A Mess of Variables

The opening of Holy Week is our absorption of one of the Passion Gospels. This week it was The Passion according to Luke. When we take it in well, what we behold is the unfolding of a singular, sovereign plan of love. Honestly, however, there are many moving parts to the narrative, so we also observe it as a complicated story. What a mess of variables it is! Hearing the experience of Jesus from his arrest to his death, we hear disturbing dialogue among its many players. The story sets side by side saving grace on the one hand and the impossible interplay of human factions on the other. Into this setting of Jerusalem two thousand years ago we enter again the tangled mess of Rome, the Jewish Temple, its pilgrims, and a new sect of the Faith and its rabbi. So we enter this mess, yet in truth, at the same time, we move into the Love of God come down. The true human, Jesus, is the true God. He embraces the full human condition from his human nature. This heals and saves the race, as nothing else could.

 Does your life ever feel topsy turvy and random? Has it ever felt even worse? It feels nearly impossible, in that, to trust and sense that a cohesive sovereign will of God is in play. Whether we’re looking at our personal lives, national life, international life, or the well-being of the planet, we have our questions about where it all is heading. Back to the story of the Passion: how can what looks like a traffic jam of separate drivers really be the open highway on which the Messiah ushers in the reign of God on earth? The story is full of people, all with separate and overlapping agendas: a description that matches our lives as well. These chaotic factors, this mess of variables, notwithstanding, the purpose of God is not divided, but simple, holy, and healing. Hidden by the mess of what we give attention to is the pure, healing action of God.

In the unfolding of these events culminating in the crucifixion of Jesus, God accomplishes in mystery, what we truly need, that which is unified and uniting, simple and effective. This is true, even as human beings in these events fracture things, and make things complex and destructive. This is predictably true of humans. God heals, even as people disrupt and harm. In Jesus, we have the central picture of salvation, his passion. It becomes for us the great invitation for faith. What a mystery! A rabbi from Nazareth finds himself up against clashing powers in Jerusalem. Astoundingly, this seals the deal for you with God, now and forever. At a particular time, in a particular place, a particular person was born, lived, and was killed. That life of Jesus has given life to you.

In Holy Week we give attention to the offering Jesus makes of himself and see contrasting things put alongside each other. For example, we see Jesus in action, and Jesus in submission. Heading into Jerusalem, Jesus calls the shots:

“Go into the city, find the colt, and untie it. Tell them this…bring it here…I tell you, if these cheering ones were silent, the stones themselves would shout out.”

Once arrested, he conforms to something hidden: an ominous saving mystery, in play. He answers Pilate’s question about whether he is a king with only, “You say so.” He answers Herod, not a word. He is silent as the soldiers of Herod mistreat him, and as the Roman soldiers mock and strike him. When he does speak up, it is to address the women who weep and grieve, it is to reassure one of the criminals on the cross.

Another set of contrasting elements juxtaposed in the story is the enemies of the followers of Jesus. The Passion shows Jesus’s many antagonists alongside his supportive followers. The elders, chief priests, scribes, Pilate, Herod, many in the crowd, soldiers, and the deriding criminal. These edge Jesus toward his death.  They become accusers, inquisitors, scoffers, mockers, and haters. In contrast, Luke’s account puts special light on Simon of Cyrene who carried Jesus’s cross, the compassionate women of Jerusalem, the criminal pushing back against the other, some from the crowd, and the centurion who at length praised God saying, "Certainly this man was innocent.”

In the story, we see cruelty from some and kindness from Jesus. We know well the cruel actions in play there. They stand out against the kindness of Jesus, who pauses to speak with the women, pauses to petition his Father to forgive his persecutors, pauses to speak to the thief, and promises paradise.

One way to approach this story is from inside the question that is put to Jesus several times, “Why don’t you apply your power; be done with all this?” The answer that Jesus seems silently to give is, “The power of God is implemented in all of this, and is working its saving effect.” So, we are invited to take up the central, and key juxtaposition in the Passion. These events have the look of a helpless Messiah but are the result of the all-powerful and loving Messiah. In the helplessness, there is paradoxically an indescribable power and love released for the saving of the human family.

Special sections of the Psalms and the prophet Isaiah poetically describe helplessness connected with divine actions of deliverance in the story of Israel. Psalm 31 gives voice to one crying out for help. Isaiah describes a figure that comes to be called the Suffering Servant. Both match the experience of Jesus in the Passion:

Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble; my eye is consumed with sorrow, also my throat and my belly. For my life is wasted with grief, and my years with sighing; my strength fails me because of affliction, and my bones are consumed. (Psalm 31:9-10)

I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting. the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame; he who vindicates me is near. (Isaiah 50:6-7)

The suffering of Jesus connects with the suffering of Israel in exile in the days of Isaiah, and in the days of David their king, contending with his enemies. The suffering of Jesus, just as surely, connects with you—with your own suffering in life. Everything you are and all you experience is taken up into the life of God because God in Christ has assumed the whole human experience and the reality of human nature. Through his arrest, trial, flogging, agony and death on the cross, Jesus did not sidestep any aspect of human vulnerability. That is what makes his suffering and death both a mess of human variables on the one hand and the other, a mysterious, singular, sovereign plan of divine love. He shared in what you are so that you can share in what he is.