I am haunted, as I imagine everyone in our community must be, by the mug shot that has appeared on the front page of the local paper in recent weeks. True, it bears all the marks of dark sorrow one might expect from a photo taken under the circumstances: a young teenager has just shot his father multiple times, and he is pressed against a wall to have his tragic face recorded. But if you look past that tainted light, you see the large eyes and a heart-shaped face of a boy. He’s 14, and he has been charged as an adult for the murder of his father. And that’s where I can write no more about the story, because there are few details available and because it’s not my story to tell. It is simply and yet not simply, an incomprehensible horror, one that has left his fellow youth group members staggering at a new level to understand violence, suffering, and God.
And it is in such a place that God meets us with the events of Holy Week. Two days ago, some waved palms in a re-enactment of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. But even as he entered, Jewish leaders were moved to disgust, fear, and plots of murder. Jesus knew what he was doing, and when some Greek believers came to him, he spoke the words of John 12:24. It is in these words and in this story that God meets the suffering and confusion of the broken world.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,’ said Jesus, ‘it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’ (John 12:24).
Again, we listen to words from Wright’s book, Christians at the Cross:
In Holy Week of all times, what we can also do is to bring our sorrows, large and small, corporate and personal (because of course there are all kinds of personal sorrows woven into the larger texture of the community sorrow at this point, sorrow about loss of jobs and prosperity, sorrow about loss of loved ones who died younger than they might have through illnesses contracted down the pit, and so on) – what we can do is to bring all these sorrows on the journey with Jesus, the journey that takes him to Jerusalem and ultimately to Calvary outside the city wall. We can bring them here and leave them at the foot of the cross.
And part of our vocation this Holy Week is to get our grief out in the open: to say to our God, as you do with any bereavement, ‘Why did it have to happen like this? Why him, why now, why didn’t you do something?’ Those are the right questions, the natural questions, the questions we always ask when we face the sudden shock of bereavement.”
“The reading from John offers a standing invitation to bring our stories and sorrows and see them folded into the story and sorrow of Jesus. ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’ Now that’s all very well when you’re planting a seed and you know what sort of a plant it’s going to grow into. But Jesus was talking about something much more scary. He was talking about going to his own death.”
“What are we to do? We are called, in Holy Week, to claim in prayer that victory over the powers which Jesus won on the cross: to hold the grief and pain of the community, and of our own hearts, within the love which went to Calvary for us; to pray that as the grain of wheat fall into the earth and die they bear much fruit; and to work for that fruit, that new hope, that regeneration at every level, which God will give in his own time and his own way.”
[Please pick up this precious little book – these quotes are wonderful but they do NOT tell the whole story!]
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