Today we begin the most important, the most 'dramatic' week in the Church's calendar. Holy Week. And we begin the week by celebrating the Lord's triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
What is asked of us this week?
We are asked to: '....go with Jesus, in faith and love, so that, united with him in his sufferings, we may share his risen life'. So say the words of the introduction to the service today.
But what does that mean?
I have the notion that many think this week is about trying to imagine what it was like to be there, in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago in the last days and hours of Jesus's life; and to imagine the experience, to take on to some degree the anxiety and sorrow of those days; and then on Easter Sunday to try and experience some of the emotion, the joy and wonder and, indeed, fear that the disciples experienced at Jesus's resurrection.
And that's no bad thing, but it can never be for us what it was for them, no matter how vivid or even fevered our imagination. And although, sometimes, the wording of our worship asks us to 'walk the way of the cross', I believe that Jesus walked the way of the cross so that we wouldn't have to. He died that we might live - however you interpret that, and it's here at the start of Holy Week that we can begin to think about what that might mean for us.
I said that Jesus walked the way of the cross so that we wouldn't have to, yet we recall the words of Jesus in our gospel reading from last week (John 12.20-33) about the grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying so that it bears much fruit. And Jesus says we have to be like that seed; and that we have to lose our life to gain it. These are difficult words. In another place Jesus says we have to take up our cross and follow him if we are to be his disciples. And we hear Jesus also say in yet another place, 'I have come that you might have life, life in all its fullness'.
All these references to death and life and resurrection. So if Jesus died, that we can have life, what is it that we should be thinking about this week? What are all these references, these allusions to death and life about?
To see it properly, we have to think about all that Jesus did and said, the whole package, the whole man. We can't just take isolated statements out of the context of his whole life and expect them to reveal something profound to us. We have to look at the whole man because Jesus preached what he lived. His life was the message.
In his life and death Jesus is showing us what it means to be truly human, what it means for us to be made 'in the image of God', what it means to become what God intends for each and every one of us. And as we read this week about Jesus dying, we are meant to ask ourselves what it is about us that has to die to become what God intends, to experience a resurrection in this life, to have that fullness of life now that Jesus came to give us.
And notice that in that parable about the grain of wheat, the seed isn't put to death, it isn't killed, as Jesus was put to death, it simply has, in some way, to die to become fully what it's meant to be. There is a difference between 'being killed' and 'dying'. And we too don't have to be put to death, there is nothing in us that has to be killed so that we can become what we are meant to be. So often we look at ourselves and others and knowing our and one anothers weaknesses and failings try to put something to death in ourselves because of it, to put part of us to death to become more virtuous. We feel we have to make ourselves better. But that's not how it works. Yet something has to die that we can become more like Christ, see more of the image of God in us, to bear more fruit.
And maybe this is the cross that Jesus is meaning when he says that all of us has to carry our own cross if we are to become disciples of his. What that something is in me that has to die only I and God know. And the same applies to everyone. If we know what that something is we are fortunate indeed. Maybe each of us this week, as we travel through it with Jesus might ask God to reveal it to us and show us how it might die so that we might live and on Easter Sunday experience in our own life now, a resurrection of some sort.
A saint once said that the Christian life is one long dying. What has to die in you that you might have the life of Christ and become all that God intends for you, with life in all its fullness?
