On not losing heart
The point of Holy Week
Consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart. – Hebrews 12:3
Holy Week can be a bit of a downer. There is no getting around it. The passion narrative is centered on the hostility that Jesus endured. It invites us to look squarely at divine love and at the resistance to divine love that we experience in our hearts and in our world. It invites us to recognize all the ways in which we wound one another and are wounded. This is very painful to acknowledge.
But the point of Holy Week is not to revel in some kind of maudlin display of remorse or self-pity. It isn’t about making ourselves feel bad about ourselves, or compounding our despair and cynicism about the state of the world. We don’t need Holy Week to do that!
The point of Holy Week is to come close to Jesus, the Suffering One, and to see in him the pathos and the dignity and the divinity of our suffering world. In coming close to Jesus, we bear witness to his suffering even as he bore witness to ours. More than that, we bear witness to the space in which human suffering and our attempts to make it better meet, only to end in failure. We meet suffering, and our inability to control, fix, heal, or manage it.
The passion of Jesus is literally the passivity of Jesus, what he undergoes or endures at the hand of others. There is much in life that we simply must endure, so many things that we can’t control. How do we move through such experiences? Can we do so with an open heart? Can we keep loving, forgiving, and blessing ourselves and others?
Even Jesus encountered situations where the resistance to love was such that he could do no deeds of power. That resistance became so great that it eventually took his life. But Jesus never stopped touching and being touched by the lives of the poor and oppressed, the anawim, the little ones, whom everyone else avoided. In Godly Play, we say that Jesus’ work was to come close to people – especially to the people that no one else wanted to come close to.
Coming close to Jesus, the Suffering One, during Holy Week is an opportunity to renew our commitment to share this work. As our ancient texts tell us, we must learn how to sustain the weary so that we do not lose heart. Walking the way of Jesus is about learning how to keep breathing through our experiences of betrayal, abandonment, loss, humiliation, rejection and injustice; to learn how to keep breathing in time with the divine breath, our hearts syncopated with the heartbeat of God, even as we open our hearts to the full range of human experience. How do we do this?
Jesus shows us the way. It begins by being rooted in the ethics, ritual, and spiritual practices of a wisdom tradition. Jesus was steeped in the wisdom and compassion of the prophetic lineage of Judaism. He was deeply rooted in it, and it provided him with the moral compass and spiritual vision that he needed, even as he developed that tradition in sometimes unexpected ways. We need a lineage of elders who transmit holy breath to us.
Jesus was a community organizer. He listened to others, and they listened to him. He sent people out two-by-two. He celebrated weddings and funerals and feasts with his friends and family. He trusted that he was part of a movement that was much larger than himself. He was right about that. Jesus never isolated himself. He was abandoned, but never completely. There were a few who followed him until the end, and they carried him in their heart when he could not take another step. We need a community of fellow disciples who carry us on the journey.
In coming close to people, Jesus kept coming closer to God, and in coming closer to God, Jesus kept coming closer to people. This is what sustained him on the journey. I used to think it was his praying that sustained him – his time apart with God. But I am beginning to suspect it was the pattern of time apart with God and time together (with others) with God that kept his heart spacious and flexible. With either alone, we become unbalanced and self-preoccupied. With both together, we are capable of walking the way of the cross. We cross the threshold of ego consciousness into pure love. There is no longer any separation.
Jesus understood his passivity to be simultaneous with his glory, enduring the cross for the sake of the joy that was set before him. It is this vision of joy, of ultimate reunion or homecoming, seeing beyond the estrangement inflicted by our wounds, that allows us to experience our passion as at the same time our glory. It is the glory of a love that embraces all of reality and transfigures it into joy, because nothing can separate us from the love of God and this love keeps generating life out death.