The Sorrowful Mother Was Standing
Holy Week is mixed bag of happenings, starting with the lowly heights of Palm Sunday with its unavoidable political overtones continuing into the ordinary yet strangely charged times and places of Jesus’s life across one week in the history of this world. Monday’s Jesus is cursing fig trees, weeping over Jerusalem, and overturning moneychanger tables in the temple. On Tuesday, Jesus returns to the cursed fig tree to teach, and continues his intellectual and spiritual tussling with religious scholars and teachers. The week called holy is a genuine tangle of the luminous, bewildering, and horrifying.
It’s an ordinary week of human history, strangely charged. In the midst of getting ready for a significant meal Jesus would share with his disciples later that week, one of his disciples makes backroom deals to enrich himself, promising to betray Jesus into his opponents’ hands. Thursday, dressed in the towel of a servant, Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, serves the Last Supper, and presses prayerfully into the pain that his love of the world would require of him. The midnight arrest, the trials and scourging, Friday’s hasty crucifixion, his last words, his last breath. Nothing about what happened was inexorable or historically determined, even though it was prophesied. Rather, it was lived in time.
As with time, so with place. The actual events of this holy week happen in and around an actual place, the holy city of Jerusalem, that mixed bag location of hassle, haggle, and holiness, a place utterly ordinary yet strangely charged.
On my first visit to Jerusalem, two things caught my attention that have never left my memory, and neither of them is luminous. First, the eyes and behavior of holy tourists. It’s hard to distinguish true piety from foolishness, but holy tourists in Jerusalem take that blurring to the next level. The fixed focus of holy tourists in pursuit of the divine seemed to enable them to screen out actual life around them. It was easy to see, but even more so to feel, what happens to people who are grasping for the holy. It’s nothing like the fierce softening that happens after a genuine encounter with the holy God.
But I get it. Getting to travel to Jerusalem is both rare and rarefied. If you find yourself there, you want to take in its marrow for yourself, and get enough of it in you, into your very bones, to last a lifetime. Carpe Jerusalem! Who knows when you might get back?
But in that pilgrim seizure, holy places can feeling shockingly unholy. Marching from one holy place to another, holy tourists could effortlessly trample upon others in pursuit of the idea of the holy. Yet in the same breath, it is without dispute that truly holy events took place in this particular place and no other. To pretend otherwise avoids historical facts. It’s both, a real mixed bag of both.
The second thing that caught my eye and stayed with me from my first visit to Jerusalem was the tacky crocheted underwear displayed on headless plastic female mannequins on various vendor stalls lining parts of the Via Dolorosa, or the traditional path that Jesus took carrying the cross out to the place of his crucifixion. This shocking admixture of human and holy along the Way of Sorrows shattered what I had long imagined about the events of that week and in that place.
I often say that when I first visited the Holy Land, my flannel graph Jesus died. New, “mixed bag” realities came to shape my biblical imagination. Strangely, tacky crocheted souvenir lingerie is now part of it. Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t crucified on a cartoonish flannel graph hill, softened with sanctity. He was tormented, mocked, jostled, and crucified among proverbial displays of tacky underwear, cheap tourist sunglasses, overpriced water bottles mindlessly tossed as litter, in the spirit of a kind of cruelty that mixes with shrugs of dim, good natured understanding. Oh well. Don’t take it so seriously! To try to make it serious or holy for ourselves, we can just as easily overreach into the fixed-eye fog.
We don’t solve this mystery. We can only live it, watching as the events lay bare truths about who we are, a scalpel capable of piercing between joints and marrow. Sometimes what’s actually serious, actually holy, doesn’t feel like that to us. Sometimes what feels holy, isn’t. Our signals get crossed; we lose the thread. The tangle of it all is perplexing, conflicting, befuddling. This week is the ordinary bramble of admixture and perplexity. Grasping or ignorantly chuckling, this week is a needle none of us thread, despite practicing it year after year.
On Monday of this holy week, I attended a live afternoon performance of Arvo Pärt’s setting of “Stabat Mater,” performed in Copenhagen’s Trinity Church. Though I have adored Arvo Pärt’s compositions for a quarter of a century, Monday’s performance was the first time I’ve heard his work performed live. The Stabat Mater Dolorosa is a 13th century poem honoring Mary, Jesus’s mother, and across the centuries, many composers have set it to music for centuries. The poem’s opening stanza reads — Stabat mater dolorósa juxta Crucem lacrimósa, dum pendébat Fílius — “The sorrowful mother was standing beside the Cross weeping, while the Son was hanging.” At times, the holiest thing we can do is stand still, attentive, in sorrow, caught as we are in the admixture of our time and place, in the historical tangle that this holiest of weeks represents.