A Holy Week Reflection
The irony that undergirds Christianity’s paradoxical tenets – namely, that we die so that we may live; that we renounce so that we may receive abundantly – is especially, perhaps uncomfortably, clear in the season of Passiontide.
In his life, the world found no room for Christ. Even though he himself is the Bread of Life, his first bed was a repurposed feeding trough (Lk 2:7). Even though he is that in which we live, move, and have our being (Acts 17:28), Jesus proclaimed that “...the birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head" (Lk 9:58). Even his tomb was borrowed. Christ still has no place to rest in our shared world except any home we ourselves are willing to give by making room for him in our hearts and lives. Little has changed.
Why would anyone make such a home? For Jesus insists that anyone willing to follow him will find a cross prepared for them. For, if we would experience the reality of the Resurrection (which we greatly desire), we must also undergo the Passion (which we would rather avoid), its wisdom a dark gift about our violent impulses.
Christ, who died to himself fully, is therefore the fullness of Resurrection. And the Crucified One, who knew deeply that what we do to another, we also do to ourselves, called for our forgiveness even as his suffering overwhelmed him. Can we follow there? Most of us cannot, and it is for this demonstration of great love that we lift him up and follow as best we can.
Following Jesus, or “Walking the Way” is dangerous. For early Jesus followers, it meant the possibility of ultimate imitation: persecution under Imperial authoritarianism and possible physical death. For us, the danger is different, yet no less urgent, for the call of Jesus is ultimately a willingness to encounter the illusion of death to access the reality of the Resurrection: an event that is always-already happening in the dimension we call “eternity.” Therefore, the extent to which we have access to the Resurrection is the extent to which we have died to ourselves and from which we have “woken up” from the “sleep of death.”
May our encounter with Jesus this Holy Week wake us up.
Faithfully,
Gregory Peebles, Director of Ministry
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