Here we are again, another Holy Week. As a kid, I welcomed Holy Week because I was anxious to get to Easter Sunday at which my fast from chocolate would end … thankfully! Images of a large, solid chocolate Easter Bunny occupied a lot of my thought during that time, far more positive than the dreary Stations of the Cross we endured every Friday during Lent in which the Old Testament text, “I am a worm and not a man,” echoed through the old musty, incense smelling interior of St Andrew’s Catholic Church in which we gathered, and the painfully pitched Stabat Mater sung.
While there will be some adults who never graduate from their understanding of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection than that they had as a child. For the majority of us, who have lived life with all its emotional, physical, and spiritual pain, we have a pretty good idea of the meaning of Paschal Mystery, though we may not necessarily state it using that theological term.
Our bodies and our souls bear the marks of our pain and suffering. I have a long scar on the back of my right hand that extends past my wrist, the result of two surgeries to try to restore full use of my right hand (only partially successful). I have a long, wide scar that stretches from behind my left hip and goes down to my left knee, the result of six surgeries due to a MRSA infection following a hip replacement (the incision opened so often that surgeons abandoned the use of staples to close it and used instead 50 lb fish line to stitch it back together). Scars on my right knee, right hip, right foot, and left ankle, all the metal and screws holding my breaks and joints together, mark the history of long and painful recoveries from those surgeries. In the midst of all the pain and recovery from all of this, I didn’t heroically offer it all up for the greater good. I asked, like most, when will this pain end? Will I ever be able to walk again? What will my life be like after I have recovered, whatever that means. What limitations will I now have to live with?
As a pastoral minister, I have been at the side of many people suffering losses. The enormous grief people suffer at the loss of a spouse, a child, and a parent. Those suffering from broken relationships in which life dreams have been ripped asunder by infidelity, domestic violence, and the abuse of alcohol and other addictive substances. Those suffering from chronic depression who courageously get out of bed every day and carry on, hoping that their meds will help relieve some of the inner pain with which they live.
All of us have our share of suffering and death. The brutal torture and execution of Jesus, as awful as it is, how can it compare to some of the torture and pain people have suffered in their lives, whether it be in the extermination camp of Auschwitz, imprisonment in a Soviet Gulag, or the “reeducation camps of Pol Pot in Cambodia? How does the passion and death of Jesus compare to the PTSD of war veterans haunted from the horror of war and the deaths they must have caused, or to the PTSD of those violently abused by family members and clergy? Are these not more horrific and long term than Jesus’ three hour tortorous death? My sister, Mary Ruth, suffered for 20 years from a chronic illness that was extremely painful, and my parents, stood at the foot of her cross as she suffered not just for three hours but for the majority of her life. I remember pointing this out to my mother. Just as Jesus didn’t deserve to die, nor did my sister deserve to have this chronic illness that caused her so much pain and eventually killed her.
Of course, I am not the first person to compare the events in Jesus’ life during that Holy Week to the horrific suffering people have experienced in their lives. No theologian has ever been able to explain how Jesus’ suffering and death somehow was worse and supersedes that of the suffering of the rest of humanity. However, a poet, Denise Levertov did.
On a theme from Julian’s Chapter XX
Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot wood, the nails, blood trickling
into the eyes, yes –
but the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived till after the soldiers
had come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why single out this agony? What’s
a mere six hours?
Torture then, torture now,
the same, the pain’s the same,
immemorial branding iron,
electric prod.
Hasn’t a child
dazed in the hospital ward they reserve
for the most abused, known worse?
This air we’re breathing,
these very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid upon the sky’s
moody ocean, we share
with women and men who’ve held out|
days and weeks on the rack –
and in the ancient dust of the world
what particles
of the long tormented,
what ashes.
But Julian’s lucid spirit leapt
to the difference:
perceived why no awe could measure
that brief day’s endless length,
why among all the tortured
One only is ‘King of Grief’.
The onening, she saw, the onening
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies
sands of the sea, of the desert –
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when He took Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:
within the mesh of the web, Himself
woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole, Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.
(from Breathing the Water, (c) 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, by Denise Levertov, A New Directions Book.)
Conclusion
In the early 1990’s, I was at a presentation by Fr Raymond Burke, one of the most prominent Catholic biblical scholars. He had just completed a massive two volume work entitled, “The Death of the Messiah.” While it was a day of great scholarly wonder for me, the one thing that stood from that day was in the question and answer following the presentation.
The question that was posed was which was the REAL last words of Jesus? Was it Mark’s and Matthew’s, “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” Was it Luke’s, “Into your hands I commend my spirit?” Or was it John’s cry of victory, “It is accomplished!”
Fr. Brown, pondered the question for a moment then responded this way to it. “I have been a priest for many years, and have been at the death beds of many people. There are some people who die in despair (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.). There are some people who die in resignation (Into your hands I commend my spirit.). And, there are some people who die victorious (It is accomplished.). It doesn’t matter what the “real” last words of Jesus were. No matter how a person dies, Jesus has already shared in the same death as the dying person.”
Or as Denise Levertov so poetically wrote:
“One only is ‘King of Grief’.
The onening, she saw, the onening
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies
sands of the sea, of the desert –
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge.”
In other words, all the physical pain I have suffered, all the chronic illness, torture, persecution, poverty, domestic violence, grief that ALL people have suffered throughout the history of humanity, was lovingly and willingly absorbed by Jesus in his three hours of torture prior to his death. The suffering of our Paschal Mystery was subsumed into the Paschal Mystery of Jesus.
The one thing about the Paschal Mystery is that it does end in death. Rather, the ultimate end of the Paschal Mystery of Jesus is the resurrection! As we have shared in the suffering and death of Jesus, as St Paul so succinctly writes in Romans 6:3-4:
Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life. (New American Bible Revised Edition)
What this compels us to do is look less at the events and liturgies of Holy Week in a two dimensional way, but begin to look at them three dimensionally. Looking beyond the surface of what historically happened to the depth and mystery that exists in not only the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but in our own life, suffering, death, and ultimately our own resurrection.
Have a Blessed Holy Week!
