Reading of the Passion of Our Lord from the Gospel according to St. Luke from the English Standard Version. Read at Holy Wednesday Matins, March 31, 2021.

Passion of Our Lord according to St. Mark, from the English Standard Version, recorded at Holy Tuesday Matins service.

Today begins Holy Week. Why is it holy? It is holy because we set this week apart to hear and remember Jesus’ suffering and death for our sins, His Passion. This so we can look forward to and understand all the more the joy of Easter, Christ’s resurrection. So why is it a week? Well, for one thing these events did take place over a week. Jesus’ triumphal entry was on Sunday, His Last Supper the following Thursday, crucified Friday, and then rose again very early Sunday morning the next week.

Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. Matthew, read from the English Standard Version.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. This creation of God in the very beginning, God’s absolute creation from nothing, was formless, empty, and dark. It was a formless mass uninhabitable by anything – plant, animal, angel or man. The human mind cannot comprehend the first undifferentiated creation, without distinction of matter or energy. Yet God was there, and the Spirit of God hovered over this undifferentiated mass, this empty deep. And God said “Let there be light” and there was light. By the Word of God the very glory of the Spirit of God shined light into creation. This light was the first thing created that was good, and God divided the light and darkness thereby creating the day and night and time. This was the first day.

Often in life we have to make compromises. Sometimes this is to reach an agreement with an equal, sometimes in love of someone who we care for, but the hardest compromises come when we are forced to do so by someone who holds power over us. This last one was the case for the three young men in our reading tonight. Along with their friend Daniel, and most of the nation of Judah, these three men were prisoners of war, deported from their homeland in Palestine to the city of Babylon. God had allowed this deportation, this exile of His people, due to their sin and idolatry. They knew it too – God had sent many prophets to warn his people, but they largely ignored the warnings and went on with their life as usual. So these three men, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, were brought into King Nebuchadnezzar’s diverse team of nobles and renamed Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – good Babylonian names.

The great blessing of having the Bible, the Word of God, so accessible to us is that we can come back to it again and again to re-orient ourselves in the midst of life. To be ‘oriented’ is to be faced east, the way that our churches face, even if they face north like ours. It is to be set in the direction of Jesus Christ, our Sun of Righteousness who rises with healing in his wings. In his life, death, and resurrection He is primarily our gift, but also our example, for He lived a perfect human life. So as we read and hear the scriptures preach, we are both “transformed by the renewing of our minds” by the Holy Spirit, an act of God upon us, and we are shown how to live in response to this. This is nothing less than keeping Christ’s word.

When God saves there are always winners and losers. We sing every week to God in the Sanctus, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.” Sabaoth means hosts, armies, massive groups of soldiers. Our Lord is a Man of War, as the Song of Moses says. When God saves his people from evil, He truly does defeat evil. Those who oppose God, who oppress God’s people, will be on the receiving end of God’s mighty right hand.

This Sunday, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, is traditionally seen as a little lighter than the rest of Lent. In some places the colors are changed to rose instead of violet to show the lightness of the week. The name of the Sunday, Laetare, means “Rejoice!” as we heard in the beginning of the introit today from Isaiah 66. Rejoicing isn’t something we usually associate with Lent, the time of repentance and fasting. Yet we need to know that even in repentance, even in fasting and preparation and sorrow for our sins, there is rejoicing. We rejoice because we have a gracious God who provides for all we need. As we hear in our gospel reading today, our Lord provides for all, even in the wilderness.

For one hundred years Noah preached to his neighbors to repent, for God was going to destroy the earth by water. The world was incredibly wicked, and no one but Noah and his family would survive. Noah was righteous before God and blameless among his generation, yet the least effective evangelist of all time. How did the world get to this point? Why was Noah’s message not heeded?