Monday in Holy Week: Time inside time

Lessons: Psalm 51; Jeremiah 12:1-16; Philippines 3:1-14; John 12:9-19

Eucharist: John 12:1-11

I keep thinking about time and liturgical time this morning. The oceanfront cottages are filling up since it is school break, but the weather is brisk. I wonder if those coming in were hoping for the usual spring. Evidently it is not going to happen. For them is it time off or time missed? Yet I imagine if they are from the colder north, even this is a break, a good shift in climate and time.
 

For many this is also Holy Week which is always time out of time. I have felt that most of my life, especially in the more protestant South. Easter bunnies decorated yesterday's restaurant and I had just come from the Passion of St. Luke's Gospel. Easter egg hunts are already afoot, and we are just entering the time when we begin to hasten our way toward the whole of the Passion. One needs the cross if Easter is to have its full depth. Otherwise all we get is a pastel wardrobe change, little boys in bow ties, little girls in gloves and hats, and candy eggs.

We went to a local high school performance of Seussical the Musical on Friday. The lead, Brady, the Cat in the Hat, was superb, alive, funny, and kept tenderly touching the heads of the small cast members. I liked how he inhabited his character. Only later did I find out this high school senior, Methodist youth group member, has just finished five months of treatments for Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I cannot help but like him more. I wonder if those gentle touches meant more to him than I knew and if Good Friday and Easter will hold together in greater depth this year. He has tasted them both. Does he know it and in what way?

What does this have to do with Liturgical time, time out of time? Well it has a lot of overlap. In the readings of the week we will touch on last moments, Jesus' final days. In the Eucharistic reading which plays in my bones even as I am saying Morning Prayer, Mary, the sister of Lazarus, anoints Jesus' feet and washes them with costly nard and tears, a foreshadowing of death. Here, a moment of expensive devotion, tears mingled in Nard. Judas is lost in usual time and wonders if it might not have been better to sell the Nard, restore the treasury. Time collides.

In the gospel at Morning Prayer treachery is afoot. Crowds are gathering on account of Jesus miracle of raising Lazarus, John's quick nod to Palm Sunday occurs, the disciples don't understand what is afoot.
The Pharisees then said to one another, "You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!" 
 

For John earthly time is interrupted by a cosmic shifting. Humankind's ability to do all as usual is not possible. The usual powers that we blindly give over to, the rhythms we do not alter, are weakening and they know it.
"You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!"
They will keep to their plot to secure worldly place, but will lose a larger battle. This bizarre way of loosening the grip of human sin will play out fully. The powers that be, we if we are not careful, have no idea that God is shaking time, activities, hopes, promise of eternal time.

So we are invited to walk the dusky edge of time and liturgical time. Maybe we are busy with eggs, bonnets, bow ties. Yet aren't we also busy with Brady, the Brady in us, coming through life's deeper side, learning to hope more deeply, healing from some piece of our journey?

"You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!"