Wednesday in Holy Week: Resignation and Rest

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 70
Hebrews 12:1-3
John 13:21-32

The Gospel tonight opens with the words “Jesus was troubled in spirit”. Not surprising. After three years of teaching and healing, he still finds himself an outsider, and not just an outsider but one whom the authorities are actively planning to bring down. After three years of fellowship and companionship, his closest followers still do not understand what he is about, they fail to grasp what it means to live a kingdom life. And, after three years of friendship, one of his friends prepares to betray him to those whose will it is to destroy him. Little wonder he finds himself “troubled in spirit”. However, he himself never forgets his identity; never forgets who and whose he is (as the expression goes). He clings to his relationship to the Father and trusts wholeheartedly that “if God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.” (John 13:32) In perfect union with the Father he does not shrink from the path his life will take by the week’s end; and indeed it is that perfect union that will keep him faithful and steadfast to the end. He resigns himself, not in any defeatist sense, but in trust.

As we continue journeying through Holy Week with the poetic works of John Keble, we come to his poem from The Christian Year for the Wednesday before Easter. And as we engage with them for their emotional impact, we find Jesus himself speaking as he prepares to begin his passion, as he awaits his arrest:

O Lord my God, do thou Thy holy will –
I will lie still –
I will not stir, lest I forsake Thine arm,

And break the charm

Which lulls me, clinging to my Father's breast,

In perfect rest.

Jesus submits to what is ahead of him, because it is the only way he knows by which to be faithful to the Father, and knows that in falling away from the Father’s will, he falls away from the Father’s care also – better the cross with God, than peace and praise without him:

Wild Fancy, peace! thou must not me beguile
With thy false smile:

I know thy flatteries and thy cheating ways;

Be silent, Praise,

Blind guide with siren voice, and blinding all
That hear thy call.

There is, it seems to me, a rest that does come with resignation; when we can accept the path our life has taken and – in broad strokes, at least – the direction to which it points. If we are to visit – as we have done through this week – the themes of Holy Week with more than an intellectual stance, we have to recognise that sometimes our purely intellectual assessment of a situation may let us down. A purely intellectual assessment would have moved Jesus to ratonalise why things did not need to be this way, or even how the saving power of God could be made known in less painful ways, or by slightly compromising the truth of his message. But he trusted his gut, as it were. His attachment to God and to the road that lay before him is not rational or intellectual, but an almost visceral reaction which finds its origin ultimately in love and in utter union with the Father. But also in union with humanity by sharing utterly in our condition, and at the same time giving us a pattern in our own difficulties:

To the still wrestlings of the lonely heart
He doth impart

The virtue of his midnight agony.

Sometimes we must cling to the certainty of what we feel or believe, rather that to possibilities which we can intellectualise or rationally construct. And sometimes by doing what seems logically foolish – resigning ourselves – we come into a place of salvation for ourselves and for others that we could never have thought out:

“O Father! not My will, but Thine be done” –
So spake the Son.

Be this our charm, mellowing Earth's ruder noise
Of griefs and joys:

That we may cling for ever to Thy breast

In perfect rest!