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We are at the beginning of Holy Week. If we want to truly be Christian, this week ought to be a time when we share in a special way in the passion of Christ. We do this, not so much by indulging in pious feelings, but by bearing the burdens of our life with simple fortitude and without ostentation. For we share by faith in the passion of our Lord precisely by realising that our life is a participation in his destiny. We find this difficult, because so often we fail to understand that the bitterness and burdens of our own life do — or should — give us a mysterious share in the destiny of all human beings … If we were aware of this … we would understand that his passion is the unique acceptance of the passion of humankind, in which it is accepted, suffered, redeemed, and freed into the mystery of God.
Karl Rahner
A suggested plan of readings and meditative reflections
for home use during Holy Week
Monday
Reading: Mark 14.1—10
Reflection
I am the woman who anointed Jesus. I am unnamed, as many women of my time are unnamed and unnoticed. But not by Jesus — he speaks to us, takes us seriously , argues with us , unselfconsciously accepts us — he is different from the other men. I’ve been following him for a while, inspired by his teaching. I have felt that he is increasingly troubled, struggling with something he knows he must do or face. Many of his women followers have noticed this change in him. He has become more annoyed with his inner circle’s failure to comprehend what he is trying to tell them. I and some of the other women decided we needed to tell him, needed to let him know, that we could see his pain, his fear, the struggle he is going through, and although we are not sure, we too fear that it is his life that is at stake. We decided to act and to reach out to him. We bought nard and decided that we would anoint him — we would acknowledge him as our King. And also tell him that if he fears he will die, we know that fear too, we lovingly prepare him for facing death.
Our law says that for us to do so would make him ritually unclean, but we know in our hearts that Jesus would pay no heed to such nonsense. We know too that we were casting ourselves in the role of prophets by doing so, but has he not taught us to speak out, to say what we feel? We gathered the money together — some of the women following him are quite wealthy — and we bought the perfume — it cost the equivalent of a labourer’s wages for a year. It was easy to get to him at Simon’s, because Simon the leper is part of our group of women, healed lepers, possessed and others who meet together sometimes to talk about Jesus’ teaching — the inner circle of men around Jesus find us a bit odd, and I think threatening.
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We are the men at the table, and all we have to say is: who does this woman think she is?! She has broken the law, and spending all that money on poncy Roman affectations is disgusting when so many are poor. Does she think she’s some kind of prophet? We know Jesus is our Messiah and our King — we don’t need her to tell us that with her pseudo-ritualism — but what is Jesus going on about death and burial for, if he’s the Messiah who will triumph? He won’t make many friends or get many good Jews following him if he carries on behaving like that and letting women touch him in that way — can’t he see people think it’s odd and unclean? He’s too familiar with the women.
All in all he’s behaving very strangely, and we don’t understand what he wants of us or what he is talking about half the time.
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I am Judas, and I am disappointed and angry. I thought this guy was really going to take on the Romans and get them out, but he’s just another religious weirdo riding on the back of the people — my Zealot mates were right. And accepting the gift of nard that was imported from India by the Romans! Why didn’t he sell it and give the money to the poor instead, or put it in our kitty? As treasurer I know we need it, but no, instead Jesus praised her for doing it. So much for being on the side of the poor. I’ve had enough.
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I am Jesus. I am tired of trying to explain to the Twelve about how I feel things are going to unfold. They don’t seem to hear. I increasingly feel that I am going to have to die soon: God is calling me to face this possibility. And I am scared, and feel so alone with it. That is until she came forward — Mary, part of that interesting group of women, healed lepers and possessed who worry the Twelve with their radical unorthodoxy. Peter says they go a bit too far and are doing my cause no good.
But she understands, and through her touch and her action she has let me know. I feel she is saying to me ‘No, you are not mad to feel and think what you do — I can see too where all this may lead, I can see the burden you bear — let me reach out to you … I do understand.’ It is such a relief, and it is beautiful.
I worry for Judas, though: he is so bitter and angry. I’ve noticed he has been distant with me lately. He is full of so much anger and hate, he still can’t forgive the Romans for what they did to his family. O God, please don’t let him come to harm; bring him healing for his wounds; don’t let his bitterness destroy him.
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The possible feelings surrounding this group are complex and the above is merely speculation. But there is no doubt that the woman has understood Jesus. Intuitively she has responded to what Jesus has been saying — it is she who understands what he believes is going to happen to him. And lets him know through lovingly anointing him — communicating through touch what perhaps is impossible or too risky to speak out about in words.
She has done a beautiful thing for him.
Ray Gaston, drawing upon Women Believing by Ruth Musgrove
Prayer
O Jesus, stretch forth your wounded hands over your people to heal and to restore, and to draw us to yourself and to one another in love. Amen.
Tuesday
Reading: 1 Corinthians 1.18—31
Reflection
Perhaps like people who cower away from the light, lest their own sins are exposed, we cannot bear to be in the presence of total Love, so we destroy it. The jealous, small-minded childishness of wanting to destroy what we cannot be and cannot have. Or is it the weakness of Jesus we despise, the weakness that reminds us of our own, which we try constantly to conceal and deny? His total humanity reveals our inability to be human. God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
This is the foolishness of the cross to which Paul refers: this absurdity that the story of a supposedly broken, defeated and executed prophet, healer and lover of humanity becomes the story of God’s saving action in the world and potentially of God’s saving action in us all.
This is standing with Christ, accepting the foolishness of the cross as the way of salvation — that in this vulnerable Messiah is a truth that needs to be lived and made known.
It is in accepting our brokenness and our vulnerability, acknowledging our confusion and our sense of loss — in that lies the seeds of resurrection hope. We are not perfect, and neither will we be perfect, but the way of love is not about perfection but about forgiveness and healing. It is about being weak enough to lament the realities of the pain of our world, the realities of our own sorrow and confusion, and then again and again turning back to the light and welcoming through love what it reveals. It is in accepting our brokenness that we know we are loved, and we learn again what we were made to be and what we can seek to become.
Ray Gaston
Prayer
O Jesus, stretch forth your wounded hands over your people to heal and to restore, and to draw us to yourself and to one another in love. Amen.
Wednesday
Reading: John 13.21—32
Reflection
If we believe that Jesus knew all along what was going to happen, and if we believe that Judas was a mere puppet having to take his allotted role because he was part of the great plan laid down in Scripture, then I fear there can be no hope for us. This would mean that we are programmed, controlled, without freedom to grow or develop. It would also mean that we are quite beyond each other’s reach, unable to choose intimacy or separation, closeness or distance, love or indifference … So Jesus leaves the upper room and goes out into the night, his heart breaking for Judas and weighted down with sorrow at the apparent indifference of the others to Judas’ plight. It was as if they had been paralysed by the apparent powerlessness of his own love: if Jesus could not keep Judas within their company, what hope had they? For Jesus, I suggest it must have felt very different. Why was it, he must have asked himself, that nobody, not even John whom he loved so dearly, had been able to say to Judas: ‘We love you, you are one of us: where are you going? what are you intending to do?’ Why was it that not one of them had seen that Jesus’ impotent love needed the expression of theirs to regain its power? Why had they not been able to see that being truly human is impossible on your own?
Brian Thorne
Prayer
O Jesus, stretch forth your wounded hands over your people to heal and to restore, and to draw us to yourself and to one another in love. Amen.
Maundy Thursday
Reading: Luke 22.23—34 and 54—62
Reflection
Peter seeks to be the perfect disciple. He fails, and is absolutely desolate. But Jesus told him he would betray him. Peter is not ready, or rather it is not necessary for him to make such a stand. He fails to hear Jesus telling him so. Perhaps Jesus’ words should be read as less of a prediction and more as a gentle warning: ‘Don’t do this to yourself, Peter’.
In our discipleship, are we like Peter, striving to be the perfect disciple? So busy trying so hard, relying on our own resources, that we fail to hear the words of Jesus to us: ‘Do not do this to yourself; it is not what I require’?
Peter’s time came. His faith was tested: we are told in the Acts of the Apostles he had to change his mind and be open to God in a dream. And tradition tells us he was ultimately tested when he too faced crucifixion.
And we too face our own tests of faith. They will come; we don’t need to create them for ourselves. We don’t need to seek to prove we are the perfect disciples. Instead we need simply and prayerfully to be open to the wonder of God’s grace working in us now. God loves us and knows us as we are, and if we let him he will use who we are now to his glory.
Ray Gaston
Prayer
O Jesus, stretch forth your wounded hands over your people to heal and to restore, and to draw us to yourself and to one another in love. Amen.
Good Friday
Reading: Hebrews 4.14—16, 5.7—9
Reflection
He leaves the bright heavens
comes again
condemned to hang
between heaven and earth.
And there he remains
he absolves the guards
lets the tortured forget
makes hatred subside
teaches the weary to breathe
the trembling to sleep
the dreamers to act
the doers to dream.
Dorothee Solle
Prayer
O Jesus, stretch forth your wounded hands over your people to heal and to restore, and to draw us to yourself and to one another in love. Amen.
Holy Saturday
Reading: John 19.38—42
Reflection
Drink deep of the chalice of grief and sorrow,
held out to you by your dark angel of Gethsemane:
the angel is not your enemy,
the drink, though sharp, is nourishing,
by which you may come to a deeper peace
than if you pass it by,
a ‘health of opened heart’ …
From a slow accepting of our wounds, life within us begins to move outward, bitterness waning, compassion growing …
True prayer is the source, the prayer that comes not from the mouth, but as from the lips of wounds …
Hidden in that prayer is both the crucified Christ and our fellow-sufferers, those whom, in intercession and compassion, we need in order to be ourselves.
There is no higher aim
than to reclaim
another, blinded by life’s pain,
to help him see again.
Seek love in the pity of another’s woe,
In the gentle relief of another’s care,
In the darkness of night and the winter’s snow,
In the naked and outcast — seek love there.
Jim Cotter
Prayer
O Jesus, stretch forth your wounded hands over your people to heal and to restore, and to draw us to yourself and to one another in love. Amen.
Easter Sunday
Reading: Isaiah 65.17—25
Reflection
I do not know
what resurrection is
(though I’m almost sure
it has something to do
with hallowing the common ground.)
Of course, that’s not all of it.
I expect one day I’ll get up
and find that it sneaked up on me
while I wasn’t looking,
and maybe even that it’s been there all along.
That’s as may be.
There’s no point in trying to see things
before you’re ready.
You have to walk before you can run.
In the meantime,
I believe in it
And that feels like an initial step.
For now,
it will do.
It is enough.
Kathy Galloway
Prayer
Thanks be to God for this new dawn
This new beginning of a day and of our lives
Creation’s re-creation through pain and sorrow.
Life-giving strength bursts from the grave,
And from an ending comes the promise of a new tomorrow.
Amen.
O Jesus, stretch forth your wounded hands over your people to heal and to restore, and to draw us to yourself and to one another in love. Amen.