Getting to Calvary on a Bad Traffic Day
We started Lent with the words of the Gospel for Quinquagesima (the Sunday before Ash Wednesday) still fresh. It’s been a while, so a reminder is probably helpful. In that Gospel, from Luke 18, Our Lord tells the disciples, “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man shall be accomplished. For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: and they shall scourge him, and put him to death: and the third day he shall rise again.” The disciples were given the whole picture of what it meant to “go up to Jerusalem”, and yet we’re told that “they understood none of these things.”
Later, in Acts chapter 10, we find St. Peter and the apostles clearly setting forth to growing crowds exactly what they had learned since then. Peter says, “And we are witnesses of all things which he did…in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree: him God raised up on the third day, and shewed him openly; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.” Now they understood those things.
The difference was that they had walked with Christ to Jerusalem, and through his Passion, and were witnesses of the Resurrection. They had lived it.
The Church sets forth for us every year the same series of events, not as a sort of monotonous repetition, but as a chance for us to walk with Christ to Jerusalem, and through his Passion, and to be witnesses of the Resurrection. And we have this chance again and again so that we can grow into it, and so that it can impress itself upon us deeply, and so that it can change us.
This change is not something that usually happens all at once, because we are seldom able to give ourselves fully to the drama of Holy Week and Easter. And even if we were able to do that, we’re never living it like the disciples did. We have different kinds of lives.
Put yourself in the place of the disciples in Luke 18. Christ tells us, “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem…” and he describes what will happen there. Our first thoughts are likely to be something like this: “This is a very inconvenient time! I have lots to do. Jerusalem? I spend half my day sitting in traffic. I have kids to pick up, and they have activities. I have a boss waiting for me to get things done. Going up to Jerusalem is not something I can fit into my calendar. Anyway, I just went to church on Sunday. Isn’t that enough for one week?”
Maybe, if we’re the kind of folks who are fairly active in our parish life, we may say, “Look, maybe I can run by Jerusalem once this week. Just for an hour. Google Maps is telling me that it’s going to take a long time to get there. It shows my arrival time in red.” No matter how committed we are, most of us are pretty slammed.
The first thing is to create some context for yourself. Ask yourself if there is anything that would rank high enough in importance for you to take time for over several days. Maybe a vacation? A long-planned family event, like a wedding? The great thing is that we know the date of Easter every year into the future for as long as computer-generated calendars can look. And for as long as there are Easters, there will be Holy Week. It’s already in the schedule, so it shouldn’t take us by surprise. We can plan for it.
Is it important enough to plan for? If you’re a Christian, Holy Week and Easter are the days around which all the other days revolve. I hope you make time to come to Mass on Sundays; Easter is the Sunday of Sundays, and Holy Week is how we prepare. It is the time we take to accompany Our Lord to Jerusalem. We go with him because he asks us to, and through his Church, he makes it possible for us to do even though we are living long after the fact. t’s that important.
But what about the busyness? There is probably very little in our schedules that is absolutely unavoidable, that can’t be rescheduled or otherwise dealt with. But even if there is, we can still make time for as much as we can. There is more for us than the services of Holy Week, great though those are: there is the Office of Morning and Evening Prayer, which takes about 15 minutes to say and which during Holy Week really places before us again and again the incidents of the Passion of the Christ. We can make a little time before everyone else is up or after everyone else has gone to bed. We can read the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel for each day on any 5-minute break during the day (if you don’t have a missal or prayer book, you can find the collects and lessons at http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1928/BCP_1928.htm).
Time, after all, is one of God’s gifts to us, and he gives it to us primarily so that we can use it to get to know him and to grow closer to him. That’s what our lives are for, and that’s what our time is for. Take some time, even if you have to wrestle it into place, to walk with Christ to Jerusalem, to the Upper Room, to Calvary, and on to the empty tomb. The traffic will be bad. Calls will interrupt. It may rain. It will be kind of a pain.
The point is not perfection, but rather to make an effort to be with Our Lord. When we go up with him to Jerusalem, we witness miracles. When we go up with him to Jerusalem, battling traffic and spam calls and an overflowing email in-box and the insistent demands of the world around us, we gain a little leverage over the tyranny of busyness. When we go up with him to Jerusalem, we set aside a few of the things that are incidental to who we are in favor of a few of the things that make us who we are and who God intends us to be.
Let’s try to go up to Jerusalem, as much as we can. It’s worth it.
—JB+
