Saying yes to death

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 9: 22-25) offers us one of Jesus’ starker prophecies: the foretelling of His passion and death. It also contains an explanation of the implications of one of His first commands to the disciples: follow me. Follow me in living…well, why not, Lord? we reply…Follow me to my death…hmm, did we hear that right, Lord? The sufferings of the Lord will be multiple: rejection, slaughter, but then… He will be raised up. We are likely not to hear this last part, not least because Jesus punctuates it with the paradoxes of our discipleship: whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. Why so much loss? we wonder.

After the rigours of yesterday’s fast, maybe we crave an easy time on the first morning. Some might think they are being humble by not aspiring to too much this Lent: the lower you aim, the less distance you can fall, perhaps? Given the paradoxes of Christianity, it might be that the lower you aim, the wider you miss.

Some may even think of Lenten idealists as they would of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s hero in the famous poem:

The shades of night were falling fast

When through an alpine village passed

A youth who bore, mid snow and ice,

A banner with this strange device,

Excelsior.

If what happened to him happens to Lenten enthusiasts, the risk is that they end up frozen by their own idealism and the bitter winds of pride.

The gospel here, however, is neither idealistic nor bitter.

It is not idealistic because Christ is not an ideal type, but a real person of flesh and blood. He does not invite us to be guided by higher aspirations, like Wadsworth’s youth, but by an inspiration that comes close to the centre of His being: His eternal communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit that pours forth with a torrent of love to His creation and His creatures. And this communion is sweet not bitter, moreover, because it is not secured through our all-conquering elan. Rather, it comes to us as a gift from the Father to the Son and from the Son to the Holy Spirit, overflowing into us through our redemption and sanctification.

So, why must this sweet communion seem so bitter to us, at least until the moment of resurrection? Why is it only reached along the paths appointed by this dreadful prophecy? Because since our fall in the Garden of Paradise, our only way back is through the Garden of Gethsemane. Since our betrayal of God’s friendship before the Tree of Knowledge, the only road home takes us by via the Tree of the Cross.  Since we tried to take our destiny into our own hands, we can only recover through recognising we are in his Hands. As the poet says:

   Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?

   'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

   I am He Whom thou seekest!’

Francis Thompson could equally have written:

   'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

   It is thou whom I seekest!’

For in entering the desert of Lent, we do nothing for the Lord but attend to a call He has already sounded; we mirror the gesture of an already proffered hand that bears on it the mark of the nails.

If we can add to our cooperation a COLWelian skip of joy in our step, all the better. It is not easy to die on the Cross under whatever guise it comes to us this day (stresses, strains, losses, pains). But if we think of it as dying in His arms – His arms outstretched caressingly – then maybe, like Mary our model, we can say yes; yes just this once, as if answering an offer of marriage; yes, yes and thank you this one day and every one of the moments of our life to the end.