers … but for the whole cosmos. The pieces and remains of his earthly ministry scattered: now residing in the minds and bodies of frightened disciples who have fled and women who stand watch and grieve. How do you pick up the pieces and go home? And it begs the question of whether or not we even should pick up the pieces, doesn’t it?

When our illusions of love are blown apart at the cross, perhaps it isn’t up to us to pick up the pieces. It may very well be that some of those pieces need to be left behind at the cross. Perhaps it is an invitation to leave behind those very things which are standing between you and the outpouring of Christ’s love for you: an opportunity to leave behind resentments, old wounds, suffering, addictions, attachments, and pain to make space for Christ’s real love, his love poured out this day, to enter your heart. If anything, perhaps we need to pick up the pieces and offer them to God alone for redemption and healing – an offering to let ourselves be remade, redeemed, renewed, resurrected.
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Did he make you cry, make you break down, and shatter your illusions of love? Is it over now, do you know how, to pick up the pieces and go home?