Holy Thursday
Surely we don’t need more bad news! The world’s going to hell in a handcart and now Jesus is about to go, too. Why else remember him under the guise of bread and wine? Two recent statements have disturbed me: one from a priest who should have known better. ‘Jesus, as God, was really in charge all along. Indeed, it’s a puzzle to me why he had to suffer at all. Surely, as God, he could have avoided it.’ And the other from another priest along the lines, ‘Yes, the readings are bleak this week but remember, all will be well again with the Resurrection.’ Both, it seems to me, missing the point that God enters fully into our human and earthly reality which inevitably involves suffering precisely in order to redeem it and we, in Christ, as a result of this same dynamic of self-surrender, including, of course, resurrection, shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves suffering with him as he goes towards the cross – so close is he to us, now, and we to him in this one redemptive act. To look at it through a slightly different lens – many people are suffering huge anxiety about climate change and the psychotherapist Sally Weintrobe has been much in demand, not to allay but, in a sense, to reinforce the fears:
I tell Weintrobe about my anxious feelings, and she says reporters often phone her and say, ‘I feel overwhelmed, being a climate journalist.’ I find her next words strangely hopeful. ‘I feel overwhelmed, too. Sometimes I find myself lying on the sofa unable to move because it’s all so worrying. But you get out of it and you carry on.
( Moya Sarner G2 12.4.22 )
To return to the more obviously Christian perspective, redemption isn’t about removing us from the sometimes awful reality of this world but of enabling us to be fully present to it or perhaps, better, allowing it to be fully present to us and yet not rob us of our ability to respond. In kneeling at the feet of Peter, Jesus shows us that the response that is called for is one of service and this is the most mundane of things. We might prefer a Christ who, as God, makes life easier by taking our troubles away or by imagining that the thought of the Resurrection is enough to allay our fears. But no, if Christ is about anything he’s about facing the truth of things as they are – and in our inevitable despair saying, ‘I am with you. Do not give up hope; here, allow me to lend you a helping hand, to do something however small that changes everything.’ And so ‘you get out of it and you carry on.’