"I Am Who I Am"

The burning point of our Christian tradition is Truth. We say that the truth will out. Certainly, all will be revealed about ourselves when the debris of our lives is burned off at our deaths. For the One Who alone is Truth will turn His all-seeing, all-knowing gaze at each of us. And we must face Him in this blinding light, this consuming fire, and we will be known in our nakedness. And truth will out.

Psalm 66 teaches that God tests us:

Gold is proved in the furnace (1 Pet 1:7). Silver is tried in the fire, writes the Psalmist. Precious metals are purged of impurities. Of which impurities shall we be purged? We shall be purged of lies. Every vain delusion we have believed, every self-flattery, every exaggeration, every lie we have embraced — our excuses, our explanations, our rationalizations, our bald face lies. — all these will be burned off.

For you see, lying is the essence of evil. We reflected recently that evil has no being of its own. It has no prayers for its liturgies. Rather, the truth is perverted. That is its litany.

The father of lies rules this world, and he cannot stand in the presence of All Goodness. For the first stirring of a mendacious syllable would vaporize instantly in the Fire of All Truth. The one whose being is lies is no more. And surely the One Who sees all and knows all will not abide our lies. Purity cannot endure filth.

What is the greatest insult to a pure, loving, and trusting heart? It is a lie. The wronged beloved says, "I cannot endure anything. But I cannot endure a lie."

At our death a new situation pertains. Things will be as they truly are as He Is as He Is .... without variation, without shadow, without blemish. Says YHWH to Moses, "Tell them

And at our death each one of us will be sent to Him Who Is.

Each year on this day, we behold the most audacious lie in human history — against the One Who is the Way and the Truth: false charges, mockeries of justice, and a sanctioned and ratified murder.

What words can be offered as a defense? That "we knew not what we were doing" is not so, but rather this was Jesus' heroic and merciful plea to the Father on our behalf as He laid His life down for His friends.

He stood where we should have stood in the hope that at last we would own up and take our rightful place. Is this not the hope a loving and trusting friend — that He be not abandoned. You see in our freedom, who knows what we would do? .... that at the last, we would take our rightful place, as Pythias had done for Damon, as Damon had done for Pythias.

Truly, it was not Jesus Who was put on trial but ourselves. God tested us with the greatest test of our sad history: He placed Himself — vulnerable, weak, needful — into our hands. Three Kings knelt before this helpless Child laying precious gifts beside a make-shift cradle in order to model for us the dignity and veneration that was, and is, our sacred obligation. But we would not listen .... and we will not listen still.

In the fullness of His manhood, He would be the Leader few would follow .... when it counted, the Teacher few would believe .... in the end, the Living God Whom no one worshiped .... except demons who bowed down before Him. He was Author of all life, Who became victim in a plot to kill Him. And each year again the verdict comes in: the accessible and mortal and vulnerable God trusted us, needed us, loved us. And in the face of this magnificent intimacy, we abandoned Him, betrayed Him, spitted on Him, mocked Him, tortured Him, and killed Him upon that most cruel instrument of subjugation and terror: the Cross.

Today, yet again, the verdict is rendered. Today again the truth is told. And on this Great and Holy Friday, once more, our story must be recited. Peter was right to weep in the smock of the Most Holy Theotokos. Judas was right to hang himself. Thomas was right to walk down in the streets with a racing mind daring the authorities to arrest and execute him. For life can never again make sense in the face of this epic failure, this colossal collapse of love.

The truth will out. What was true along is now plainly to be seen. The centurion plainly sees, "Truly this Man was the Son of God!" (Mk 15:39). The Myrrh-bearing women see: He is Victor over death, for no tomb or heavy stone could hold Him (Mt 28:1). He is God, the Risen God, Who harrows Hell, and before Whom every creature must bow in awe.

But these things were known all along. Did He not raise Lazarus from the dead .... and the daughter of Jairus? Did not every disease flee from beneath His sovereign hand? Every demon of Hell attested, "You Jesus, You Son of God" (Mt 8:19),

And again:

The Son of God, the Christ, the Messiah.

And when He plainly revealed what must be,

But this they had no stomach for:

And why were they afraid? Because such things just did not square with their plans for themselves. After all, they had discovered the Messiah, the Christ (Jn 1:41). They held the "winning ticket"! Their path was the ascendant path, not the lowly one. Only glory could ring true in their ears. They asked, "In your glory, which throne will be mine" (Mk 10:37).

They heard but could not hear. Over and over He told them: worldly glory does not matter; only the Kingdom of Heaven matters.

The rest of the truth would require decades, even centuries, to grasp — that He is the Logos and Creator of the World; that He is YHWH Who appeared to Moses and later burned hot on the summit of Sinai; that He mysteriously is One with a Divine and Triune Unity, of which we humans are a part. And we still do not grasp .... and never shall.

But the basics were revealed. The Son of God must be placed into our hands from His infancy. And it was up to us to discern and judge and understand.

Do you recall our reading earlier today?

To understand! He gave us this charge directly near the headwaters of the Jordan at Banias: "Who do you say that I Am?" But we, being blinded by vanity, by ambition, by fears for our inheritance, and deluded by restive egos, could not see it. So we failed. We failed to understand. And the price for this failure? It would be borne by Him, Who was rejected, scorned, beaten, and killed .... and today reviled and discarded throughout the United States of 2023.

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But this was not sudden event.

Nearly thirty years ago, arriving to a university where I would spend the next seven years, I sought out a silent, reverent space where I might come to pray. I found a simple Roman Catholic chapel with a long nave and thirty-foot ceiling suggesting prayers ascending to Heaven like incense. It was nearly always empty. Perfect. But one peculiarity stuck out. This place had been stripped of the Holy Cross. Patched holes remained where the Stations of the Cross had been displayed. More puzzling still, a large, golden donut hung suspended over the chancel step, where the great Crossing Rood must have been. Did I say large? .... perhaps ten feet in diameter.

I prayed here each day. No priest ever came forward to welcome me. As my surroundings became more familiar, I began to explore. I noticed two rooms, one on either side of the chancel. They had no doors but were pitch black inside. I ventured into one, on the Gospel side, inching slowly into the darkness. You could not see the hand before your face. But slowly, as my eyes adjusted, and I perceived that I was not alone .... in fact, that someone was staring at me. So I looked up over my right shoulder, and immediately I was face-to-face with the Lord Jesus Christ, His enormous figure perhaps ten feet high, His suffering eyes looked directly into mine .... our gazes locked, as He hung on the great Crossing Rood that had been hidden away in a dark storeroom along with mops and pails. Literally, the size and power of this form took my breath away. Unaccountably, tears began streaming down my face .... not for this work of holy art, but for the Lord Jesus, Who had been banished and desecrated by those who had pledged their lives to protect Him and all the holy things. Immediately, the verse came to mind, "Could you not watch with me one hour?"

What was designed and made to be a Crucifix upon which we might center our devotion now had morphed into a new art form — performance art that enshrined the Abandoning of the Disciples and the Denial of St. Peter. This was a new kind of shrine I had stumbled upon. It was the shrine of our age.

I stood there for awhile, and I prayed. As I left I saw a priest standing near the narthex door at the other end of the chapel. I began the long walk down the nave to introduce myself. He was already visibly perturbed anticipating my question.

"It's a symbol of unity," he said.

"The golden donut?" I asked.

He did not answer me but walked away waving me off as he muttered, "Can't we all just have a nice day?!"

Ten years later, I served a Roman Catholic parish in New England that was brightly lit at evening services on Good Friday. (This would be my first Good Friday at this parish.) Jaunty music could be heard as I approached the church door. The rector would later announce, "Jesus is not dead. He is Risen!"

His music director agreed: "Let's have a good time and leave all that 'old school' behind us!" And the parishioners wanted to know, "What kind of priest are you? Old school or new school?"

The people were easily cajoled into a party atmosphere. No complaint could be heard. And a certain giddiness took hold.

I looked around me to see that the only grieving heart was my own. And I thought, "He entrusted the most serious subject in the world to us, and we continue to make light of it."

Twenty years later, of course, things have gotten much worse. As a boy, I marveled that no less a figure than God stood in the midst the people He loved, and they did not see Who He Was. Mind boggling! Today, that "failing to see" has become commonplace. The rejection of Christ, even the murder of Christ (as we see Him banned from our culture and life), is commonplace. And now we have come to revile the Book of Life, His morality, which He gave us as a safeguard for ourselves. Instead, we parade grotesqueries in our elementary schools and public libraries so that children might be trained to mock Him, too .... and sneer at people who are concerned they be safeguarded as well.

What kind of religion is this?, where unbelief, at its beginnings and two thousand years later, is the rule, not the exception?

Yet, does God continue to test us. He tests us today — the priests who just want to have a nice day .... rather than watch with the Lord Jesus in His sufferings; the priests who just want to throw a well-lit party .... on the day that we mourn the Lord's murder; and all the people who would slap a smiley face upon the Cross He carried and happily join in the party mood beyond earshot from His Passion. Yes, we are all tested.

Perhaps Great and Holy Friday is the Final Exam each year. For on this day we must reflect on the outcome of our many indifferences. We must own our part in the daily and weekly rejection and banning and murder of God. I say we must own our part.

When we fail to stand up for our faith, when we fail to reverence Him and venerate Him where all might see us, when we stand by passively as the life He made for us is trampled upon, then we have rendered our answer: we have joined the party; we tell everyone to have a nice day. And in each syllable of that bromide, He is crucified again and again and again .... as He reveals to Peter in the Quo vadis narrative: He is crucified each time we fail to take His yoke and to pick up our cross. He is crucified each time we fail to show up .... as Damon showed up for Pythias and Pythias showed up for Damon. Here is the burning pint of Christianity.

So what will be our outcome personally? We shall find that we have chosen Bar-Abbas, who is the son of the city of man, and we have rejected the Son of God .... drifting passively into a vast crowd who cries out every day over every issue and policy before us, "Crucify Him, crucify Him, crucify Him!"

There is no middle way. Either we are His ministers and evangelists, or we are His persecutors and murderers joining our voices to the mania of death that surrounded His final hours. This is the question on Great and Holy Friday: Who do you say that He Is? For it does not require very much courage to stand up for God .... if He is God.

As He told us at Banias, our answer will matter. It will matter as nothing else we have said or done in the entirety of our lives.

Who do you say that He is?"

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.