As we step out of our comfort into the starkness of what is real, we transcend fear to see clearly that we must continue on to Jerusalem because that is where change happens. This Holy Week we sit with Jesus in the underground cistern, where he was likely kept overnight as he awaited trial and try to fathom how it is that he continued to love and work for love in spite of so much evidence that he should just give up. Humanity must have broken his heart. They were hopeless, mired in their own self-preservation, and yet, there were those women, his mother, the Magdalene, the others. Fearless they pushed on, wanting him to see them, to know their nearness. Like in so many of the stories of his Jewish community, they enacted God’s reign, the few who made visible God’s love, showing that humanity was not without hope.
Jesus is the last person in history who will die with the question of God’s abandonment. Where was God? In his flesh, because he stared down reality and transcended it through stubborn hope for who we could be, he forever transformed history. The God of love and of life was indeed present, real and alive in history, taking Jesus up into God’s arms, raising him for all to see: “this, humans, this unstoppable belief in your potential is the key to transformation. Jesus is leading the way, now follow him.”
Image source 1: James Tissot, Jesus is taken from the cistern (1886-1894), detail, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_Jesus_Taken_from_the_Cistern_(J%C3%A9sus_tir%C3%A9_de_la_citerne)_-_James_Tissot.jpg
--Cecilia González-Andrieu
Image source 2: A cistern much like the one Jesus might have been imprisoned in, https://rememberedplaces.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/between-caiphas-and-calvary-where-did-jesus-spend-his-time-as-condemned-man/
Quotation source
Quotation source
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