As a Christian Church around the globe, we have just entered what in many of our traditions is the most visibly sacred time of the year --- Lent. Sure, we make a big deal out of Advent and Christmas, and it is a beautiful time indeed. But Lent is the time that brings us the difficult and complicated remembrance that the Good News was met by a stubborn, violent and unbelieving world.
We must admit, however, that it is really difficult for us to truly enter the painful uncertainty of Lent, because, as one of my friends who teaches theater expressed it, "We know the story, and it has a happy ending." It is this, my friend reminded me, that makes it so difficult to write plays and good films about the life of Jesus Christ. If good drama thrives on surprise, and good tragedy depends on an undeserved and terrible end (think of all the dead people on stage at the end of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet) the Christian story, seen from 2007, has lost both of these intrinsic and powerful qualities for us. We know the story much too well to ever be surprised.
Even more (and especially in North America), we tend to look back at the Passion from the vantage point of the Resurrection, thus removing the tragic quality of the events and of all those who lived through them.
What this awareness of the "happy ending" takes away from us is what Aristotle understood as the most important quality of the tragic: the arousal of pity and fear. As the philosopher explained, "Pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves." This experience of pity and fear is important; it is what opens us up, breaks through our walls, allows us to weep, to be cleansed, to have compassion, and most importantly to know ourselves as vulnerable.
This awareness of our vulnerability, which Aristotle saw as intrinsic to good theater, is what we religious persons can understand as also making us good Christians.
We know that the "job description" of an unbeliever inevitably includes the idea that such a person is somehow invulnerable, since there is no power greater than him/her. Our affluent and technological world spends 99 percent of its time trying to create this illusion of invulnerability for us. The Christian, on the other hand, must cultivate an ability to truly feel pity and fear, so we may become small, vulnerable and in our helplessness turn and cling only to God.
Now, I do not think for one moment that any of us is able to even remotely imagine Jesus' pain while praying at Gethsemane, nor can we fathom the horror of his walk to Calvary or his tortured hours on the Cross. What we can do is to look for those surrounding him who are indeed "like ourselves," and try to see what they saw. In other words, this Lent, we can try to truly be his "disciples."
Can we for one moment imagine the level of sheer terror Peter must have felt after Jesus' arrest, a fear so overwhelming that it would have caused him to deny knowing Jesus? Scripture tells us Peter, "the rock," wept bitterly when he realized what he had done (Matthew 26: 69-75).
Can we try to put ourselves in the place of the two disciples walking back to their village of Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35)? Luke tells us they were sad, we can gather from what they say that not only were they brokenhearted thinking of Jesus' death, but they were utterly confused, afraid, not knowing what or who to believe anymore. Some in their group said Jesus' body was missing from the tomb, but they knew he was dead; it was like everyone had gone crazy!
In all four Gospels, although the descriptions are different, what we can feel during the days following Jesus' death is this sense of utter confusion, terrible fear and pity --- pity for themselves, for ourselves, for our plight. As the disciples walking to Emmaus explain in their grief, "We had hoped that he was the one…."
This Lent, perhaps we can let go of knowing the end of the story. Maybe we can try to meditate on Scripture, or kneel before the representations of the Way of the Cross, and make a real effort to enter that terrible pity and fear that our forebears in faith felt as Jesus was mercilessly struck down by the force of our rejection of him.
Catholic Christianity has always been very clear about the need for us to spend time in this utter vulnerability, in this desolate smallness --- that is why our crosses are crucifixes. Christ is dying right in front of us, always, the "corpus" in Corpus Christi. It is only in feeling the desolation of his death that we can begin to understand how bereft we are without the comfort that comes from clinging to Him. It is on that Cross that he tells us most eloquently of his always enduring love.
This Lent, let the events that are to come break your heart. Cecilia González-Andrieu writes from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She joins the Theology faculty at Loyola Marymount University this fall.
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