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234 Palm/Passion Sunday/Year C
Palm/Passion Sunday/Year C
Please see Palm/Passion Sunday/Years A, B, and C.
Good Friday/Year C
Isaiah 52:13–53:12
For comments on this passage, please see Good Friday/Year A.
Easter Day/Year C
Isaiah 65:17–25 (Alternate)
Today’s reading from Isaiah is a marvelous text. It follows Third Isaiah’s
pronouncement of judgment on the sinful in Israel and stands in dialectical
tension with that pronouncement (see Proper 7/Year C). The prophet
is saying that the way forward into God’s promised future for the people
is through facing our sins and errors with honesty and dreaming of what
might be. We are reminded of faithful people like Martin Luther King Jr.,
who knew all too well the difficulties faced in the struggle for equality but
in spite of them proclaimed “I have a dream” and described a future when
that dream would be realized.
Anyone with a clear-sighted assessment of the situation in which we live
should be depressed. With millions suffering because of natural disasters,
victimized by war and genocide, dying because of destitution and starvation;
with the poor getting poorer and with militarism constantly on the
rise, what hope is there that God’s order of kindhearted justice for everyone
will ever happen?
There are several options in the face of such realism. One is gnostic: to
give up on the salvation of this world and live on the hope to be saved from
this world. Another is to satisfy ourselves with doling out charity in the form
of free clothes for the homeless, free food for the destitute, blankets and tents
for victims of natural disasters, and to regard God’s compassionate justice as
in effect something that will never be realized. A third possibility is to escape
into the kind of apocalyptic thinking that leaves it to God to do all the heavy
lifting while we wait passively for the reign of God and the return of Jesus.
The prophets, the Gospel writers, and Paul will have none of these.
They set forth a grand vision of what might be and insist that by walking
the way of faith and doing deeds of loving-kindness we can mend the