Sestina for the Passion of Christ

(Matthew 26:14 – 27:66 or John 18:1 – 19:42)

 

He is alone in prayer in the garden, knowing the cost.
His followers care, but flesh is frail and they fail
to fend off sleep as Jesus endures his mortal fear
with faithfulness. This night will bring betrayal,
abandonment, suffering, and ultimately, a cross.
But he will not turn from obeying the will of God.

He is alone in facing trial for blaspheming God.
The religious rulers are determined at any cost
to be rid of this nuisance Jesus. But though they cross
words, set their traps for him, they almost fail.
Judas’ earlier duplicity is matched by betrayal
of truth; and the rest of Jesus’ followers have fled in fear.

He is alone in front of Pilate, but showing no fear.
Is he King of the Jews? Is he somehow from God?
Pilate doesn’t know, doesn’t really care. Betrayal
of justice doesn’t bother him much, the only cost
he worries about is the empire’s peace. Fail
and he’d pay the price; so send this King to the cross,

it’s an easy call. Kill the pest, quiet the Jews. The cross
is just another tool when you rule by fear,
after all, so why be worried about truth? (This fails,
somehow, to ease his mind; but he holds the power of God,
of life and death, so death it will be, at Jesus’ cost.)
And Pilate’s lethal injustice is the final betrayal.

Jesus is alone, crowned with the thorns of betrayals.
He is mocked and whipped and abused, and the cross
is placed on his shoulders, and the high cost
of love mounts the hill of the Skull. Fear
only forgetting love’s suffering; forget not the grief of God,
as the sky grows dark as if the sun itself has failed.

Do the women wonder if faith has failed
as Jesus is laid in the tomb? Is hope’s betrayal
on Joseph’s mind, as he wraps this man from God
in burial cloth? The death of Christ on the cross
for many meant grief, despair and fear;
only later would they understand what was worth the cost:

that we are not alone in times of fear, nor when we fail
– bearing the costs of our small and large betrayals –
nor even in death: for Jesus, God’s Son, died for us on the cross.

--Andrew King, from his blog A Poetic Kind of Place

Image: Crucifixion, by Greg Weatherby

The Agony & The Garden

 

i.
Now all he dreams are ropes,
sees them in the trees at the beginning of
the world: grim slide of vines
through first light
throat-tails dangled, mother-arms,
an instinct of the hand to twist, like a heart,
around what it holds.

ii.
Half his heart is a campfire.
Father, he begins, father,—
He stands there and the black gears of night lurch
through sand. On the other side of the hill olive trees
descend into questions, into women, into merchants,
into emperor flesh, into pottery, into bread, into a child’s
mouth, into a waltz, into the printing press, into thermometers,
into sighing gardens, into motion pictures, into
glass, into bedposts, into soup, into car exhaust, into rain,
into glaciers, into unread letters, into ATMs.

Father, the wind. The ordinary life.

iii.
He does not understand women,
was given no glimpse or direction. He only
knows the world unfolds from their robes the way
wine spills from a cup.

He knows they sometimes take the form of angels,
and they will take the bruised form of saints,
and celestial bodies,
they are like long roads, the hushed underneck
of a swan, and they reach, wanting
to know you, palms uncoiling
past
you in ecstasy.

iv.
It’s the nightmare again in which his feet
are splinters, and his mother is gasping,
and his face peels off onto linen,
and his father watches him from a night tree,
and there is some great secret he must shove
up the hill, to the sky,
where he is loved, loved
only by thieves.

v.
The world lights a broken man.
And the apparition he sweats beside,
realized into angel, into lamp, how it
bears him as the soldiers push
their way through blackness, through
the olives, thistle, and his dark-eyed heart,
a dinghy tossed in another life’s dream.
Far rain on the ocean, where a father is nowhere
to be found. If grace is the fixed star
we long for, the good disciples must sleep their parts,
hands folded on their hearts like oak
doors. Somewhere at the hillfoot the crossmaker
is roping beams in his shop’s
half-light. So they come and they come
in their armor, mirroring moonlight.
Now the moon opens on his heel.
The moon is the scent of a shy girl’s letter.
When they stand, and they stand, her feather tips
brush the wall.


-- Eve Jones, poet, photographer, former instructor at Lindenwood University, from Dappled Things journal.

Scripture reference: Matthew 26:31-41; Mark 14:27-37; (The Passion Liturgy, years A and B)

Image: Christ on the Mount of Olives, Paul Gauguin, 1889

Oratorio: Christ on the Mount of Olives, Op. 85, Ludwig van Beethoven, UC Davis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

 

Palm Sunday

And He answered and said unto them, I tell you, that if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. St. Luke xix. 40.

YE whose hearts are beating high 

With the pulse of Poesy,
Heirs of more than royal race,
Fram’d by Heaven’s peculiar grace,
God’s own work to do on earth,
(If the word be not too bold,)
Giving virtue a new birth,
And a life that ne’er grows old—

Sovereign masters of all hearts!
Know ye, who hath set your parts?
He who gave you breath to sing,
By whose strength ye sweep the string,
He hath chosen you, to lead
His Hosannas here below;—
Mount, and claim your glorious meed;
Linger not with sin and woe.

But if ye should hold your peace,
Deem not that the song would cease—
Angels round his glory-throne,
Stars, His guiding hand that own,
Flowers, that grow beneath our feet,
Stones in earth’s dark womb that rest,
High and low in choir shall meet,
Ere His Name shall be unblest.

Lord, by every minstrel tongue
Be thy praise so duly sung,
That thine angels’ harps may ne’er
Fail to find fit echoing here:
We the while, of meaner birth,
Who in that divinest spell
Dare not hope to join on earth,
Give us grace to listen well.

But should thankless silence seal
Lips, that might half Heaven reveal,
Should bards in idol-hymns profane
The sacred soul-enthralling strain,
(As in this bad world below
Nobles things find vilest using,)
Then, thy power and mercy shew,
In vile things noble breath infusing;

Then waken into sound divine
The very pavement of thy shrine,
Till we, like Heaven’s star-sprinkled floor,
Faintly give back what we adore.
Childlike though the voices be,
And untunable the parts,
Thou wilt own the minstrelsy,
If it flow from childlike hearts.


--John Keble (1792-1866), English Anglican priest and poet, one of the leaders of the Oxford movement, from The Christian Year.

Sabbath 1998, I

Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.


-- Wendell Berry (1934- ), American poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, and agrarian philosopher

Scripture reference: 1 John 3:16-24, Easter 4B

Don't Call Me a Stranger: The Cry of a Migrant

Don’t call me a stranger:
the language I speak sounds different
but the feelings it expresses are the same.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I need to communicate,
especially when language is not understood.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I need to be together,
especially when loneliness cools my heart.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I need to feel at home,
especially when mine is very far away from yours.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I need a family because mine I’ve
left to work for yours.

Don’t call me a stranger:
the soil we step on is the same
but mine is not ‘the promised land’.

Don’t call me a stranger:
the colour of my passport is different
but the colour of our blood is the same.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I toil and struggle in your land
and the sweat of our brows is the same.

Don’t call me a stranger:
borders, we created them
and the separation that results is the same.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I am just your friend
but you do not know it yet.

Don’t call me a stranger:
we cry for justice and peace in different ways
but our God is the same.

Don’t call me a stranger:
Yes! I am a migrant
but our God is the same.

--National Council of the Churches of India, found at Welcoming the Stranger: praying in solidarity with refugees from around the world, part 2: Lent and Easter, by the Jesuit Refugee Service, https://www.jrsuk.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Lent-Prayers-Pack-JRS-UK-2016.pdf