Death in the Afternoon

Las Ventas in Madrid.

In November of 1567 Pope Pius V issued a papal bull that forbade Catholic Christians from sponsoring, or watching, or participating in bullfights, on pain of excommunication, and denying the privilege of Christian burial to any person killed in a bullfight.[i]

Writing centuries later, Ernest Hemingway acknowledged that “from a modern moral point of view, that is a Christian point of view, the whole bullfight is indefensible.”[ii]  But this admission did not prevent Hemingway from launching an extended defense of the sport, which he insisted is actually more art than sport, and “the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.”[iii]  Nor did the papal edict prevent bullfighting from continuing to be enjoyed by peasants and nobles alike all across Spain, that most Catholic of nations, even to this very day; subsequent popes having weakened the force of Pius V’s ruling, anyway.

Hemingway felt that the bullfights offered a unique opportunity, as “the only place where you could go to see life and death, i.e. violent death now that the wars were over.”[iv]  As a writer, Hemingway believed he had to encounter life and death, even violent death, in order to write meaningfully about them.  Who am I to argue with him?

I happened to find myself in Madrid nearly a year ago during the Feria de San Isidro, in the month of May, when on nearly every night of the month a bullfight takes place at the bullring, Las Ventas, in Madrid.  And because matters of life and death are of interest to me, too, I went one night to the corrida, to see the bullfights, since I am not beholden to papal authority.  There are many fascinating details to report about the bullfights, most of which I must leave aside today.  Today I have interest only marginally in the toreros, the bullfighters, and more especially in the toros, the bulls.

Hemingway will tell you that “the bravery of the bull is the primal root of the whole Spanish bullfight.  The bravery of a truly brave bull is something unearthly and unbelievable.”[v]  But truthfully, Hemingway is more interested in bullfighters than in bulls, and more enthralled by the men than the animals when it comes to matters of life and death.  For it is in the person of the bullfighter that that great American writer found the crux of life and death.  The bullfighter, he wrote, “is performing a work of art and he is playing with death, bringing it closer, closer, closer, to himself, a death that you know is in the horns [of the bull…. The bullfighter] gives a feeling of his immortality, and, as you watch it, it becomes yours.  Then when it belongs to both of you, he proves it with the sword.”[vi]

Of course, on Good Friday, my interest is of life and death and immortality.  It is my job today to write about these things – even about violent death – and to speak to you about them.  And I am, of course, interested when a writer as famous as Hemingway, so renowned an observer of the world and of life and of death, turns his eye and his pen to the matter of immortality.  Maybe he has something to show us, in shedding light on the gifts of the bullfighter, about the ministry of that one Man whose death unlocked the door to true immortality.

Hemingway went to hundreds, maybe thousands of bullfights; I have been to one, but I believe I may have seen enough.  There in the center of the sandy ring is the bull: strong, and brave, and noble in his power and his beauty.  It is important to remember that the bull has done nothing wrong; indeed, he has been sent here for this, has been bred and raised for this one purpose, to be killed by a matador in a ring.  The bull has been conditioned to fight by having been limited in his exposure to humans throughout his lifetime.  He is meant to be aware of the threat in the ring as soon as he arrives there.

First, the picadors confront him on horseback, piercing him with their lances, drawing the first blood from the bull, and weakening him.  Next, come the banderilleros, who jab their barbed banderillas into his flesh.  There is more blood now, and a weaker bull, too.

This doesn’t take long.  Now the bull is bleeding; you can see his neck and back and sides stained red.  His powerful neck has been weakened, and his head is carried lower now.  The Spanish call this state “aplomado.”  “When he is aplomado,” Hemingway writes, “he has been made heavy, he is like lead; he has usually lost his wind… he no longer carries his head high… he has obviously been beaten… but he is still supremely dangerous.”[vii]  And then the matador – the word literally means “the one who kills” – goes to it with his sword, and kills the bull.

Blood my come from the bull’s mouth if the killing is not clean.  He will fall to his front knees for a moment, and then, faster than seems possible, and with an almost comic stiffness, the bull will keel over onto his side, dead as can be.  One of the matador’s assistants will jab a blade into the animal’s brainstem to make sure.  An ear may be cut off, as a prize for the bullfighter – or two ears if the performance is deemed especially good.  Then a team of mules will drag the carcass of the bull out of the ring to be butchered, its meat put to good use.

If there is anything in a bullfight that comes close to connecting the observer to immortality, Hemingway is quite wrong that it could be the bullfighter, at least by any Christian reckoning.  Because every bullfight already includes a figure who is easily identified with sacrifice: and that is the bull, who has done nothing wrong, but who will be antagonized, bloodied, and inevitably killed to satisfy some bloodlust of ours that lies deep in the human psyche or soul, I guess.

On almost any given night in May, six bulls will fulfill this bloodthirst in Las Ventas in Madrid.  But today, on Good Friday, there is only one sacrifice that matters, there is only one bloodied body that has been made aplomado, heavy, like lead.  He has lost his wind, he no longer carries his head high; he has obviously been beaten.  But he is still supremely dangerous (per se), because his power is made perfect in weakness – and this is Jesus.  Sitting there at the bullring in Madrid, watching the blood pour down the innocent animal’s side, it seemed so obvious.  Jesus is the bull, and the bull is Jesus: born for and sent to us for this one purpose.  He has done nothing wrong; but here he hangs bleeding.

Hemingway may have the contours of the narrative right, but it’s the characters he has mixed up.  For us, it is Jesus who is performing a work of art, playing with death, bringing it closer, closer, closer, to himself, a death that you know is in the thorns and in the nails, and in the torturous suffocation that comes of hanging on the Cross itself.  It is real and actual death, and it comes to Jesus just as surely as it does to the bull, a final jab in his side to make sure the job is finished.

Nearly all of human history is a chronicle of the power of conquest through the shedding of blood.  And it has been the hope of many men that the most successful matador (the one who kills) will become, somehow, invincible.  But the truth is found in only this one chapter of history, on a sandy ring of ground beneath a Cross, where the One who is killed becomes the unmistakable victor, as the sun darkens and the earth quakes.  And Christ passes through death on the way to immortality, to everlasting life, because he knows that we must do so too.  There is no path from this life to the next that does not lead through death.  And Jesus came to lead the way, which is more about love than about bravery, more about service than about power, more about humility than about greatness.

Mistaken though Hemingway may be about the parallels between a bullfight and the story of Christian salvation, he has nevertheless provided language that helps us beautifully to encapsulate the drama and the meaning of Good Friday.  But in our case, it applies not to the one who kills, but to the One who is killed:

Jesus is, in fact, “bringing [death] closer, closer, closer to himself, a death that you know is in the [Cross….  And here, on the Cross, Jesus] gives [you] a feeling of his immortality, and, as you watch it, it becomes yours.  Then when it belongs to both of you, he proves it.”

Watching from afar, you see this thing unfold, as death draws closer, closer, closer.  But do you also feel the immortality that is being poured out with the blood that drips on the sandy ground?  Has it become yours?  Can you see his saving death, and the immortality it points to, and believe, and know that it belongs to both of you – to him and to you? 

Yes, immortality belongs to him and to you and to me.  And now that you have seen him die, are you ready for him to prove it, and to rise?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Good Friday, 2017

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] “Super prohibitione agitationis Taurorum & Ferarum” (“An injunction forbidding bullfights and similar sports with wild animals”), commonly referred to as “De Salute Gregis Dominici,” 1 November, 1567

[ii] Hemingway, Ernest, “Death in the Afternoon,” New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932, p. 1

[iii] Ibid. p. 91

[iv] Ibid. p. 2

[v] Ibid, p. 113

[vi] Ibid. p. 213

[vii] Ibid. p. 147

The Truth of This Very Night

I was recently contacted by a local journalist, who wanted to write an article about whether truth was dead. She was a terrific person to talk to, but I have to admit that I approached the conversation with some dread. I couldn’t help but be mindful that in the eyes of the larger public, Christians, and maybe clergy in particular, have what is sometimes a well-earned reputation for being purveyors of fake news. We are seemingly quick to proclaim that “love wins,” seemingly quick to minimize the evil in which we are complicit, seemingly glib about the aching questions that accompany the experience of human suffering and vulnerability. We may sometimes seem willing to claim the Easter victory without showing any real sign that we have been willing to carry the cross.

So in preparing for that conversation I experienced, not for the first time, the need to review what it is about our collective lives of faith that might help us to retain a fundamental commitment to honesty. And the answer was, “this.” By the grace of God, if we are given the ability to use it so, this is a powerful corrective to our own mendacity. This very night. This liturgy, with which we begin the sacred Triduum. This evening, which stands out liturgically for at least three things: the washing of the feet, or “Mandatum,” the stripping of the altar, and the vigil before the Blessed Sacrament at the altar of repose.

When Jesus washed the feet of his beloved disciples, he offered care and hospitality for their sheer humanity. For the useless, honest, embarrassing, mortal dust that clung to their feet, and to his, and to ours. For the weight our feet bear, the miles we walk, the blisters we rub, the actual endurance it takes to measure out every step of the pathway we are on. Our feet are signs of where we have really been. And so very few among us actually enjoy removing our shoes at Mass on a solemn evening like this. It’s very unlikely that we can come to the front of the church and take our seat and have our feet washed without embarrassment, or without feeling a twinge of the deeper need that keep us searching for the love of God. It’s awkward to acknowledge that it takes real humility for clergy to get down on the ground and pick up a towel and move from chair to chair.

But that’s what we do tonight. We force our worship out of its normal constraints. We let it become more physical than is really comfortable for us. We become more candid than we really want to be. Because Jesus has welcomed our humanity, assumed our humanity, nurtured our humanity, and commanded us, if we want to be his disciples, to do this for one another, out of love.

Is truth dead? Or are we increasingly unwilling to acknowledge that we are human beings who need the care of a loving God? And how better to acknowledge that truth than in the sight of our bare feet, all of us together in need of washing? We make this bold acknowledgement--we uncover our feet, tonight—at a Eucharistic banquet. This is a night in which we commemorate the very institution of the Eucharist, and on this very night we are asked to acknowledge the ungainly feet we have been standing on, all our lives.  

Why should our deep experience of candor happen at a banquet? Let me suggest that real honesty can only happen in the context of a banquet. All our lives, while we stand and walk on those ungainly feet, we are also imagining that we might really be much greater than we are. We can’t be honest about our own needs and limitations, and so we cook up a fantasy version of ourselves and our place in the world, and we go through life promoting it. We hoard our little supply of self-esteem, hiding what we are from others and from ourselves. And we tell lies. It doesn’t take long before we become full participants in the kind of world you see around us, a gilded world in which truth has somehow become too costly for us to bother with. Education, journalism, the arts, history, science, environmentalism, feeding the hungry: they all become too expensive because we have a fantasy about our personal greatness that we want to maintain at all costs. We have extravagant lies to tell about who we are, and so we have no generosity with which to entertain truth.

And to this hoarding, selfish, humanity, filled with a fear of shortages and shortcomings, Jesus says, “Come and eat. Sit at my table. I will pay the price of my own life to feed you. Receive my body and my blood. If you are my disciples you must learn to do this for one another and for the world.” Jesus does not fear our hunger. He does not shun us. He does not protect himself from suffering at our hands. We, his betrayers, are his welcome guests. He washes our ungainly feet and he feeds our ungainly, self-protecting bodies and souls. Is truth dead, or have we failed to accept that we are guests at the table of our creator? Are we living in untruths and half-truths because we fear that we can never be or have enough within us to face reality? Tonight we come to the table with whatever humility we can muster, to be filled, and to be nudged toward a selfless honesty.

And on this very night, Jesus gives us another gift: the chance to follow him on his own path of self-giving. Just as he has seen our feet, we are blessed to accompany him in his hour of anguish. “Come to the garden and wait with me,” he says to the disciples, and tonight we do our best to accept that invitation, too. We will follow him in the Eucharist, to the altar of repose, and we will do our best to remain with the unbearable truth of his sacrifice. We will pray in silence, with gratitude. We won’t last there forever, we won’t be heroes of prayer, our own shortcomings will be ever before us, but we will offer our thanks and do what we can to stay present before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. We will not fear, tonight, to gaze upon the mystery of a God who chooses the shocking path of crucifixion and the incongruous form of bread in order to be with us.

And, this very night, we will endure the stripping of the altar. Bit by bit, candle by candle, vessel by vessel, we will witness the stripping away of all the signs we use to connote what is holy. We will acknowledge together this night that the language of our worship, the physical manifestation of our reverence, will never give full expression to the mystery of God’s presence among us, to the mystery of the death and resurrection of our Lord. Just as we have peeled away the shoes and socks that hide our feet, so will we peel away the linens that cover our altar of bare stone. And we will not be afraid of this stripping away.

The warmth of tonight’s banquet will still cling to the emptied sanctuary. Bathed in that generous abundance, we will not hesitate to acknowledge emptiness. Washed by our gracious host, we will not fear to acknowledge dust. Loved beyond measure, we will learn, bit by bit, prayer by prayer, year by year, to stop counting the cost of following God on a path of truth. May God bless us as we worship this night, and may our hearts be transformed so that we may follow our God with humble, contrite, and gladdening hearts.

Preached by Mtr. Nora Johnson

Maundy Thursday 2017

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

When Jesus Visits

Eating dinner with Jesus must have been kind of a risky thing to do. I’m not sure it would have been an unmitigated pleasure, for instance, to know that you were going to be the host at a party to which he was invited, or worse yet a party to which he had invited himself. After all, you could practically guarantee that crowds would be gathering at your door trying to get a glimpse of him, and there would likely be tensions breaking out, murmuring among your guests. Remember the folks who let their friend down through the roof to get healed by Jesus? Would you like that to have been your roof? Would you like to have cleaned up after the woman in Luke’s gospel who broke open a jar of perfume and poured all of it on Jesus’s feet? Or in Matthew’s gospel, when a woman poured perfume all over his head while he was reclining at the table?

And then, even worse, sometimes Jesus seems to have chosen his dinner companions more or less explicitly to make a point about what sinners they were. You could rely on Jesus to invite himself to the home of the people nobody liked: the tax collectors or the self-righteous, for instance. Even at the wedding in Cana Jesus was remarkably uninterested in helping with the wine until his mother made him step up.

In the fourteenth chapter of Luke’s gospel, Jesus commands his followers not to invite the kind of people they normally hang around with: “When you give a luncheon or dinner,” he says, “do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid” (Luke 14:12). He really isn’t kidding. Jesus’s parties are perfectly awful. They cause stress.

All of which is to say that Mary and Martha and Lazarus must have been special people indeed, because Jesus really truly liked them. In Luke’s gospel he just goes to see them—and here I’m mixing Luke and John if you’ll bear with me. He doesn’t seem to have come to their home because they were notorious sinners, or to make a point about how self-righteous they were. Sure, there was the small dispute between Martha and Mary about who would help with the housework, but by the standards of Jesus’s other social occasions visiting this family was remarkably civil.

It seems like Lazarus and Martha and Mary were on Jesus’ team, allied with him. Maybe they felt that. Maybe they could see that they were not in Jesus’s life to be object lessons or to provide the setting for someone else’s healing story. (I think this is universally true about Jesus and us, but in the way gospel stories are told, that’s not always evident. But it is here.) Maybe they could sense that it was their peculiar gift to be in the company of our Lord just for the sake of simple love. What an honor. The deepest and most consoling form of contemplation, just to sit at the feet of Jesus with no agenda. And here it was, given to them, apparently just for the joy Jesus felt in that communion. They were happy together. They were friends. They had an understanding and a mutual sympathy. This family knew how to be friends with their creator.

What a devastating and priceless honor, then, that they should become the central figures in Jesus’s most searing, most inexplicable demonstration of his power. What spiritual and emotional labor it took them to participate in the events of this morning’s story. Lazarus died knowing that his beloved friend, who could save him, did not do so. Martha had to reach down within herself to forgive Jesus. She rushes out on the road beyond the village to meet him, as though he were some kind of prodigal son. She does not try to paper over her sorrow. “My brother would not have died if you had been here,” she tells him, and it’s true. Mary says the same, with much weeping. Even Jesus is working very hard. His own weeping feels like a signal that what he has had to do is unbearable even for him. He has had to let his friend die. Think about it: his own understanding of the situation causes him deep distress. That’s profoundly unsettling. I don’t know about you, but I cruise through my life blithely sometimes, assuming that suffering has some kind of explanation and that if I could see it all through God’s eyes I would be consoled. But Jesus sees this suffering through God’s eyes, and he weeps. Even though he understands. This kind of understanding is not necessarily a consolation.

Jesus takes Mary and Martha and Lazarus with him, in other words, into the deepest mystery of death and pain and the suffering of the righteous. And they are more or less unflinching. They ask him challenging questions, they worry, but they stay with Jesus and they don’t ever stop hoping in him. And Lazarus is raised from the dead. These are friends of Jesus. These are the people we need to become.

The next time we see Martha and Mary and Lazarus, six days before the Passover, Jesus is on the verge of facing crucifixion. He stops in Bethany and they hold a dinner in his honor, with Martha serving and Lazarus reclining at table with him. Mary enters with “about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume” (John 12:3). She pours it on Jesus’ feet and wipes his feet with her hair. When Judas objects, Jesus says that Mary is anointing him for his burial.

Do you hear how rich this is? Having been to hell with Jesus and back, they are ready to host him at the kind of banquet he desires. Mary messes up her own house and her own hair, voluntarily. She and Jesus understand each other. This is not the time for easy communion or happy respite from the pain of the world. This dinner is a testimony to their shared readiness to face the whole truth of the world’s rejection of Jesus, and the suffering of the innocent, and the painful mystery of God’s will.

As Jesus faces the events that we call “Holy Week,” he needs friends like these. And as we face Holy Week liturgically, this gospel reminds us to be willing to surrender easy feelings of communion with God so we can be taken deeper—to hell and back—with Jesus. We have to learn how to want to host this Jesus at our tables. We have to learn, for our own sake and for the sake of a world that is in tremendous pain, how to welcome a Jesus we can’t fully understand, who doesn’t make us comfortable in our own homes, who wants our company on a journey of death and resurrection.

Our prodigal savior does not operate on the timetables we set, even when we really need him to. Can we run out on the road like Martha did to meet him when he comes to us? Can we find it in ourselves, as she did, out of love and gratitude, to forgive him for even our most incomprehensible losses? Can we see him weep without losing faith in him? Can we live and die like Lazarus did, knowing that he is with us even when we fear that he will never come? Can we move with Jesus from the occasions we enjoy—when we are in a place like this, where everything speaks to us of his love and his presence—to the occasions we dread to face?

Stay with him. Ask your questions, worry about the answers, but enter with Jesus into the heart of suffering and loss, into the passion of God that awaits us as Holy Week approaches.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

2 April 2017

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia