Our excellent minister of music and senior adults asked me to begin our Maundy Thursday worship gathering last night with an “overview of the story of salvation”. The idea being to set the events of Holy Week in the context of the entire Bible.
This is how I wanted to begin:
Said Frodo, “That’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to”.
[Sam replied:] “No sir, of course not.Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it – and the Silmaril went on and came to Earendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got – you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?” [emphasis added] (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol”)
But this is what I said:
Holy Week. Jesus enters Jerusalem. The Passover meal. The trial. The crucifixion. The cross. Death. The tomb.
Holy Week is part of a larger story. Not a small part it is the most important part but a part nonetheless of the story of creation. The story of God and his relationship with the world that he made.
That in the beginning God created human beings in his image for a great purpose. To live in close relationship with God with each other and with the world that God made. In Church of the Nations we often say God created us to manage the world with God and for God. But the first human beings disobeyed God and fell into sin. The close communion they enjoyed with God with the world with each other all fell apart and became broken. And since then we have seen the results of this falling apart. Sin suffering evil brokenness and death.
But God did not give up. God is good and loves humankind. The story of the Bible is the story of God bringing this broken world and broken human beings back into relationship with himself. And when the time was right God the Father sends his only Son Jesus Christ who becomes a human being. Shares our humanity. Experiences everything we experience but does not sin. Is obedient to God his Father to the point of death when he offers himself upon the cross in order to bring us back into new and healed relationship with God.
Through Jesus Christ we can be what God created us to be. Through Jesus Christ we have communion with God. And with one another.
