March 19, 2008
Sacred
Sacred space.
It is a phrase one encounters. It usually has something to do with religion, especially organized religion. We churchers like to think of our places, our spaces, as somehow sacred, not only just sacred in themselves, but more sacred than other places which may not seem so sacred.
The temple of Jesus’s time had what was believed to be a most sacred space. It was known as the “holy of Holies,” sacreder than sacred itself. It was even curtained off from possible view so that those who were not considered by religious authorities to be holy enough to gaze upon it could not. In recounting this ecclesiastical archeology, it is significant to note that when Jesus died on the cross, the curtain went kaput. And not without reason.
Matthew put it like this: “And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split; and the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised… and they went into the holy city and appeared to many. ” (Mt 27.50-53).
It was an audacious symbol. Even the stones finally cried out. For it meant, at least, that there are no sacred spaces more sacred than others. Now, all God’s creation and all God’s time is sacred, none holier than any other. Like nothing else in our calendar, Holy Week affirms this audacity, this affront to religion, for the irony is that it takes the calling of it holy to make known that nothing is holier than anything else. And it is to remind us that we profess an incarnate religion. And that we are an incarnate people, a sacramental people, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality people.
These few days which we call holy so that all else can be known as holy are begun by our recalling the daring march into Jesus’s Jerusalem. Once more, the adventure surrounds our own Jerusalems. Once again, we are challenged by the absurd rashness of it all. The Gospel which gives birth to the church now calls the church to give birth to the Gospel. Contemptuous of religion’s legalisms, our faith brings us to enter again into the tragedy and into the comedy of love and justice and hope.
We mark and celebrate these events, these realities, with a liturgy, a work of the people, which risks a same-old same-old affected only by what we bring to it. In whatever way we can, are we caught up in the intrepid daring of our Lord and we pray, May we as well be grasped by this refreshing and restorative dawning, a light in these dark days that opens the way for others. As today’s collect affirms, “confident of the glory that shall be revealed” (BCP p 220).
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