Crises have a way of unraveling us – our presumptions, our expectations, our plans. Out of nowhere, they can suspend us in a helpless state of unknowing. What is happening? What will come of this? Is this the worst day of my life?
Many of us know this unraveling firsthand, unfortunately. Yet I find that Christians often forget it when we recount the story of Christ’s passion and crucifixion.
We forget it because we know how the story ends – not with a body in a grave, but an empty tomb. So, when Holy Week arrives, we listen to this familiar narrative, we move through our ritual remembrances of Christ’s final days, but we know, all the while, that that happy ending is immanent. Why grieve at the cross when we know how it ends?
Why linger over the unraveled lives in [the Passion narrative]? Over Peter, whom one Biblical scholar called a tragically overconfident figure… At every turn, Peter’s expectations for Jesus and for himself fell apart. When the cock crowed, how devastated Peter must have been, fearful for his friend and undone by this confrontation with his own fragile loyalty. He thought he knew who he was.
Why grieve with Judas, whose life unravels in every way across the arc of this Gospel. His risky deal with other religious leaders reflects a personal desperation about which we can only conjecture. Perhaps he saw his betrayal of Jesus as an escape to a new life. In the wake of Jesus’s condemnation, however, Judas realizes that though his plan succeeded, it would not ultimately deliver on whatever it was that he had hoped for, and a way beyond this catastrophe was imperceptible to him. This was not the ending for which he had hoped.
So many lives unravel across this first Holy Week. How Mary and Martha must have felt, looking on from a distance, as they watched Jesus breathe his last breath, the title, King of the Jews hanging over his head. And how baffling his death must have been for those who, at the start of the week, sang Hosanna! in the streets. Crucifixion was not the fate they expected for the long-awaited Messiah, God’s Anointed One. Distraught at Jesus’s death, none of them could have fathomed how all of this would end.
But we can, right? So why do we sit with these sorrows, when we know how it ends, and when our contemporary ethos disposes us against it? Pope Francis laments this in his apostolic exhortation, Gaudete et Exultate, where he writes, The world has no desire to mourn; it would rather disregard painful situations, cover them up, or hide them. The worldly person ignores problems of sickness or sorry in the family or all around him; he averts his gaze.
Christ’s resurrection reveals that a transformation of our suffering and uncertainty awaits us. And like Jesus’s first followers, it is a transformation far beyond what we can fathom—whether at our best or at our most undone. We do not know when it will come, or what it will look like. We do not, in fact, know how this will end. But we profess that, by the grace of God, our unraveled lives will be transformed in glory.
It is transformation, not reversal or erasure, that awaits us this Holy Week. And if this is so, then our movement toward Easter morning should not be a movement away from the uncertainties and sorrows of our world. If resurrection is, indeed, a mysterious gathering up and transformation of them all, then we should spend these days present to the disappointments, tragedies, and uncertainties of our lives. Let us gather them up and bring them to the cross in hope of whatever it is that is to come.
--Jessica Coblentz
Image source 2: Leonardo da Vinci, Peter and Judas,
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