Maundy Thursday: It Is Finished!

Untitled (Blue, Green, Brown), Mark Rothko, 1952. Oil on canvas, 103 x 83 in.. Private collection.

“Hallelujah, What a Savior!” from the album Beautiful Savior. Composed by Philip Paul Bliss. Performed by The Maranatha Baptist University Choir and Orchestra with Dr. David Brown.

Poetry:

“Holy Thursday”
by William Blake

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine.
And their fields are bleak & bare.
And their ways are fill'd with thorns.
It is eternal winter there.

For where-e’er the sun does shine,
And where-e’er the rain does fall:
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.

IT IS FINISHED!

Some realities are too immense to comprehend; their scope too magnificent to take in.

A naked man hangs on a tree, sides heaving as he fights for breath. Everything about him screams mortality. Hours earlier his flesh had made contact with the earth of which it was made, his tears betraying the distress of one bound by time and space running up against the limits of his capacity. Willing spirit drove weak flesh to cry out to the Father with prayers and petitions for deliverance from death. Hebrews claims he was heard because of his reverent submission, yet this source of eternal life still found himself hanging to death, summoning precarious breath to express abandonment and, at the last, to state finality.

Standing at the foot of the cross, I want to shake the drooping frame and ask: What is finished? In what way is it finished? What does it all mean?

A respectably clothed Rabbi sits in prayer, illumined by lamplight and surrounded by well-fed friends. Raising eyes to heaven, he concludes his touching farewell speech by allowing his disciples into an intimate moment of conversation with the Father. Serene Savior sees beyond the fleshy fray to gaze on eternal glory, recognizing the coming of the hour He has anticipated from outside of time. Now has come. He petitions the Father to glorify him with the glory they shared from the foundation of the world.

Disrespectful and disturbed, I want to tug His sleeve and ask: In what form, this “glory”? In which dimension, is this “now”?

Much like Rothko’s painting, these glimpses of dimensionality emerging from within the life of God both delight and confuse me. How can the God who is One experience separation? How can the infinite I AM be mortal; the thrice holy Creator learn and be made perfect through suffering? But perhaps closer to home, how can gore and glory look so alike?

The Lamb slain before the foundation of the world asks to be glorified through slaughter.

The Son glorified before the creation of the world submits to a process of creaturely formation.

Creation is both finished and begun; eternity entered and brought down to earth.

And we, included as human witnesses to the kaleidoscope of breathtaking interplay amongst Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, get swept up in the story. Though we spill endless ink attempting to nail it down, our senses, circumscribed by time and space, quickly run the gamut of what they can take in. But that doesn’t stop us from peering into eternity, straining beyond the bounds of our mortality to see the Love of the Father for the Son by enthroning Him on the tree; the Glory of the Son with the Father as together they spoke all things to be.

Somehow suffering fits right into the middle of this One Creator’s glory. Somehow we, God’s redeemed bits of earth, fit right into the middle of this Triune Lover’s interplay. Though the mind cannot comprehend it, the heart stretches a little wider at the contemplation of it. And all within this temple cries, “Glory!”

Prayer:
Who are we that you are mindful of us; mere mortals that reveal yourself to us? Bless you, Beautiful One, for giving us the eternal life of knowing you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. Open the eyes of our hearts that we may see You, enthroned on the tree and in all eternity. Finish your new creation, that you may be glorified in us and we be made perfect in you; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen.

Rev’d. Tiffany Clark, M.A., I.C.S.
Assistant to the Rector
Christ Church
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Author and Spiritual Director