Holy Week has always been a mystery to me. In my faith tradition, celebrating Lent and the events leading up to Easter was best left to the Liturgists. While Easter is equally important to Christmas, it lacked the anticipation and starry-eyed magic of the Christmas season. Instead, Holy Week was a long, slow march towards death. Death to self and sin and our Savior. It was more palatable to celebrate an empty grave rather than stand witness on the hill of Golgotha.
With a scripture reading on Good Friday and a church service on Resurrection Sunday, we moved on before the long weeks of Lent had excavated our souls. Over the years, I’ve begun to observe Easter a little differently. Whatever your faith tradition, I’m inviting you to join me for daily posts here during Holy Week as we journey to resurrection.
John the Beloved
Love
Shortly before the late-night prayers, the sweating of blood, the arrest, and the stumbling walk towards death, Jesus sat with John and the disciples over a final meal. Plates filled with scraps and crumbs littered the table along with cups in various stages of full and empty. Bread and wine made their way to the lips of one man and then another. Clean feet scuffed against the floors. Shoved into a dim corner, a bowl of brown water and smudged towels carried away the dirt of the day. John, satisfied but perhaps aware of an underlying tension, reclined against Jesus’ chest. He heard the rise and fall of Jesus’ breath, the low rumble of his voice–a hint of thunder in his chest. His head rested near the heartbeat of Christ. Whatever would come in the hours and days ahead—betrayal, shock, and sorrow—John needed this moment to sustain him. He paused to rest in his belovedness.
GRief
Later, after a turn of events Jesus predicted, but no one else could logically fathom, we see the disciple whom Jesus loved standing guard at the foot of the cross. The chest, the voice, the breath that had grown as familiar to him as his own, nailed to a wooden post above him. Jesus spoke to John, releasing Mary, his mother, into the care of his most loved friend. John never wavered. From that moment on he was more than a friend, he was a brother. Jesus and John now shared the same mother.
The chest on which John had laid his head hours before grew still, as Jesus took his last breath. Logic told John this was the end of everything. The death of Jesus’ body was a mystery he could not unsee, could not unravel. Memories rose like fire and smoke. His intellect told him Jesus was dead, but perhaps his heart held out for hope of another miracle as he held a sobbing Mary.
Redemption
Two thousand years later, we know the triumph of Jesus’ and John’s story, a beginning disguised as an ending. We know the mystery of Christ’s body once dead, now resurrected, and yet we struggle to comprehend it. Perhaps if we follow John’s lead and lay our heads upon the chest of Christ, listen to his voice, feel the rhythmic thump of his chest. Perhaps if we learn stillness we may learn how to love Jesus, so we may rest in our own belovedness.
John stood at the foot of the cross shocked and grieving, but also welcomed as a beloved brother. He continued to refer to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved long after the crucifixion. John’s sin lifted the rough-cut beam of the cross alongside the rest of us. Yet, he was grafted into the family of God on the very same day—sinner, disciple, beloved brother. Could we begin to see ourselves in the same way?
[…] *Click here to read Day One: John the Beloved. […]