Spirituality of the Readings
Empty, Full
The power of story.
My dad used to tell special stories to us kids about Bruno the Bear. Bruno was just a cub, like us. We gloried in his secret stashes of honey, in angry bees swimming in the dirty river, the little bear cleaning behind its ears at Momma’s command, and so on.
With Bruno we burrowed safely into the comfy cave, his bear dad always just a few lumbering steps away. And of course our own dad’s strong voice retailing all of this from the center of his dadly person. We metamorphosized into stillness and wonder.
That was a long time ago, I know, but isn’t it amazing that people’s ears perk up immediately when a story begins, whether they are children or not.
I wonder if you and I might feel that way Thursday afternoon and Friday evening and Saturday night at Holy Week Triduum. Will we come to attention when the story of the last supper is read? What about the Passion reading of Good Friday? Or are they just a test of our endurance?
There will be no problem as long as we get caught up in God’s great story.
Like this. It was the night Jesus died. He took some normal, coarse bread. He blessed it, broke off pieces and gave them to his disciples. The words he said have been remembered and retold throughout history. Eat of this, he said, it is my flesh. I am going to give up everything I have and am so that you can live. And this wine, it is my blood. I will shed it because I love you. Drink deep.
He picked up a pail of water—smelly because it came up from a well. He took a rough cleaning cloth and did what nobody would have ever foreseen or even wanted in a million years. He washed their feet.
Peter takes our part: “Lord you will never wash my feet! Stop it!” Peter does understand that Jesus is the Christ of God (Messiah), but this does not help to explain the menial foot-washing that only a servant would do.
In the desert the devil had tempted Jesus in a fashion not too far removed from this one. Those temptations said, in effect, "You are equal to God, act like it!” And, remember, Peter had tried previously to stop Jesus' humility, remember, and Jesus answered with, “Get behind me, you Satan!”
Now Jesus warns Peter again, this time at the supper, “If I do not wash you, you will have no part in me,” and then goes ahead and washes Peter’s feet.
Why? And why do we memorialize it on Holy Thursday? Because the entire relation of human beings to God is one of receiving love and giving back love, no matter what the cost. If Peter will not allow Jesus to care for him in this very earthy way, he will be refusing the gift of God’s labor on his behalf. “You can’t love us in that way,” he would be saying.
Jesus’ action is a reply. “I do not want to be Godly in the way you imagine. I want to show you that only humility can love and be loved. I want to show you that death is the most humble act of all.”
On Good Friday he washes us again, but this time in the humble flow of his own blood.
Will we listen to this story?
To that extent we will receive and will be stilled. We will be emptied as he was and as his followers were.
Patience
… Natural heart’s ivy, patience masks
our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks,
purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.
That word haunts me at Easter. Yes, the promise of all ages has now been fulfilled in the Resurrection, and we rejoice.
Even so, we have to wait for our slow selves to understand. We are forced to learn patience.
Remember how Jesus was so unhurried when he learned that Lazarus, his friend, not far away in Bethany, was dying? Jesus delayed four days going there. In other words, he waited “forever” in emotional time. Mary and Martha, those close friends of his, did without him as they buried their brother and grieved. Jesus finally got there and each sister cried out words that tore into him.
You could have saved our brother!
Jesus wept.
Yes.
And then he replied, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
On this day we rejoice because we can sense the truth of this statement. This day it is spread out before us in the Great Celebration of Easter.
We followers of God and his Christ take a long, long time to get beneath the surface of this feast, to put ourselves into the hands of, after all, what is not a money-back guarantee, but a promise. “You will be my people and I will be your God.” It is so tough for us to drink the milk of trust in the same way a child drinks at its mother’s breast. We must decide to entrust still another sluggish part of ourselves to God and to his promise.
Maybe it is the length of the Easter Vigil Service that helps us to take in this fact.
In the full Vigil Service there are ten readings, including the Epistle and the Gospel, together with a candle-lighting-ceremony (“Light of Christ”), and numerous Baptisms. Patience is the name of the game. It lets us hear, in sequence, how Abba God created us and blessed us, how he called upon Abraham, how he rescued the Hebrew people as they ran from their captors in the desert journey (and ran from God too).
For a “brief moment,” we are told, God loses patience and turns away! But then “with enduring love” takes his people back, offering water to the thirsty and grain to the poor. Can you trust this? How much?
You will be my people and I will be your God.
Finally the Gospel is proclaimed, announcing an empty tomb! The women in the story believe. The men don’t. At least not right away.
How about you, woman or man, do you believe? Is Jesus risen or is he not? Or is it after all just a child’s fable?
On this Easter weekend, after we have reacted just like the disciples during those seemingly never-ending post-crucifixion days, and even after we sing songs about resurrection, still we do it by faith and trust.
We hear it anew, maybe now more profoundly, with pandemic and Eukraine!
So, we wait, even, with joy!
Halleluiah!
Ultimately we are asked which path we will follow. The skeptical, calculating path of doubters, or the trusting, patient route of those who keep learning to believe—above all and after all—in the tender mercy of God.
Halleluiah!
.
John Foley, SJ
**From Saint Louis University