Liturgy of the Passion (Year C, RCL)

What heals me may harm another.

We recognize ourselves in those who accompany Jesus on that longest, hardest night.

God is the encounter we can't control.

Isaiah’s suffering servant plays on our own ambivalent ideas about violence, passivity, and retribution.

In the hours before the Passion, the Jesus who was hidden becomes revealed.

“One second-century pagan critic of Christianity was willing to tolerate everything else about Christians if they would only worship the gods.”

In the face of mob violence, a six-year-old responded with love.

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Matthew 26:14–27:66; Philippians 2:5–11

Luke's text for Reign of Christ Sunday is a searing critique of leaders who are powerful but not vulnerable.

During Holy Week, it's common for worship leaders to ask people to consider their place in the drama of Jesus' final days. To what extent do we betray him, deny him, insult him, crucify him? When do we, like the crowds, find ourselves gawking at suffering with prurient glee? When do we, like the thieves, alternately ridicule the truth, then believe in it? When do we, like the centurion, make our confession--though perhaps a moment too late?

Our culture's foundational sin is to make gods of ourselves, to find any excuse to go our own way rather than follow the Lord of life. We are weak. And yet in this Gospel story, so is Jesus.

Sacramentality is the breath of Christian life—life that springs from the sacraments and life that yearns to return to them.

When Jeanne Bishop learned of her sister's murder, she found herself saying aloud, "I don't want to hate anybody."