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“It is finished . . . ” John 19:30
Last Sunday we were warned by the CDC and our elected officials that it was going to be a rough two weeks. The pandemic is spreading and will hopefully peak in the next two weeks or so. It’s time to be extra diligent about washing hands, practicing social distance, wearing masks, donning gloves, staying home. That the first week is also Holy Week– the time when we follow Jesus to his cross, witness his crucifixion and view his burial in a borrowed tomb is not lost on me. It’s a week of death, then and now.
Why? Why now? So, we spend time learning about the virus and how it jumped from one species to the next and then from one person to another to another to almost 1.4 million people with just about 80,000 deaths. In our best moments we are hopeful and cautiously follow the protocols. Some volunteer — making masks, delivering food, calling the isolated, caring for others. In our worst moments, we are full of fear and anxiety, worry and frustration. Many of us spend our days ping-ponging back and forth between hope and fear, courage and terror. To quote William Butler Yeats’ poem The Second Coming, we are living in a time when “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” We are like Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put us back together again. Not as we were. Now there are too many missing pieces.
Why? Why then? Why did Jesus do this? He knew the religious leaders were out to get him. Why did he go to Jerusalem in the first place? And when he did, why the grand entrance riding in on a donkey, palm branches waving, people shouting Hosanna? He could have quietly slipped into the city, without such fanfare. Even Pilate wants to know why. When he interrogates Jesus, we can hear Pilate feeding Jesus the right answers, the ones that will get him off, that will lead to a slight reprimand, not DEATH BY CRUCIFIXION! “Come on Jesus,” we want shout back through the centuries, “Cooperate, don’t be a wise guy, give the man the answers he wants. Can’t you see he really wants to give you the benefit of the doubt?”
As the Gospel of John tells story, Jesus is not a helpless victim of circumstances beyond his control. Instead, he’s the victor – lifted up on the cross, willingly, intentionally, without regret. So much in charge that while hanging on that cross, he arranges for his beloved disciple to care for his mother. And as he’s dying, Jesus proclaims, “It is finished,” as if he’s the director of a play in which everyone else were mere actors. For Jesus the cross is not something to escape, but embrace. More than an instrument of torture, the cross is a place of willing sacrifice, indeed of love.
Danish theologian, Søren Kierkegaard, once said that if there is one thing that unites us as Christians, it is our forgetting, our overlooking how much we have been loved by God in Christ. We are united not so much by what we have done or left undone, by what we have believed or not believed. We are united in NOT remembering with what great love we have been loved in Christ. We have not remembered in our hearts, that it wasn’t the nails that kept Jesus on the cross. It was God’s love.”[i]
God’s love. That’s what made the first Holy Week, holy. And that’s what makes Holy Week 2020, holy too. God’s love working through the hands and hearts of doctors and nurses. God’s love shared in posts, emails and on-line worship. God’s love embodied in families, in caring, in grieving, in loving, in putting us back together again. Never the same, but perhaps by God’s grace, we will be people with more compassion, more faith, more love now and forever. Amen.
[i] H. King Oehmig, “Postscript,” Synthesis, April 5, 1996, 4.