Dear Friends,
There’s a subtle little something that happens to us after
Easter. What a relief! Another Lent has been negotiated in a more or less
satisfactory way. Jesus is safely risen. Our catechumens and candidates are baptized
and welcomed into the church. We can relax. Enjoy the blossoming springtime.
Live out the rest of the year without concentrating on Christ’s passion, death
and resurrection. Christ’s in his heaven, the poet says. All’s right with the
world. What more is there to say?
The more is this: we are never done moving between the
events of Holy Week and Christ’s risen presence. So during the weeks of the
Easter Season, this blog will occasionally look at some aspect of the biblical
accounts of Jesus’ last days and His Resurrection, and see that they have
something revelatory to say to us in our times which are growing more secular
and less convinced of Jesus’ present day reality.
In all four Gospel accounts of the Passion, it is said that Pilate
handed Jesus over to be crucified. Pilate had that power bestowed on him from
Caesar. Jesus, in His own way, accepted the power of Pilate over Him. Jesus did
not flee, or argue or try to change things. He allowed Himself to be handed
over.
That made me think about the many ways we hand ourselves
over to people and situations, or that people hand themselves over to us, for
better or worse. Some hand themselves over to social media. At some level, we
hand ourselves over to doctors, dentists, airline pilots, educators. We trust
their skill and learnedness. We believe we will get to our destination, our
goal by placing ourselves in their hands: lower blood pressure, strong, healthy
teeth, skills acquired to make a living. I know a man who just had major
reconstructive surgery done. For six years, he had handed himself over to a
doctor who tried many procedures, but failed to address the root problem.
Another doctor, the one who did the surgery, was disgusted with the doctor who
let the pain go on for six years. Healing sometimes requires that we hand
ourselves over to new guides.
There is a level of life deep within us that we are
reluctant to hand over to anyone, and certainly not God – our privacy, our mistaken
belief that we are the primary guides of our own lives and this has nothing to do
with God. I think of Ignatius of Loyola – soldier and man of the world – who
sustained a battle injury and had to convalesce in a place where the only books
were about Jesus and the saints. These were enough to set him on the path to a
future unlike any he had anticipated.
To what spiritual guides do we hand ourselves over? Cultic
leaders who want to dominate us or guides who help us follow the unseen paths along
which God guides us already?
And who has been handed over to us for better or worse? If
we are parents, our children have been handed over to us to guide and inspire.
If we are educators or faith leaders, we are called to help shape those we work
with not to be like us but to be like Jesus.
Jesus, handing
himself over to Pilate went to his death. But that was not the end, for Jesus
was ultimately handed over to eternal life. That is our destiny, too.
~Sister Joan Sobala
