Some food for thought from Prof David Welbourn
As we find ourselves in Holy Week, leading up to events in the Christian Life with which we are familiar, but in circumstances which are anything other than familiar, I wanted to share a thought, which is particularly pertinent to us all at this time.
We run through the familiar events of Holy Week itself, with the highs and the lows tumbling one after the other. We are privileged to know what comes next, yet each year there is new insight to be gained and fresh ways to understand the depth of pain and love God endures for our sake.
But this year, more than ever before we can place ourselves that much closer into the shoes of the disciples. There is an inevitability about unfolding events, but we fail to understand why or how they will transpire. There is a hope of real transformation onto which we can hold. But there is fear and confusion and a stripping away of normality intermingled with that hope. We anticipate the great festivals of faith, but have no idea how we will feel about the things we have lost, or the new understanding we will gain, or indeed the sudden loss of loved ones about whom our future plans were fashioned.
When we look on the gospel story and we feel ourselves into the shoes of the disciples, we seek to make sense of each of their responses, by looking at the emergent story of their lives and relationship with Jesus as it has been told through previous chapters. But maybe we have missed the reality that whatever their normality meant to them before the palm procession, the dislocation they were about to encounter was far from their normality. Each responds in a unique way to the shattering of their lives. For some, fear and anxiety marked the days to come, for Thomas it was withdrawal, for Peter, the need to find distraction in something approaching normality, for John it was that earth shattering moment of true belief as his fear to enter the grave was overcome by Peter breaking that moment, and the reality of the empty tomb slotting all his reflections into gear.
What will you learn afresh of the Easter story, as you confront it with more uncertainty and confusion than you have ever done before.
Just like the disciples who unexpectedly had to pick up the mantle of God’s work as they emerged from their Pentecost, what you personally, what we together, make of it, will shape the way we lead the transformation of the church forwards to overcome the shock which has reshaped normality, into a resurrected and redeemed world.