B Lent 5 2009                                                                          Christ Church , York

                         “The time has come,” the walrus said, “to speak of other things, of shoes and chips and ceiling wax and cabbages and kings and why the sea is boiling and whether pigs have wings.” These words from Lewis Carol ’s famous work, “Through the Looking Glass” seemed appropriate for us to hear as we come to this last Sunday in Lent, not because we are interested in cabbages, kings or flying pigs, but because today the time has indeed come to speak of other things. The first part of our annual Lenten season is always relatively easy as we seek to spend some special time thinking about the life of Christ, putting ourselves out a little to attend mid-week services, offering a little change in the Lenten offering boxes or even reading a page of two of our Lenten devotional booklets. All this was fairly easy, simple and straightforward…until today. For now it is time to speak of other things as we are confronted by nothing less than the immanent death of our savior and the suffering He is about to endure. Except for one brief day of joy which we will experience next week with the celebration of Palms, we are now faced inevitably with the end and we cannot turn away from it. The easier times of the miracles and the cures, the great events of debating with the religious authorities and the building of a following through the calling of disciples, are now all over and only the hard times remain to confront us. The sands of time have now run their course and the end is near. Our attention turns from the glorious acts of Jesus to His glorification as our Savior. The time has come, as Jesus Himself might say, to speak of other things, things that are not always pleasant or easy, but things that must, nevertheless, be said. The time has come.

Time is a funny thing. We are organized by it, controlled by it and bound to it. We need it, we use it and we find that we are lost without it. Calendars, time sheets, clocks and watches abound in our society, removing from us the rhythms of the natural day and ordering our lives according to some other impersonal routine. Even the government changes time at its whim by establishing daylight savings time as it did just a few weeks ago. And while we know that time controls our lives so totally and fully that we cannot live without it, at the same time we often come to hate it and we often resent the way in which it dominates our lives and imposes deadlines upon us. Meanwhile in our own lives time drifts on and we mark the significant times of our lives with special celebrations – births, baptisms, graduations, weddings and even funerals, marking so much of our lives in terms of this week, this year, next year, sometime. We mark our lives with the passing of time.

And as we come to this last Sunday in Lent and as we prepare to enter Holy Week, we also sense the passing of days and hours and know that the time will surely come when we will be asked to recall, in all its fullness, the passion, the death and the resurrection of Christ. There is an inevitability about the passing of time leading to these events  as they move inexorably toward their conclusion. And to make matters worse they leave us with very mixed emotions, for while we look forward to the coming joys of Easter we know that there are days of suffering ahead and that our Savior did indeed bleed and die for each and every one of us. But however we feel about it, whatever emotions we might have, there is no doubt that the time has come. It could not be hurried; but it also could not be delayed and Jesus knows that it is now the right time to speak of the coming events and to proclaim to all, the role He was about to fulfill.

Indeed all three of our lessons today confirm that now the time has come. In the first lesson we hear how that the time is drawing near when the culmination of all that God had sought for His people would be achieved as the hours and the days come together and the people understand their role as members in the new Covenant which God would now make with His people. This new Covenant would again be the Lord’s doing, but this time it would be different. For instead of being external, written on slabs of stone, now the law would be internal, written upon their hearts. Therefore they will no longer need others to teach them about God, but instead the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the male and the female, will come to know the Lord and the Covenant that He has made with His people. And, the prophet says, God will do these things “after those days.” For it is in God’s good time that He establishes the Covenant with us. It is in God’s good time that He sends His Son to affirm that Covenant in a new form. And it is in God’s good time that we come to understand the heritage that we have received from the past, while at the same time look forward to the relationship that we can now have with God in and through the resurrection of Christ Jesus Our Lord as we open ourselves to this new law which God will place upon our hearts.

And with this new law placed upon our hearts, the time has come for us to assume the burden of responsibility that being a disciple calls us into, which means learning to become obedient like Christ. Paul tells us this morning that “in the days of His flesh” that is, when He lived on earth, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears. Take this responsibility away from me, He said. Don’t make me go through this. It will hurt; it will be painful, physically, emotionally, spiritually and it will result in my death. Being fully human, this man Jesus wants nothing more than to step back from the abyss that was opening up in front of Him. But the time had come and so, instead of disclaiming His responsibility, instead of running away, instead of hiding in fear, He chose to embrace obedience, an obedience through which He became perfect. Now too we are called into the same obedience, to take up our partnership in the Covenant and to walk the way of the Cross. For our time has also come and the irresistible tug of the coming week will draw us ever closer to the Jesus whose hour had come.

This was Jesus’ hour, the time when He would fulfill the will of the Father who had sent Him. Now, Jesus says, for the first time I can tell you that the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. In spite of His humanness, He does not wish to be saved from this hour, for it is precisely for this hour that He has come. Indeed the hour of glory is also the hour of passion; He will be humbled in order to be exalted; and He will die so that He, and all of us, may live. And so in His prayer, Jesus acknowledges that His hour has indeed come, the hour which would decide the destiny of the world. Earlier in the Gospel at the marriage feast, Jesus told His mother Mary that His hour had not yet come. And later on He told His disciples the same. As a result, His enemies were not able to lay hands on Him. But now the hour has come. In the human torment of this hour Jesus knows that the past and future are bound together. The hour of death is His hour of glorification. The seed must die before it is born again in beauty and glory.

And for you and me, the hour has also come. The hour has come for us to live in obedience, to choose the cross, to die to self so that we might rise to new life in Christ Jesus Our Lord. Our hour comes with the same mixture of fear and anticipation that Christ must have felt but it is still our hour as, with faith in the Father, we grasp the cross with both hands and walk in its way to the end. For it is promised to us that if we embrace this hour of passion, suffering and death, then we will also share in the same promise of glorification.

The time has come. Now we prepare to begin the holiest period of the Christian year. Now we commemorate the hour of Jesus. Now we will gather to remember the suffering and the death of Jesus. Now we will embrace the new Covenant in our hearts. Now we will willingly serve the Lord. Now is the hour to speak of other things. The time has come. May God give us the strength to be faithful to the end. Amen.