But Jesus turned to them and said, “Women of Jerusalem, stop crying for me. Instead, cry for yourselves and for your children.
— Luke 23:28 —
I know the title of this blog is shocking, but I must admit to an impatience with an attitude to Holy Week that is either sentimental or an indulgence in horror.
Although the Anglican Book of Common Prayer says piously, ” full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice,” our liturgies tend to revisit Jesus’ crucifixion in ghastly detail, with an unseemly savouring of its details, including encouraging people to shout out a call for his death. I have always hoped that I would be the person who said, “Don’t.” It seems to me that Jesus’ horrific death millennia ago, has only one purpose in our memory. That purpose is to remind us that we remain complicit in erecting the cross of horror, shame, brutality, and injustice. We do not need to look to history to see the wounds and passion of Christ all around us, in our streets, in our families, in our own limitations that mask as convictions about truth and social status.
The cross is the potent, albeit dreadful sign of the failure of humanity to let the holiness within prevail upon the earth. As we walk through Holy Week, I think we need to focus on the paths we have taken over the last year, since the previous Holy Week. What have we done for the children of the world? What have we done for the planet and its other creatures? How have we stood against war, poverty, lies? Whom have we helped and why? The veneration of the cross is not about glorifying suffering but about an accusation to the Body of Christ. Have we fed the lambs? Have we brought the children to safe harbour?
On Maundy Thursday, in most churches, we are good at showing love for each other, at least superficially, but why are we washing feet that are fat and clean? When Jesus performed this action, it was an act of hospitality, a host, deferring to his guests, the convenor, acting as servant. Food for the journey, sustenance for those who would soon be tested and mostly found wanting. Do we understand that this baptismal act is not so much about cleansing as preparation to walk the way of the cross? To be called to testify to the uncomfortable, unpopular truth about solidarity with the poor and the forsaken? The first eucharist celebrated the presence fo Christ at table with those he loved, whomever they might have been. The last supper in Emmaus reminded the disciples to study, to learn, to act, to pray for God’s reign of peace and justice on earth.
On Good Friday, when we say our prayers, when we remember Jesus’ act of self-offering, we need to remember also that although he has been resurrected, we have not yet taken down his cross, that it still scars our landscape. I started to weep as I saw the young people rallying against violence in the March for Our Lives — not just against them, but as an acceptable idea in this 21st century. I wept for their beauty and for their hope. As the church we have fought against the resurrection, attempting to keep that hideous cross instead of having faith in the resurrection. We, as the church, have been ingenious at maintaining violence of all kinds, of encouraging people to indulge in self-recrimination and shame instead of declaring their freedom in Christ, the freedom of the resurrection, the freedom to be new.
Jesus is risen and has been alive and with us for centuries. When will we believe it and act on it? When will we decide human evil and selfishness has had its day? I long for the Holy Week in which the cross has become a faint outline, a dim memory of what humanity was before we discovered the incarnation running in and through us, the resurrection of hope and possibility.
Please go to church this week, but go not for the memory of Jesus’ death, but to remember the path to resurrection that will call us to lay down the comforts and assumptions and lies that are blotted out by the reality of suffering. Go to weep for the children who are not yet free. Go to testify, to be present to the pain that exists in our world. Go to present yourselves as an offering, an offering to live out your baptismal promises with weeping, but also with the knowledge that the Resurrected One is with you. Go so that you know how to reveal Jesus’ resurrection that walked through passion and love to a life shared in action and faith.
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