The Weight of Glory

Almost one in four families in the US did not always have enough to eat last year. The UN thinks that those struggling with hunger will double across the world thanks (no thanks?) to the pandemic. I think about it each time I grocery shop, as staples for the food cupboard are standard on my list, a tithe of my grocery cart for the hungry:  5 pounds of rice, tuna fish, cereal, coffee, jam.  When I pack up the bag each week to take to church I sometimes hear the dinner guests in Bethany murmuring in my ear, seventy-five thousand hungry people — do you honestly think what you are doing makes any difference?

We are engulfed by the Passion in Holy Week. It seems such a long way from Ash Wednesday, when the ground was hard and cold and the branches stuck out like bones.  Against that stark backdrop, the call to justice sounded clearly, but now that the trees are misted green with new leaves, it gets harder to imagine that people around me are still cold and hungry.  In the glory and the chaos of Holy Week it’s easy to let the every day work of the Gospel become submerged.  

But listen, I hear this gospel say to me, don’t let the enormity of what is happening overtake you, pay attention to the people on the edges of the action. Watch the disciples in the garden and the women at the cross, called to companion and witness.  Hear the centurion, driven to cry aloud a newfound faith.  Feel the weight of the body of Christ, like Simon the Cyrene and Joseph of Arimathea.  None of these acts would be enough to save Jesus, but all of them made a difference — then and now. 

I wonder what happened to Simon the Cyrene and to Salome.  The Gospels are silent, but somehow I suspect that whatever they went home to, it was never quite ordinary again. What will happen when this week is over? Will I return to the ordinary — or what passes for ordinary these days — dropping the faded lilies on the compost heap on the way out? Or will I be willing to bear the weight of glory?

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This is an edited version of a reflection from Not By Bread Alone, Liturgical Press, 2018. Photo is of the door to the Passion facade at Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.