Somehow yesterday, when I was listening to Jermell Witherspoon wonder aloud if maybe God was going to worship him—what I’m about to say is proof of just how satanic the ‘sermon’ was—this song popped into my head, as well as the He Gets Us Superbowl deep thought, the one about how Jesus doesn’t “teach hate.” Now they are both stuck there. This is not the sort of content I hoped to be meditating on, perched, as I am, on the precipice of Holy Week.
Surely you know that we’re about to enter into that most sacred time, the moment when the church corporately traces the path from the Mount of Olives into the Valley, up to the Temple, through the events of Jesus’ last week, and then his slow, sorrowful march to the cross and to death.
It is my favorite week of the year. For the people making the services go, it is a mad rush, and a jumble. Shrouding the crosses in gauzy black is likely to happen the same day as the frantic search for extra lilies, arranging the cataclysmic noise at the end of Tenebrae at the same time as counting basins for feet washing, shopping for Easter Dinner an hour before the Stations of the Cross. The somber grief of the death of the Lord jostles against exhausted joy. You might want to, but there’s no practical way to walk in the way of the Lord’s death and resurrection in sequential order.
The most basic questions that arise for me every year, are who is Jesus? Why is he dying? Who is he dying for? Why did he do it this way? Why is remembering this great mystery and trying to put your whole mind, body, and strength into its shadow so necessary for the Christian?
Sarah McCammon begins her book, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, with a description of a scary passion play in which she thought, at the tender age of 4, that the man playing Jesus was really dying. In brilliant rhetorical flourish, she relates the crowd on stage reenacting the crucifixion to the mobs riling themselves up in favor of Mr. Trump in 2016.
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