Radical trust!!!

Oftentimes in life things just don’t go our way. Our dreams and hopes, the things we spent energy and resources on, take an unexpected turn. Just imagine the disappointment, shock, guilt, shame, blame, anger, resentment and grief. We begin to question why did this happen? How? Who? Why didn’t I see this coming? What could I have done differently? Why me? Why now? This could be due to the end of a dream career, job, marriage, relationship or friendship, a business venture, a holiday panned well in advance, project or investment or even family trouble, illness or death…

The pain of letting go of our dreams, of our way of seeing the world, of what we once thought was the normal and the way into the future, is painful and grief filled. To let go of what I once thought was God’s will for me, what God wanted for my life and now is no longer, because of circumstances beyond my control, has the potential of derailing our personal, spiritual and communal life. It can send us into a downward spiral, bring up past hurts, lead to mental and physical breakdown, affect all our relationships or perhaps it could be the most transformative time of our lives.

This theme struck me recently as I have been obsessively listening to Lauren Daigle’s song “Trust in you.” The song is legitimately wrestling with the question of what happens when we hit a road block, when we have to go on “letting go of every single dream,” when God doesn’t “move the mountains,” when we are needing God to move them. What are we to do when God doesn’t “part the waters” and we can’t walk through?

I believe that this is the core question that is beneath the surface during the drama of Holy Week. There is nothing premediated about the week. It is no coincidence that the events of Holy Week left a deep impact on the early Christians, so much so that the four Gospel traditions remembered tiny details from the event with much similarities between them. It was crisis time of great proportion. It was COVID-19 and beyond in first century Palestine for Jesus and his disciples.

The dreams and hopes of the disciples suddenly came crashing down. Whatever plan they had in mind seemed to have been lost. The Last Supper must have been a disappointment, in that their expectation for some miracle to change the course of history in an instant did NOT come to fruition. In the midst of the crisis Jesus did not meet with them to gather the troops and put a strategic plan and do a cost-benefit analysis and work out an armed defence plan to end the Roman occupation and fight the leaders of “the Jews.” He did not speak about victory plans and ways to down the enemies.

Oh, how they must have felt when this did not happen? They arrived at the red sea but it would not part. Peter musters courage and bravely tells Jesus that he is ready to step in the ring for the fight, that he is “ready to go to prison and to death” with him (Lk 22: 33), but Jesus replies and reminds him that he will deny him. It seems that the more the enemy drew near in that fateful week, the more they sensed their leader and teacher powerless. Do something, “strike with the sword” (Lk 22:49) they said, but Jesus stands firm and says, “no more of this” (Lk 22: 51). Crazy stuff, he won’t cave in, what is wrong with him?

Jesus was simply on another wavelength. The Gospel of John tells us that knowing that “his hour had come” (Jn 13:1), he loved the disciples and “loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1) and goes on to wash their feet. Luke tells us that he “eagerly desired to eat” (Lk 22:15) the last supper with them before he suffered. This was no ordinary time or meal, rather a commemoration of the Exodus event, a time when God set his people free from slavery. Jesus was about to show them and us a new way of setting us free, the only permanent way, the way of love.

Rather than give them arms and a secret get-out plan, Jesus during the last meeting chooses to feed his disciples until the very end. “Take this… this is my body, which is given for you” (Lk 22: 17, 19). Jesus here is providing for his own. Biblical scholars highlight a key insight noting that during the Last Supper Jesus now provides not bread like they do in the traditional Passover meal but himself for his own. This is the meaning of the Greek word soma (body), Greek being the language which the Gospels were written in. Soma does not mean mere human body, but ones entire life, the whole human being. Jesus does not give them weapons during the Last Supper but his entire life.

But before the Last supper, according to the Gospel of John we find Jesus deeply troubled saying: “My soul is troubled. And what should I say: ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” (Jn 12: 27). The hour is “that hour” on the cross (see Jn 19:27) when he is “lifted up from the earth,” and “will draw people” to himself (Jn 12:32).

As the events unfold, Jesus himself also seems to hit a road block. Entering into the fullness of our humanity, Jesus experiences fear. In the Garden he begs the Father for relief. Is there another way he asks? In anguish he calls the Father to “remove this cup” of suffering (Lk 22: 42) but then trusts his Father once again. He became so distressed that “his sweat became like great drops of blood” (Lk 22: 44). In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus becomes “exceedingly sorrowful” (Mt 26: 38).

When will this end? Not so soon as so much happens, so fast. Jesus feels like a “worm” scorned by others, and despised by the people,” mocked as “people make mouths” at him and “shake their heads.” His heart feels “like wax,” and “mouth is dried up” and feels as though his tongue is stuck to his jaw. People “stare and gloat” at him and “divide” his clothes among themselves and cast lots. See the imagery, pay attention to what it must have felt like. These words are not mine, they come from Psalm 22 which Jesus alludes to and begins to recite on the cross. What is happening to him is reminding him of the ancient Psalm.

When the hour of the cross arrives, the toll of the journey gets to him. Jesus on the cross “cried with a loud voice, Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken (or abandoned) me?”’ (Mt 27:46).

This cry is at the heart of our fear when our dreams are derailed. Fear of letting go. Fear of being alone and forsaken, fear of abandonment. In his Palm Sunday homily 2020, Pope Francis reminds us that “Jesus had suffered the abandonment of his own” and “in the abyss of solitude, for the first time he calls him (God) by the generic name “God”. And “in a loud voice” he asks the question “why?”, the most excruciating “why?”: “Why did you too abandon me?”. Jesus, Pope Francis writes “experienced the utmost abandonment, which the Gospels testify to by quoting his very words.”

This cry of Jesus is not new at all, but a cry of the ancient Psalm 22 that Jesus feels, lives and recites on the cross. It is a cry of deliverance and hope. A cry for God “not be far away” to “come to help, to come quickly to our aid!” (Ps 22:19).

At the heart of Holy Week is an answer to the question Lauren Daigle’s song and others have asked about those mountains that don’t move and the waters that don’t part so we can walk through, when we don’t get the answers. The answer that Jesus gives is that precisely at these times, we are called into radical trust in God, our Father and Daigle song invites to do exactly this and exclaims: “I will trust, I will trust, I will trust in You”.

To trust over our deepest fears of abandonment and loneliness. Not to settle for false medications and solutions. To allow ourselves not to be afraid to enter into the darkness of Good Friday, knowing that Jesus walked the path before us with radical love and trust in God, his Father, is our deepest vocation.

But how? You might ask. This is absurd, you might say. Who might help? You may exclaim. Pope Francis writes at the end of his reflection that Jesus experienced this abandonment “for our sake, to serve us, so that when we have our back to the wall, when we find ourselves at a dead end, with no light and no way of escape, when it seems that God himself is not responding, we should remember that we are not alone. Jesus experienced total abandonment in a situation he had never before experienced in order to be one with us in everything. He did it for me, for you, for all of us; he did it to say to us: ‘Do not be afraid, you are not alone. I experienced all your desolation in order to be ever close to you’.”

This is the paradox of the cross, the paradox of love, that precisely at the moment of Jesus’s deepest abandonment and nakedness, when he was fully empty, he was being filled at the same time with God’s light and love. Thus, God granted him an eternal victory and a life giving path by which you and I are saved so that we can sing with confidence the end of Psalm 22, to proclaim God’s “deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.”

Let me end with the prayer and hopes of the Pope: “Today, in the tragedy of a pandemic, in the face of the many false securities that have now crumbled, in the face of so many hopes betrayed, in the sense of abandonment that weighs upon our hearts, Jesus says to each one of us: ‘Courage, open your heart to my love. You will feel the consolation of God who sustains you’”.