Friday, April 2, 2010

Passion Week

There is a moment in the St. John Passion by Bach when, after Christ has been arrested and Peter has denied three times that he even knows Christ, the Evangelist (narrator) says that Peter went out and wept bitterly. This is sung in a hauntingly beautiful tenor voice, with a long, slow melody on the German word for "wept".

Who does not know the same kind of wretched despair that Peter felt at that time? We do things wrong. We fail again and again. We resolve to do better, and yet we find ourselves repeating our mistakes. Well we know what this music expresses. If not literally, then figuratively, we weep and weep and weep. We are trapped in our human failings. Even Peter, who has just been with the living Christ, repudiates him. How can we ever do better?

Miserable sinners that we are, who can rescue us from this body of death, from this pattern of repeated failure?

But there is one who can. It is for this that God became man in Jesus, came to earth, and took upon himself the punishment for all our failings, endured the denials, the mocking, the pain, the weight of all of everyone's sin. Who can rescue us from this body of death? Who but God? Thanks be to him through Jesus Christ our Lord! May we never take this lightly!

(Romans 7:24-25a)

4 comments:

Viola Larson said...

Thank you Debbie, your posting is beautiful and needed-by sinners like me!

Bruce Byrne said...

I agree with Viola--except four times.

Debbie said...

I thought of this during our Maundy Thursday service when we read about Peter. I had just recently read the Romans passage, and it fit so well with Peter's despair, and with my own human failing. I need it too!

The problem is described in the Bible, and God provides the solution.

Viola Larson said...

Debbie as you can see I tried posting earlier and it kept telling me there was an error. (Now I see it was just saving my comments: )Maybe I needed to say that three times.