Risky Business

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (1 Corinthians 1:18)

When I was a young man and began attending church, I was interested in making music. I was intent on having as little as possible to do with the church beyond music-making, scarred as I was from an adolescence of negative encounters with churchgoing classmates and neighbours. I had learned that church was risky business. But, to be a good church musician means developing some familiarity with the traditions of our faith. So began my encounters with Holy Week and its power.

A few years into this journey, I remember a mentor commenting one day about a love of the Cross. This struck me as odd. I found it much more sensible to love Easter and the resurrection. These were joyous celebrations where we saw proof that the power of death and sin had been defeated; the wrongs of the past were put to rights. The Cross was a place of grief, pain, and loss. A necessary evil to accomplish the good that came next, but not something to be dwelt upon. And certainly not something I could imagine loving.

Holy Week is a risky business. It holds some of the most ancient traditions of our faith. If there were ever a presentation of our faith that seemed foolishness to the world, the emotional and theological roller coaster of the Triduum was it. The traditions of Holy Week are powerful, drawing us close to God in intimate and unsettling ways. They appear once a year and remind us of our distant-yet-present ancestors in the faith, whose inheritance we guard and treasure. Whenever we sincerely approach God with open hearts we run the risk of being changed in ways we cannot anticipate.

As the years went by and I sang and played and prayed through the liturgies of Holy Week again and again, I began to understand what one might love about the Cross. It is a difficult place, full of hurt, grief, and loss. It is a place of sacrifice of the innocent. But it is also a place where the depth of God’s grace, mercy, and power to transform are most evident. Called, as ever, to contribute to God’s work, we see humanity at the Cross offering our very worst. We gather all of the hatred, fear, selfishness, anger, and murder that we can muster and give them to God, as if in a challenge. “See what you can make of that!”

God’s response is not wrath or condemnation or abandonment. Our unworthy offering is received and transformed into forgiveness, reconciliation, and the promise that this murder will yield eternal life. Our continued violence is met with water and blood, Baptism and Eucharist, love pouring forth from the Body of Christ. Even the Cross, human instrument of agony and death, is made lovely by God’s love.

This relationship God desires with us is risky business. It is easy to think of how we might be loved when we are at our best. But Holy Week reminds us that God’s love is poured out for us in both wine at the wedding feast and in water and blood upon the Cross. That we are loved much at our best and even more at our worst. That Jesus loves us even when we are loveless and, by this, we are made lovely.