Brightness Hidden

I know you have been through many things in your life. I know there have been exceedingly difficult experiences. We are human, we are vulnerable. Just as hard as it is going through something very tough, it is excruciating to witness a loved one going through immense difficulty. When a person says, “My heart goes out to them” it sometimes represents seriously deep compassion.

Part of what makes Holy Week so deeply moving is the way the Passion of our Lord profoundly moves us to personal compassion. Jesus feels it all; we feel-along-with Jesus. Oh how things in life can fall apart! Consider the movement of the disciples’ experience of Jesus and their inner experience from the peak of the upper-room Last Supper to the moment of his last breath. That period marks an unraveling that is truly heart-breaking.

At supper with Jesus, his friends share in a high point. The disciples look upon him and see Jesus in his strength, and his element. He has triumphantly come into the city of Jerusalem. They are all gathered for this meal of great significance. Jesus uses the time to teach them something surprising about humility and the strength of service as he washes his friends’ feet. He tells them they ought also to wash one another’s feet. Jesus the presider, Jesus the teacher: the disciples are beholding the beauty of their master and are perhaps so filled with love it nearly makes them glow.

The shift comes when he tells them there is one among them who will betray him. Anxiety drastically changes the sense of the experience. Judas exits. From there the disciples tumble into a terrible sequence. They go for prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. They are so fatigued; they fail in their teacher’s request to keep watch with him. They see: his own soul seems wrung with grief as he asks them twice to follow through and pray with him. The soldiers come. Jesus is firm in his questions to the detachment, the police, and the high priest. He is resolute in his pronouncements to them. The disciples take heart for a moment but then see one, who was their strong, commanding host at supper, but now is bound and lead off to the temple officials.

He is questioned by the high priest. He is questioned by the Roman prefect. He is presented to the crowd, but they show him no favor, and the prisoner Barabbas is released instead. Then Jesus is flogged, crowned with thorns, mocked and struck. He is presented again to the crowd. As Pilate displays him, bloody, bruised, and swollen with welts, he declares he finds no crime against him. The crowd wants nothing of this acquittal: they cry aloud for him to be crucified.

He was a figure of beauty as the disciples began their final meal with him, but where was his beauty now? They had come to recognize him as the long-awaited strong Messiah, but what must they now think? If they caught his eye as he blessed the bread and cup, or as he washed their feet, they might have seen God’s light in those eyes? What shows from his eyes now? He conveyed such strength when he commanded them, “Love one another;” when he insisted that they “Take this bread and this wine, my body and blood: do so in remembrance of me.” He told them, “Follow my example: wash one another’s feet.” What rich, commanding presence he had! But now, standing with Pilate before the mob, where now is his strength?

It is with this stark comparison the second verse of the hymn “O Sacred Head Sore Wounded” (Hymn 168) has always struck me. Our souls are consonant with the voice of the hymn-writer as we beg to be shown the hidden brightness that now seems completely missing:

Thy beauty long desired, hath vanished from our sight;
thy power is all expired, and quenched the light of light.
Ah me! for whom thou diest, hide not so far thy grace:
show me, O Love most highest, the brightness of thy face.

Tonight, as the altar is stripped at the close of the Maundy Thursday Eucharist, pray that God helps you see the powerful, mysterious generosity of God even as beauty vanishes, power expires, and light is quenched. May God, the Holy Spirit reveal to you in the disappearance of all we had desired, that you are thus afforded a deep revealing of the highest Love, of grace otherwise hidden; indeed, you are directed to the brightness of his face.