Old Testament: Job 14:1-14
or Lamentations 3:1-9, 19-24
New Testament: 1 Peter 4:1-8
Gospel: Matthew 27:57-66
or John 19:38-42
Psalm 31:1-4, 15-16
In English, faith is a noun. My New Testament professor who, according to legend, was fluent in at least thirteen languages, often lamented that there is no English verb, “to faith.” Greek has such a verb, and when we translate it, most often as “to believe,” we are improvising.
On Holy Saturday in the year of Saint Matthew, we are taken before the borrowed tomb in which the abused corpse of Jesus has been wrapped in a clean linen cloth and laid on one of the carved ledges. In Matthew, we stand before a sealed tomb with a small contingent of armed troops, set by order of Pontius Pilate, to keep Jesus’ followers from taking the body away. The words of Rowan Willams in The Wound of Knowledge come immediately to mind:
“Christianity ... is born from men and women faced with the paradox of God's purpose made flesh in a dead and condemned man.”
On this particular Holy Saturday, the complaint of Job that he is “A human, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble,” takes on particular meaning. We are in the company of Father Paneloux in Camus’ The Plague, who was profoundly aware of the suffering of the victims of the plague, and “was well aware that at any moment death might claim him too.” In the light of the “high and fearful vision” emerging from innocent suffering, his faith was transformed into affirmation—the classic meaning of faith, articulated by St. Paul in the Lesson for the Burial of the Dead:
I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The Rev. Dr. Roy Wells
No comments:
Post a Comment