I hate pain.
We all do.
Much of life is spent in a passionate journey to avoid pain.
Indeed, humans spend immense amounts of time and energy each year—indeed
each day—to avoid pain and suffering, both theirs and that of those they care
about. Our lives are filled with stories of the wonderfully successful ways we
and others have avoided pain and discomfort—as well as the tragically destructive
attempts made.
One of the simplest ways we often seek to avoid or minimize pain is to
look away.
You know the drill—the nurse comes to draw blood or give a shot. She
gets your arm all prepped and then you close your eyes or turn your head. Those
who are able to just look straight at the spot where the pain (albeit brief and
generally for a good cause) is often seem to have trained their bodies and mind
to overcome what seems like a basic human reaction to pain—avoid and flee.
We are fast approaching one of the most difficult times—if we dare look—in
the Christian calendar.
Holy Week.
Those days which mark the final days of the earthly life of Jesus
Christ, the hours which mark his trials and crucifixion, and the dark, slow
hours that fell over his followers and the world in that painful interlude
between death and new life.
It has become so cliché for clergy to note all the people who rush from
the “Hosannas” of Palm Sunday to the “Alleluias” of Easter that we’ve begun
fighting a guerilla war of sorts in which we have quietly co-opted part of Palm
Sunday worship for “Passion” Sunday focus—because you can’t really see Easter if you don’t look through the pain.
But we don’t like looking.
Looking means not only looking at Jesus’ suffering. It means also
looking at our own sins and participation in those final days and hours.
We have a hard time being willing to be observers let alone acknowledge
our complicity in that pain. Over the years Christians have at times preferred
to scape goat those present—in space and time—in those final hours.
We sing songs about how Jesus died for our sins, but we point fingers
at the bad guys with whom we
foreswear any similarities.
But we can’t claim Jesus’ love for us through suffering if we look away
at the suffering our own sin and brokenness created.
Throughout Lent, my congregation and I have been walking a journey through
the final hours of Jesus’ life using the props, the symbols, of those
experiences. We’ve reflected on those hours, that pain, through items such as
the rooster which crowed to book end Peter’s denial, the coins Judas received
as payment for his betrayal, and the dice with which the soldiers callously used
to make sport of Jesus’ pain and suffering as he died.
The soldiers, we readily say, didn’t even bother to look away. They
looked at the pain and suffering and it didn’t affect them at all. How
horrible.
Indeed, perhaps our own sins involve not only
looking away, but also looking and not
seeing.
When the soldiers nailed Jesus to the cross, we
forget that it was for our sins that
he died.
Theologians through the years have explored exactly
how and why that grim exchange of pain and sin and forgiveness works. They have
posited theories to explain it. This work is important, but for us, it ought
not distract us away.
From looking.
And seeing.
Seeing the very real pain which our sins—even those
which seem so small, and even which go unseen by others—cause.
The pain our willful pride and casual self-interest
breeds in our own lives, the lives of those around us, and indeed, the heart of
God.
This past Sunday, we passed out nails to each
person in worship and I invited them to consider what the last nail was—the most
recent sin, opposition to God’s will, act of self-justification and division
from others—they committed. And then to not
look away.
To look and see and feel the pain.
Recognize the pain that each of us have gotten far
too good at avoiding.
Because Easter is a fairy tale, a lark, when not
grounded in the pain. The pain which must be seen.
This Holy Week, I invite all of us to recognize
that we stand at the foot of the cross not as observers, but as participants.
As those who walk around, hammer and nails in hand, ready to participate in the
pain and suffering of Jesus—God’s very self—and indeed the pain of ourselves
and others. But doing so by looking away just enough that it almost seems ok.
Soon enough it does feel ok. A small thing.
May you be convicted this Holy Week, by the callousness
and avoidance which has been infecting your life. May you pour yourself humbly
before God, be willing to see yourself truly and clearly in all your pain and
capacity to inflict pain, and in your openness, may God renew your very life,
give you eyes to see the path to healing and wholeness. And may you glimpse and
be drawn into the redemptive power of God’s love and forgiveness.
Don’t look away.
The best is yet to come.
