All Shall Be Well

SERMON

ALL SHALL BE WELL

REV. TERRI MURPHY

A few years ago there was a delightful movie out called The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The movie is set in India where a young man decided to open a residential hotel for senior citizens. Armed with glossy, colorful fliers, he set out to advertise, some of his ads making their way to England, where several senior citizens saw them and decided that this was the place for them to live out their golden years.

And so they came, these English seniors, ready to live out their days in an exotic clime. But what they found when they arrived at The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was a dump! Nothing worked as it should and most things did not work at all. One irate woman complained to the young owner. He responded, “Madam, in India, we have a saying, ‘Everything will be alright in the end.’ So, if everything is not alright, this is not the end!”

Julian of Norwich said this in a slightly different way when she said that “All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” Even when they don’t look that way. If there was ever a day that looked like it would not turn out well, it was Maundy Thursday.It looks out of control, with no way ever to be alright in the end. I think what both Julian and our Indian friend remind us is that just because things are out of our control does not mean that they are out of control. They are still under God’s control.

Let’s explore. The Passover table is set. The stage is set for the action to come. We are given a glimpse here of a moment of preparation before the drama of Gethsemane unfolds. We are invited to witness the action of servanthood in the washing of the feet. But something is missing.

What is missing are the emotions we might well expect to see. Jesus is facing the nightmare of crucifixion, so where is the judgment? Where is the wrath;the impatience, the disappointment, the anger? When these things might be most expected, those parts of Jesus, those parts of God are silent. In the Garden, Jesus will claim only that His soul is disquieted. That’s an understatement, to say the least.

We think this ‘disquietude’ is about His death and I am sure that it was, but I think it was about more than that. It was Jesus’ heart of compassion that was also reacting to all the self absorption, to all the sin, that had been committed throughout history and His heart was aching for all the horrors yet to come, that we inflict on each other and on ourselves. How sad then, must Jesus have felt when Peter resisted. Jesus was teaching the disciples that the only response to what was to come must be to act in compassion and servanthood.

In His humanness, Jesus must have wondered if His sacrifice would matter. In His divinity, He knew that His death was the only adequate tool to raise and sustain hope in the world. In the Garden we are told that angels were sent to comfort Jesus. Was their presence to sustain Him through what He must endure or was their presence to serve as a reminder that His sacrifice would matter for all time? It was a bit of both, I suspect.

Maundy Thursday night was a time when things were not alright. So, if all will be alright in the end, then this could not have been the end, could it? It reminds us that, when we have no control of a situation, we need to invite Jesus in and ask Him to be Lord of the Situation -especially when we cannot possibly see how things could be well in the end. God’s action in sustaining us through impossible times is what the word steadfast means. It means that God is driving when we cannot even see the road ahead. Father and Spirit were steadfast with Jesus that night – driving and in control when all He could see before Him was His own human spirit coming close to despair. It was His soul that was sustained and comforted by God even while His body was not.

This night was a crucible. A crucible is a device that holds molten metal in order to purify and clarify it. Metal is strong, but when in its molten state it can be shaped, clarified and then cooled, to become a newly enhanced tool of strength. This night, for Jesus, was His crucible. This crucible forced all the strength of soul and mind that was in Jesus, to rise to the surface. This Crucible of Maundy Thursday raised all that was in Him – His humanity, His Divinity, His love, His compassion, His fear, His anger, His anxiety – it raised all this internally, to the boiling point to shape, purify and clarify Him as the Resurrected Lord. His anguish in the Garden was the emotional crucifixion that had to come before His physical crucifixion – so that, in the end, he was completely crucified, body and mind. The One completely crucified would rise again as the One who was completely resurrected.

It was through this two-part complete crucifixion, that Jesus was able to leave behind His human life and completely claim the Divine. This is what we begin to see on Maundy Thursday – the transition Jesus goes through as He claims the Truth – that He is indeed God Incarnate.

On this night, Jesus was unlocking His spiritual truth in the only way he could – from the inside. His anguish resulted from turning this spiritual truth inside out, to show it to the world – to become completely vulnerable.

Jesus is not only God, physically incarnate, but spiritually incarnate, as well. As He anguished in the garden, we have a front-row seat to His Incarnation of Spirit – His spirit being turned inside out as He touched the world in all its raw sinfulness.

It is Jesus’Incarnational Spirit that has led from this Gethsemane moment, to all the graces that the church and the baptized, have offered tothe world. It is this spiritual incarnation of Jesus Christ that gave birth to the heroes of our faith: the Mother Teresa’s, the Francis’, the Julians of Norwich, the Martin Luther Kings, the Jonathan Myrick Daniels and all of us, who continue to take our baptismal vows seriously. It was in this crucible of Gethsemane that all our calls to love and serve were born.

Maundy Thursday was full of angst and yet, full of grace. There is a name for this kind of grace. It is called Prevenient Grace. PrevenientGrace does not look like grace at the time, but later, often much later, it begins to reveal itself. To step back and objectively look at this night, it is hard to see the grace. We see a man in anguish, betrayed and abandoned by friends, suffering the mother of all anxiety attacks, dragged off by an armed mob to face a death sentence. Where is the grace in that?

Yet true to its character, PrevenientGrace begins to reveal itself. Without the emotional crucifixion of this night, Jesus would not have been fully crucified. If not fully crucified could he have been fully resurrected? I doubt it. This, in fact, was a heresy of Docetism in the early years of the church – that Jesus wasn’t really in any pain or anguish at all.

The Prevenient Grace of Gethsemane formed all of us, in our baptisms; it continues to form us each time we respond with compassion, justice or mercy to a suffering soul. Our baptisms were born in the Grace of Gethsemane. This grace has been indelibly marked on each of us. That makes us part of what unfolded in that Maundy Thursday crucible.

So, what looked like a bad end for Jesus was not. It was really a beginning. Things may not be perfect in us or in our world, but through God’s perfection, they will be in the end. If they are not perfect yet, it is not yet the end. The story continues. The grace grows and we have work to do. May God make us worthy of this crucible of grace in which we find ourselves with Jesus… and then AllShall Be Well.

Amen