The Wednesday in Holy Week: As we stare full-faced into the maw of death and destruction
The Wednesday in Holy Week
Isaiah 50:4-9a; Hebrews 9:11-15,24-28; John 13:21-35 or Matthew 26:1-5,14-25; Psalm 69:7-15, 22-23
“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.”
The Gospel of John is my favorite gospel. Talk about light, love, esoteric, big ideas, paradoxes, and mysteries are my favorite kind of talk. The cadence of the language is easy for me to access, to put myself into, to imagine my way into the dust and the heat and press of the crowds, to lift my face and my heart into the essence of the Story. Reading the Gospel of John at the beginning of the 21st Century, no matter how active an imagination one possesses, must be nothing compared with actually bearing witness to the event. Also, having the benefit of two thousand years of scholarship, sermons, praxis, systematic theology, and historical records go a long way to augmenting the experience of what amounts to a voyeur.
The Gospel of John, this verse in particular, makes good sense to me. It is a distillation of everything Jesus has already said and done. But for the Twelve, for the band of people who followed after Jesus on his journeys, this must have sounded like crazy talk, even for Jesus.
Jesus is taking off the gloves and getting down to the heart of the matter…no more gentle parables, no more poetic utterances. This is Jesus telling them that it’s not going to be like they thought…the Kingdom of God at hand looks radically different from the Kingdom of God they imagined. The contrast between what they thought they were getting and what they have gotten is stark. They must have been stunned. All this time, all these people…no revolution, Rome remains. This is not the Conquering King…this is the Suffering Servant…The “already and the not yet” of the Story of God was being played out before them. They must have been so excited, so scared, and so utterly in awe. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. To know that everything you had believed your whole life was going to happen, was in fact happening…to you and with you and inside of you must have been an incredible experience for them.
Imagine if we believed that…believed that what we hear in church and read in the Bible was happening to you and with you and inside of you. What if we started believing in our place in the Bible, in the Story of God. What kind of crazy talk would Jesus whisper in our ears? What kind of balm would he pour on our wounds? What wonders and signs would we have eyes to see?
As we near the end of Holy Week, as we stare full-faced into the maw of death and destruction, I would invite you to believe that the Story of God, the Son of God, and the Kingdom of God are happening to you, with you, and inside of you.
--Rachel
