Wednesday in Holy Week 31 March 2021
Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 69.7-15, 22-23; Hebrews 9.11-15, 24-28; Matthew 26.1-5, 14-25
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Wednesday in Holy Week always marks the point of no return in the narrative for me. The gospel reading on this night, whether from Matthew or John (as appointed), focuses on the betrayal of Jesus by Judas.
Judas’s betrayal and the chain of events it will unleash reminds me of sitting at the bedside of someone who is dying. The person can linger sometimes for quite a while and then, suddenly or gradually, it becomes clear that the person has passed a point from which it is impossible to return to the land of the living, they can only move forward into eternity. I often think of this gospel reading in the same terms: Jesus can no longer look back; he can only look forward to what awaits him, his certain death. This knowledge, despite hearing it year-in and year-out, still kicks me in the stomach and heart.
This year, the words of the chief priests and elders of the people, who have conspired to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him, and their deciding not to do so during the festival, lest there be a riot among the people, take me back to the incomprehensible hours of 6 January, with the attack on the US Capitol, when my mind just could not understand what my eyes and ears were witnessing. There, too, there were people who wanted to take someone, the vice president, and kill him.
And doesn’t it seem tragic that even back then, money would lie at the centre of this story? For thirty pieces of silver, Judas is bought to betray his teacher.
Again, my mind does not grasp what it hears: Judas will betray his teacher during the Passover meal, an intimate gathering of Jesus and his disciples and his teacher already knows who will do so and what will happen:
The Jesus in the gospel of Matthew may not have the piercing clarity that Jesus in John’s gospel possesses, but he still knows ahead of time what is to happen to him. That he directs the disciples to find a certain man in the city of Jerusalem, to tell him that Jesus’ time is near, is stunning. That Jesus then knows who will betray him, though he does not identify Judas; rather, his conversation with Judas allows for Judas to fall into a verbal trap and identify himself, makes the heart ache. Jesus’s fate is a death foretold and makes one think of words that presage his death from other gospels—e.g., the gospel of Luke recounts how Simeon tells Mary at the time of the presentation of Jesus that he is ‘destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.’
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What to do with the disparate emotions of grief, disbelief, horror, fear and despair that this reading evokes? At the most simple level, one cannot avoid them. It does little good to walk around them and pretend they are not there. One has to walk through them, through the valley of the shadow of death to come out the other side. This journey is precisely what Holy Week invites us to do, to go to the depths in order to arrive at the Easter promise of resurrection.
Perhaps grief is the strongest of the above emotions that people feel these days. We have spent a year out of time, in pandemic time, where the world as we knew it, has been turned upside-down. Last year, in my thinking, the country’s leadership betrayed our trust by not taking the pandemic seriously and by sending out a message that it would ‘miraculously go away.’ Instead, the death toll kept mounting and mounting. Even as we seem to be getting a handle on the pandemic with 1/3 of the country now vaccinated at least once, the pandemic still has the upper hand as it continues to mutate into more infectious strains. We are so close to the finish line and we seem on the verge of blowing it. We have some much to grieve.
In a strange way, we are the disciples huddled in that room at a Passover supper, not certain of what will happen next, or who will turn our lives further upside-down. We do not know in a crowd who has been vaccinated and who has not; who will spread the virus that will perhaps land one of us in hospital. We don’t know what systemic betrayals might still be out there. Like the confused disciples at that last supper, asking, ‘Surely not I, Lord?,’ we struggle to understand with what we know.
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Perhaps this year is not the year to delve deeply into our participation in betrayal and systemic evil. The pandemic is too present and sapping our energy.
Instead, on this Holy Wednesday, may the gospel text lead you to contemplate where your deep griefs lie, and how you can embrace them, rather than avoid them. If there is a loss close to your heart, acknowledge it and then give yourself permission to say: ‘It’s OK that you’re not OK’ (also the title of a very helpful book by Megan Devine). Perhaps you need to step back from the daily news and the pandemic (though get a vaccination because that is like resurrection emotionally). If making a confession prior to Easter will help clear up the soul, find a person who can hear it with compassion.
It may have been night when Judas left the upper room but, as we know well, the depths of the night, while awesome, can also be the hardest, yet the sun will always rise. So wait for the sun to rise because there, too, the Son will rise.
