The entrance into Jerusalem inevitably leads into the events of Holy Week — the Passion, the Cross. We move too quickly on from triumph and exultation into trial, loss, and pain. There is always so much pain.
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With updates on the sale of St. Mark’s this week, I have found myself thinking of the window that hangs above the altar, which I know many of you have very long known and loved, and which I have known and loved, too. It is a remarkable icon of Jesus calming the storm, a glimpse into a holy and eternal moment, a moment of the terror before the calm, a moment of Christ’s presence at the height of a very real and human fear. While it is a common scene in Christian art, it is the only stained glass depiction which shows the other occupants in the boat not as calm, nor as pleading with Jesus to intervene, but simply as being afraid.
That window was given in memory of two young men who drowned in Ganges Harbour, Harold Scott and George Smedley. Those who knew and loved them must have thought a lot about what it is like to die in the sea, and the horror of finding their bodies washed up on the rocks just a few short steps from where we are today. They knew what it was to be confronted with those bodies where dear young men should have been, and to have to find some way to live with their death.
To face death, whether our own or that of a loved one, is to live suspended in the moment which is remembered in that window: the moment before the calm, where there is nothing but the storm that can only rage and rage and rage. Something is forever about to happen, and it is only by faith that we can imagine that what will follow might just be calm and peace.
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We enter into Holy Week to dwell in those moments where there is pain and not yet something else. Between the storm and the peace that follows, between the Cross and the Resurrection, we make our lives, not only this week, in confrontation with the empty tomb. We live with the reality that there are things which hurt, wounds which may heal, but, as yet, have not.
We will celebrate Easter with such unbridled delight, and proclaim an eternal victory that we can only really glimpse for a fleeting moment. We are not people of triumph and conquest, but of hope. We do not even know what we really hope for. We know only that life follows life, and that something follows the storm. We hope for a peace unseen and unknown, but we know that peace might well be possible, and that it may somehow follow even this.
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So we come to this week in confrontation with suffering and death, in a world ever filled with suffering and death. It’s impossible to ignore and all-too-easy to ignore.
Mostly we get on with the business of living, in a pro forma way that looks less like peace or eternal life, and more like just going on for the sake of going on. We know well how to keep things moving, but somewhere just outside of our awareness is a nagging sense of all the unpaid debts, all the mounting pain, all the fear and suffering that is suppressed, denied, displaced.
Holy Week is a faltering of our step, a disruption to our confidence, a reminder that our sure and certain plans will not succeed forever. Where we foretell our own power, it is probably pain that will follow. Here, though, is the good news that something else will follow that, and something else, and something else.
If we let ourselves be startled, awoken, and disturbed, to see the real tumult that now surrounds us, then we might also be able to appreciate the peace that follows, and the hope that lives in the empty tomb. Holy Week offers us the practice of a hope which does not bypass suffering, and that does not find some way to skip to the end, but which is grounded in the loss and waiting, and knows what it is like to find terror in turbulent water or strewn upon the rocks of a sad, sad shore.
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God will always find us in times of trial, and Christ will always be our salvation in the moments of fear. Hope is present in the moment where we cannot imagine what is coming. Hope is our companion in the presence of absence. Even the unthinkable abyss of the empty tomb is a space in which our hope is becoming.
May we find hope and peace that pass all understanding as we journey in the way of the Cross. May we know that God is present in every kind of moment in our life. May we turn to Christ and to one another in our moments of despair, and known that we are never alone in the most empty and overwhelming moments of our lives. May we walk in the way of the empty tomb, and find even in uncertainty, sadness, and fear, that this is the way of eternal life, and a hope now waiting to be born.