In a few moments, we will move our focus from this pulpit to that altar. We will repeat an action that has been carried out with faithful solemnity for twenty-one centuries. The priest will take the sacrifice of bread and wine, bless it, break the bread, and give these consecrated gifts to Godâs people. When we do so, we participate in an eternal event grounded in the history of the day we remember on this holy Sunday of the Passion of Jesus. We take, bless, break and give the eucharistic elements as a way of participating in the life of Jesus who also takes, blesses, breaks and gives. All of the parts of human life are present in this story. It is the lens through which we see reality.

One of the things the church claims is that through Jesusâ incarnation, God takes into the divine life every bit of human life, including our most horrible and deadly acts. We see it all here in this story. At the center of the story is Jesus. He soaks up everything, everyone. He takes human experience into his own life.Ê

The human institutions are all here: Pilate the governor; Herod the administrator; the officers of the law; courts of justice; everything political swirls around this man. The religious institutions are all here: the priests and the theologians; the ordained and the laity; the parties of conflicting beliefs; everything religious swirls around this man. The military institutions are here; the soldiers and their commanders. And underneath it all, the interests of business and economics are here; they owe him for disrupting their trade in the temple; the charge is that he stirs up the people, and chaos, everyone knows, is bad for business and the established powers. All of the institutions that structures our common life conspire together over this man, and silently Jesus accepts their violent power into his very person. God takes into the divine life every bit of human life, including our institutions ÷ governmental, religious, military, and economic.

The human experience is all here. The same crowd of people who hailed him with cries of ãBlessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!ä now cries "Crucify him, crucify him!" He soaks into himself the vacillating viciousness of a mob. His friends have betrayed and deserted him; he feels the desperate loneliness of abandonment. A murderer is released in his place; he knows what it means to be despised as unworthy even of being alive. The soldiers grab an innocent bystander and make him carry the cross; a man at the wrong place and the wrong time gets caught in the vortex of history, and Jesus leads him up the hill. The women who are so often passive victims of masculine violence cry out in grief, and their tears go into his heart. He feels the anguish of the vulnerable and their children. His fate is with the criminals who come off death row to face their end. Even here he is mocked, and he receives the curse of all who share his harrowing fate.Ê

Strangely from the horror of horrors comes the only tender moment. A convict now hanging to death addresses him with the first-name familiarity of one sharing a common lot. "Jesus," he asks, "remember me." Humbly the Lord of Lords accepts this unknowing kindness from an unworthy outcast, and seals their future together, united.

Jesus has taken into himself everything. Everything that is part of human life, including its evil and violence and injustice becomes part of him. He does not turn his face away from anything or anyone. He takes it, speaks his words of forgiveness over it all, and in that moment all human life is blessed.

All humanity is blessed as Jesus offers it to God as a holy sacrifice. "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." Or to translate more literally, "Father, into your hands I will lay down from myself my spirit." Just as he has chosen to unite himself with the whole broken human experience, so he chooses to give himself willingly to God, an act of total self-giving. Accepting all our human sin, he entrusts himself completely to God. His life is surrendered to the Father. That is the meaning of sacrifice ÷ something offered completely to God. Whenever something offered to God is accepted by God, it becomes holy.

Jesus took all of our human life, blessed, broke, and gave it. God's acceptance of Jesusâ sacrifice is his resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus is the reversal of death. It proclaims a new entry of the eternal into the temporal, the divine into the human.Ê

From that moment on, we know that all of life is holy. The politics, religion, military, and business of it all has been consecrated. The mobs and the friends, the unlucky and the vulnerable, the criminal and the witnesses ÷ all have been taken into God's life under the divine intention of resurrection.Ê

So... we take bread and wine, bless, break, and give it. God accepts our sacrifice of the eucharist and it becomes our holy communion; it is consecrated and becomes the holy food of new and unending life in him. All is one; all is resurrected.

We have been given the divine formula for our own destiny. We are to take ÷ take it all, whatever life dishes out to us. We are to bless, break, and give it in trusting sacrifice to God. That is our call. That is the path of life. When we are lost, or hurt, or hanging between heaven and earth, we know what to do. Take, bless, break, give. Maybe with the quiet prayer on our lips, "Jesus, remember me." This is the sacrificial act that makes life holy.Ê

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