This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the passover of the Lord.
Exodus 12:11
People die every day, and people are always being born. Christianity is full of the metaphors of dying and living, of self-emptying and new birth. If you listen to the preacher long enough, it starts to sound easy, or at least commonplace. Here’s another season, another reason to let go of what we desperately cling to and be carried out into a new ocean of possibilities. Here’s the chance to get to what is real, true, and honest.
But what if it doesn’t work out? What if we declare our love and the beloved doesn’t reply? If our courage only leads to our ruin, were we brave to speak or just fools after all? There are a thousand questions that can’t be answered until they have crossed the line between thought and speech. What’s been spoken cannot be unsaid.
Even Jesus hesitates to take that leap (and it is a leap of faith. It is the leap of faith.) I wonder if he prevaricates because of the suffering and humiliation ahead, or if he wonders whether or not it will make any difference at all. Will anyone watch as the ambulance pulls away?
Huddled in Gethsemane, all that is unspoken in our lives, all the terror at our own weakness, is poured out in a symphony of longing to live fully. “There is no way of telling people that they are walking around, shining like the sun,” Thomas Merton says. The poet in Jesus wants to give words to the truth of the beauty of our lives, but will his wounds speak to us? God, if this is not going to work, let’s try something else.
Too late. The time for debate is over. The local cops have ripped through this holy night and grabbed Jesus. Peter’s switchblade is the wrong tool for the job now. With just one look, and a whisper, Jesus is swept up into the inexorable machinations of an empire and the hierarchy that is complicit in keeping the poets in their places.
Some things won’t change. The struggle will continue in dark corners until the tension erupts and the rocks begin to roll. The Maximum Lawman will come down on us too. Yet beneath it all a heart beats. The soft hum of a reed signals the soaring sound of a solitary horn, tender at first but sustaining and redeeming everything beneath that giant Exxon sign, reminding us of Coltrane’s prayer: “God breathes through us so completely…so gently we hardly feel it… yet it is our everything.”