We have arrived at the fifth Sunday of Lent, nearing the end of the season of preparation for Christianity’s high holy days, when once more believers — and seekers, and skeptics who still are game — plunge through story and music and liturgical remembrance into the mystery of the dying and rising of Christ.
Today’s Bible readings urge hearers on — do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old whispers the reading from Isaiah. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it? Urgency echoes in the letter to the Philippians: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize... And so, by implication, you, the hearer, are encouraged to press on toward the goal for the prize.
St. John’s Gospel darkly foreshadows what is coming: Mary of Bethany, who loved Jesus without reserve, broke open her large flask of perfumed oil and rubbed Jesus’ calloused feet, then wiped the oil off with her long hair. Shocking! Judas berated her sensual extravagance. Jesus sees through Judas’s phony moralizing to the betrayal in his heart. Leave her alone, Jesus tells Judas evenly; she bought this to anoint my body for the day of my burial. The dread drama is about to begin.
If you never come to church all year long — missing Christmas, and Pentecost, and All Saints’ Sunday, poor you! — but only come for the Holy Week that begins next Sunday — and come for all of it, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Day, then in a single short week you would be exposed to the core of the Christian faith, that wrests transcendent meaning from unspeakable suffering transformed by the power of grace.
The Lenten Rite of Reconciliation that we performed at the beginning of the service, drawn from The Book of Common Prayer, is part of our preparation for Holy Week, an exercise in taking moral inventory, and more.
The ancient Ten Commandments, standing for the whole moral law, is rehearsed: Worship only God: bow down to no idol — not money, not youth, not power, not even self-righteousness, not even your image of God. Worship only God.
Hallow your sabbath time, to free your soul and clear your vision. Honor your father and your mother, whether or not you think they deserve it. You will never be free until you forgive them, because they are part of you. Do not kill, steal, betray your spouse or anybody else’s. Do not injure your neighbor with a lie; do not wish someone harm so that you can take what belongs to them.
Hearing each command, we respond: Lord have mercy, and incline our hearts to keep this law.
Note: we don’t respond — hoo boy, not me! I would never do something like that! or, that’s what others do, not our sort — not my people, class, gender, party, nationality — we would never be involved in such things, because (pick one) we are too well-bred, too intelligent, too pure in victimhood ever to wrong another. No. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, as St. Paul wrote. Because human hearts are complex and wayward; because we are self-absorbed; because even without intending to we harm others; because we bear collective responsibility for the injury done in our name by economic exploitation and war; because we are blind to profound suffering of others that we have the means, but not the will, to ease; because we are wasting the natural world through our careless patterns of over-consumption.
Because we have sinned and we are implicated in the sins of the world, it is appropriate that we pray for mercy, and that our heart will be inclined toward right relation with all beings. So the rite of reconciliation is an exercise in taking moral inventory. But it is infinitely more. Because it is not just about seeing what sinners we are; not just about the resolve to do better. Any of us could do that at our desks at work, or in the privacy of living rooms. But we enact this moral inventory together, in liturgy.
And in so doing, it becomes something much greater than list making. Together, we acknowledge not our sins as individuals only, but that all of us sin, all of us are part of a fallible and morally wayward human race. We are implicated in what one theologian calls transcendental depravity.
That being so, we are in need of forgiveness, more forgiveness than we can bestow. But some things are unforgivable; we know that for a fact. And so, in common prayer, we enter a larger world where there is a surplus of forgiveness, more than is in our power to give. We enter into the world of transformation by mercy beyond justice.
This prepares us for Holy Week and Easter, for the high holy days of Christian faith, for the mystery of the dying and rising of the divine human being, for the cosmic drama of forgiveness through grace alone. Today, through our common prayer, we prepare our hearts.
That’s what the poetry of the cantata text points to, as well, in a coincidence of themes. “God alone shall have my heart,” Gott soll allein mein Herze haben, the alto will sing at the beginning of a text about the Great Commandment that contains the whole moral law: love God above all, love the neighbor as yourself. It is not only so that we may live better; it is so we can relax our hearts, and let go of self-justification, to go forward undefended with the Lamb of God, to allow forgiveness to flood our world.
God shall have my heart. Incline our hearts to keep thy law. The story you are about to hear in the Christian high holy days just ahead is a story to take to heart.