Disrupted!

When the Lord knocks at the door of our hearts and we open up for him, he is going to make changes.

Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger

Holy Week is a disruption, and its explosive outcome is not designed to make us comfortable. No matter how often we are exposed to it — as we are annually in the liturgical cycle or in the ordinary course of our lives when its pattern imposes itself upon us — we are confronted with choices that knock us out of our comfort zones. Our lives are never exactly the same after we encounter its forceful message. Depending upon how open and how deeply we may be disposed to allow it to enter our lives, we will be changed, and for the better. We will find peace. For it is the ultimate promise and assurance that, in the prophetic words of Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well” (c. 1342).

“Man cannot bear very much reality,” Thomas Beckett observes shortly before his martyrdom in T.S. Eliot’s moving drama, “Murder in the Cathedral.” We are more comfortable behind masks, those that screen us from the world or the ones we use to shade its more difficult vistas from our line of sight. So we bring these screens to our encounters with the persons, narratives and activities during our Holy Week. 

Some of those perspectives (biases, expectations or fantasies even), may help us cope better with its blisteringly straightforward realities, the most primitive and superficial being mockery. Or maybe a euphemized takeoff on it, something comic like a Monty Python or SNL skit. All of the Passion narratives contain references to dices rolling and coins rattling almost like a night in Las Vegas. Comic relief, however, is always just that and no more. It’s a pause from facing the inevitable and unavoidable, if only to help us catch our breath before taking a dive into the bracing waters of sobriety.

We might find the courage to take a more serious approach, accepting the reality that all of the persons we meet in the narratives are actual human beings, with their own realities. Judas and Peter, Pilate and Caiaphas, the Marys and Joseph of Arimathea, the soldier Longinus who thrust the lance into the side of Jesus. Even the unnamed centurion who concludes, “this man was innocent beyond doubt” (Lk 23:47). All of them may have something to tell us if we take a moment to meditate on their stories, even daring to put ourselves into their positions which, at one time or another, we may well be in during our lives, faced with similar challenges of loyalty or betrayal, fight or flight, faith or doubt, love or apathy. Yes, apathy, the real opposite of love.

If getting too close to the scene is something too traumatic for us at a moment in our lives, we might be consoled by the thought that Jesus is ready to meet us at all times exactly where we are. He understands that we go through emotional and spiritual ups and downs throughout our lives. Times when it seems too difficult even to pray. Saints went through those dry or turbulent spells when God seemed distant or even callous toward them. They even shed tears at times, bitter and plentiful. Peter wept. Jesus wept. We harbor regrets. We lose dear friends.

Trusting, if we will, that Jesus would not burden us beyond our momentary capacities, we might simply accept the offer to be merely honest observers and attentive listeners. What exactly are we looking at? What are we seeing? Some at the real event were just there for a spectacle, not unlike a contest among beasts and gladiators in a colosseum. The Romans were good at that. They also employed their political crucifixions to terrify their opponents — this being just one more. Don’t “cross” us or you will end up on one.

Jesus clearly threatens tyrants. Those for whom wealth, power and sensuality are the gods they adore, or who use them to seduce others, to bribe them away from the God who would really loose them from their shackles of addiction, hopelessness and worthlessness. Not all of these afflictions, of course, are self-imposed. The effects of our own sins and those of others are not always easily distinguished. In a way we are all born blind, entering the world as children of Adam and Eve, branded with a kind of near-sightedness by which we miss the forest for the trees. Baptism offers us larger vistas, more to live for and hope for than fleeting creature comforts and material acquisitions that never seem enough.

So we might ask ourselves, what stands in the way of our seeing in this Christo-drama unfolding before us this week that it is designed precisely to disrupt us from our spiritual lethargy and false security in the status quos of our lives which we know neither last nor bring us peace. Yes, it is a tough thing to admit that everything we have can be taken away quite suddenly … health, possessions, jobs, loved ones. Could the one thing that impedes us from accepting the gift of eternal salvation, eternal life, be a confession of the sin, addiction, pattern, lifestyle that we have so identified with, and cannot imagine God has a better idea of who we really are and are called to be?

Disruption! No other word for it. When the Lord knocks at the door of our hearts and we open up for him, he is going to make changes. We may never think we are ready and may put off the day of reckoning until, finally, we meet God — as we all will — at the moment of our death. We can go on, trudging through quicksand of the same-old, same-old, exhausting our spirits as we plod along. Or we can take a page out of the book from the good thief who had no more to hang onto but hope and say, effectively, “Lord Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner!” He would not refuse one so happy to go to him, as he promises him Paradise (cf. Lk 23:43).

Anyone willing to allow their life to be changed has only to ask. It could start with a good sacramental Confession which is not a place in which to be judged but a liberation chamber! Let go and let God. Let God set you free! Isn’t it amazing that what seems to be a disruption is actually an explosion of love. Bishop Sheen once said, whenever I look at that Cross, in all its horror, all I see is love. If our eyes are really open, so may we.