Members of the Theos team offer some reflections on Holy Week and the meaning of Easter. 04/04/2023

Dark and light, and everything in between 

Anna Wheeler 

In the novel Les Misérables, Victor Hugo says of the Head of Police Javert: “His duties were his religion…respect for authority and hatred of revolt against it.”  He says of Valjean, ex–prisoner–turned Mayor: “Hatred was his only weapon, and he resolved to sharpen it in prison and carry it with him when he left”.  

Both men are two sides of the same coin. Javert’s father was on the galleys, his son was born in a prison; Valjean ends up in one. To cut a long story short, Valjean turns out not to be the awful criminal Javert thinks he is, and he instead offers Javert the mercy and forgiveness that was once given him by the Bishop.   

Javert’s version of morality and rightness is then utterly derailed and he cannot cope.   

How can a lawbreaker, Valjean, be someone who imparts goodness and understanding towards someone who has treated him so unfairly?    

I find Javert compelling, as I do Judas – and the way they have been portrayed on various theatrical stages.  Both were outsiders to an extent, though Javert part of a recognised authority, and Judas part of Jesus’ disciple group – one of his closest friends.  Who knew what was really going through Judas’ head when he betrayed him – he was following the authorities’ orders to find a ‘lawbreaker’ and there was money in it for him.   

But in the end, Judas’ shame of himself is too strong to bear, particularly as Jesus offered no resistance and no explicit anger towards him.  

The best portrayals of Javert and Judas are the ones by actors who recognise ambiguity and brokenness.  Terence Mann, who played the role of Javert in 2003 on Broadway, came from America’s southern Bible–belt where, he says, you are either dark, or light – not both: “Valjean’s moment of compassion for [Javert] breaks into the depths of who Javert is.  It breaks him apart…  That’s what happens when Javert jumps.” Similarly, Brandon Victor Dixon’s portrayal of Judas in New York’s 2018 revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, breaks down in agony after betraying Jesus.  

God so loved the world that he gave his only son (John 3:16) who was broken on two pieces of wood.  We could all fall into the dangerous certainty of Javert and the heart–breaking misjudgement by Judas – be broken by both and take others with us.  If there was ever a time when you wondered about the point of a man called Jesus nailed to a cross, it was to be broken on behalf of us, and carry all the beaten–up humans of the world.

Holy Week without hindsight

Andrew Graystone 

We view the events of Holy Week from the secure perspective of nearly 2,000 years. Crucially, we have the benefit of hindsight. The bizarre incidents in the gospels fit into a sort of order, and we know how the story ends.  

The followers of Jesus, women and men, experienced it from within.  

They didn’t know that this would be the climactic week of three tumultuous years. Events that are literally iconic for us looking back, were breaking around them. How were they to make sense of the madness; Jesus’ spontaneous act of vandalism in the temple; frenzied crowds; a secretive supper–party riddled with opaque symbolism; violent abduction by an armed mob? Terrifying stuff was happening hour by hour. They must have worried for their safety and their sanity. They may have been pining for the peaceful families they had left behind, and wondering whether the whole Jesus thing was turning out to be a chaotic and humiliating mess.  

How’s your week going? A bit of a scramble? Me too. I mean, no threats of arrest yet; no weird stuff with fig trees, or Roman soldiers at the door. I’m not living in a basement in Ukraine, or a refugee camp in Sudan. But even in my sheltered life there are too many loose ends for my liking. There are relationships needing attention and commitments that I should probably not have taken on. I have friends who are sick, and others who have died far too soon. The planet is groaning and world events seem out of control. Some nights I go to bed feeling buffeted, and wondering whether it all makes sense. 

For many of us, our culture is less physically threatening but no less bewildering than it was for the first followers of Jesus. In the melee of Holy Week, we have no option but to live life forwards. We may not understand what is happening to us and around us from day to day. But we are called to follow faithfully through the mess and the muddle, in the hope that the story Jesus tells turns out to be true. 

A nice kind of pain

Hannah Rich 

Throughout my adult life, the notion of going home for Easter has come as naturally and regularly as the trip back for Christmas. Wherever life has taken me, I have almost without exception found myself in my parents’ house during Holy Week.  

The other constant, for many years, was that we would all go to Maundy Thursday mass at a nearby convent. After mass had ended, the mother superior would gently strum a not–quite–in–tune guitar and sing ‘My Soul is Sad‘. Despite the minor key, it has a jarringly folksy tune. It was also the only time in the year that the guitar ever made an appearance. Not even at Christmas – especially not at Christmas – did we get to experience the incongruously joyful strumming.  

It was beautiful. The mix of joy and sorrow, major and minor, seemed to me to sum up exactly why Good Friday, for all its death and darkness, can still be called good.  

I recently read Imogen West–Knights’s Deep Down, which is funnier and more affectionate than a novel about bereavement and messed–up families has any right to be. There is a scene in it where one of the characters, as a child, sits in church reflecting on the music, including “the unanswered question ‘O who am I’ in My Song is Love Unknown, that turns [his] heart over and makes him feel a nice kind of pain he doesn’t really understand.”  

The abbey closed a couple of years ago, but that line took me right back home to the mother superior’s guitar playing, and the similarly plaintive question ‘could you not watch one hour with me?’ in her annual song. It too turns my heart over and leaves me wondering if the whole point of Holy Week is to wait a while in the experience that nice kind of pain, of a badly–tuned guitar or an unanswered question, that even as adults we don’t really understand. 

Would I crucify Christ?

George Lapshynov 

The crucifixion of Christ for the sins of mankind is the most extraordinary sign of God’s Love for His creation. It is the most awesome of sacrifices made by Him to restore humanity to Himself. 

Yet, who were those participants in the events of Holy Week, two millennia ago? 

Pilate, an ordinary hard–working Roman official who struggled his way to the top, who tried his very best to keep things running smoothly in difficult circumstances. 

The soldiers, just doing their job, following orders as all good soldiers do. Sure, they mocked and struck the Christ, God the Son incarnate, but to them he was a common criminal. 

The Jewish elders and chief priests, were they especially villainous? They only sought to safeguard at all cost the established order, and protect their many long–established privileges which Christ threatened with his Teachings. 

Even Judas Iscariot betrayed his Master, not in exchange for riches or titles, but for a mere unexceptional few silver coins. 

Those people that crucified Christ, that mocked Him and nailed Him, the most extraordinary Being, to the cross, did so in the most ordinary way. 

So ordinary in fact, that they might as well be us. How many times in the course of our lives have we acted like one of the high priests? Soldiers? Like Pilate himself? Though it gives me no pleasure to admit it, I certainly have, and many more times than I could count. 

If we think we would not humiliate, bear false witness, misjudge, and execute Christ all over again today, we are, I believe, quite mistaken. 

But let us not despair. It is after all within our power to take responsibility for what we do and believe, put aside our petty self–interest and fight, with God’s grace, against our own banality. 

Like Peter was able to recant his denial of Christ and reaffirm his faith in Him thanks to the miracle of the Resurrection, so may we also recant our own denials, misjudgements, and self–interestedness, if only we have a genuine desire to do so. 

The path of taking responsibility for our actions can be costly – as Peter and many others who paid the price for theirs with their life can attest – but it is surely the only worth walking. 

The physicality of Easter

Chine McDonald 

Last Easter, I was very aware of my body. We spent the weekend with friends and family, gathered at my parents’ home to mark the festivities. Amid the excellent food and chocolate and reflections on the momentous spiritual significance of this time of year, I felt the frequent pangs and twinges, aches and pains and groans of a body that was eight months pregnant. Our second child wasn’t due to be born for at least two more weeks, but as I got into the car and waved my family goodbye on Easter Monday, I had a sneaking suspicion that this baby would be born early.  

On Wednesday, I knew something was up and drove to the birth centre where I was somewhat surprised to hear that my waters had broken and that the baby would have to be out within 24 hours. So I spent that night preparing for the intensely physical labour that was to come. My positive birthing meditations centred around the idea of preparing for a marathon. And then for 24 hours, I laboured; experiencing the agony and the intensity and the beauty of the physicality of bringing a child into the world.  

I’ve been struck this year by the juxtaposition of birth and death in the account of Jesus’s life. By Christ on the cross telling Mary to look at John: “Woman, behold your son” (John 19:26). I’m struck when I replay the scene over in my mind of the birth of my son and the overwhelming sense of love as he was brought to me, and I looked into his eyes for the very first time. I put myself in Mary’s shoes and wonder if she too thought about the first time she looked into Jesus’s eyes and how over 30 years later here she was stood at the foot of the cross at his crucifixion.  

The Easter story is a story about bodies: it is intensely physical: brutal, messy, bloody; so too the human journey from birth to death. This is the reality of the incarnation – that God steps into our physical reality – very much within it, not set apart, or observing from some other place. I’m reminded of St Augustine’s words that:  

“Man’s maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother’s breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that Truth might be accused of false witnesses, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die.” 

Sinners and Saints

Paul Bickley  

In the Upper Room discourse, as John 13–17 is called, Jesus prepares his disciples for the coming trial (although only two chapters take place in the eponymous room). It contains some of Jesus’ most encouraging words. 

And well it might, because story is about to take a drastic downward turn into the events around Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion. At one point, Jesus draws an analogy with childbirth. What is going to happen will involve pain, shock, and suffering. There will be grief, but grief will be replaced by joy. Jesus says, “In that day you will no longer ask me anything”. In that day, there will be clarity. 

The disciples confidently declare that that time has come (“Now you are speaking clearly and without figures of speech”). We’re already clear! Jesus fires back a sarcastic question: “Do you now believe?” As if to say, ‘No, you really don’t understand’. “A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will all leave me alone.” There is a warning for anyone who is utterly certain that they have a handle on what’s going on, and encouragement – a blessing? – for anyone who is prepared to admit that they are utterly confused. 

I take a peculiar hope from the fact that the stories that circulated in the early Christian communities, captured in the documents we call the Gospels, make no bones (ha!) about the fact that their first leaders, when it came to it, were largely cowards – or at the very best, not at all impressive or heroic. Peter, John, Phillip and the rest, only better than Judas by the slimmest of margins. During Holy Week, we must look unflinchingly at human weaknesses: sinners and saints, barely distinguishable. 

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