Today’s readings: Isaiah 50, 4-7; Philippians 2, 6-11; Matthew 26, 14 - 27, 66.
One major blockage in life that, across the board, marks us all, is how to cope with suffering. The text of Isaiah serving as premise today to the passion narrative from Matthew, is not only opening the way for what we shall be celebrating this week, but provides the key for finding another relationship to suffering.
As theologian Dorothee Soelle once wrote, if Jesus had just kept to multiplying loaves of bread and healing the sick, perhaps we could have had the illusion in Christ of a little Chinese god of fortune in whose kingdom it is possible to remain free of want and suffering.
The pages of the passion narrative we again go through today are not ordinary pages. Reading them in the light of the Spirit, they not only narrate to us a story that occurred in time, but they also reveal to us the true and deep meaning of our own existence and unveil so much darkness in life.
Jesus is the key to understand not only the Scriptures, but mainly ourselves. Our salvation is not purely ritual. It is historical. We all want to go deeper not just in some theological explanation of whatever happens and why it happens. We need to mainly be at peace with life as it is and as it unfolds.
The ministry of Jesus accounted for in the Gospels took place between two poles, Galilee and Jerusalem, the latter standing for a space where promises were fulfilled and where hope was definitively celebrated. Among the instructions in today’s narrative that Jesus gave to his disciples while approaching his death, he told them: “After the resurrection, I shall go before you to Galilee”.
Galilee was the meeting point after the tragedy. Galilee was also the place where everything started and Jesus seems here to indicate that after the resurrection they needed to rewind and go back to where they started from in order to understand with hindsight all that they had gone through.
During this Holy Week we ourselves are being invited to rewind and to realise that, while our focus in life is the hope fulfilled in Jerusalem, we still inhabit Galilee, with its hardships, malaises, distortions and contradictions. The end of the story that we are celebrating, and which we all know and can anticipate, does not change the course of all that impacts us so much.
It changes, though, its meaning. It empowers us also to approach life with a different perspective and with fresh strength. It is loud and clear that the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ are co-extensive in time and space with the story of humanity, whether that be in Syria or South Sudan or in the ambiguities of politics or the precariousness of life as it comes across for so many.
“You will all lose faith in me this night,” Jesus warned his disciples when the night of their faith was approaching. Faith has never been an easy ride and will never be. Jesus had very often sought to convey the message to his disciples. But they always remained on a different wavelength and when it happened, for them it was a shattering trauma. The writing is on the wall, for those who want to read it.