A Mindwalk from Deidre Noonan
As Holy Week begins, on Palm Sunday, we hear the first version of the Passion.
Have you really read it?
Have you placed yourself in each character?
What would you do?
The Anointing
As Jesus is reclining at the table, in the house of Simon the Leper (Mark 14:3), THE LEPER? Jesus is having a meal with the outcast of the outcasts. The leper, who you have feared your entire life, yet you are with Jesus sharing a meal with someone that you would never have gone near. Put yourself in Simon’s place in Jesus’s followers’ place….
What do you do? Do you sit at the leper’s table or turn and run away?
A woman comes in with an alabaster jar, a jar that contains very expensive oil. She anoints Jesus’s head, what is she thinking? Doesn’t she know that oil could be used to feed the poor? How do you feel as the woman, taking probably a life’s savings anointing Jesus? What is going through your head as you watch all that money being “wasted”?
What would you do?
The Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem
You are traveling with Jesus to celebrate the Passover meal in the Holy City. The Passover meal is a celebration that remembers Moses leading the Jewish people out of Jerusalem. Jesus tells them how to find a room. Do you run off to find the person carrying the water jar? Or do you think, what is he crazy? It’s Passover, we are never going to get a place!
You put your cloak on the colt, and Jesus sits on the colt, and as Jesus enters Jerusalem, people place their cloaks on the ground before him taking branches saying: “Hosanna to the Son of David!”
What would you do? As a person in the crowd, are you wondering who the man is and just caught up in the frenzy? Or have you heard of Jesus?
What would you do? As a disciple, that has heard that the chief priests and scribes are looking for a way to arrest Jesus? Are you just caught up in the jubilation?
The Last Supper
You are with your friends at the table, and Jesus does several things that are extremely unusual. Jesus washes the disciple’s feet, he blesses and breaks the bread, he tells them that one will betray them, and one will deny him.
What do you do? Do you let Jesus wash your feet? When he says one of you will betray me, what do you do? What do you do when he says one of you will deny me?
Put yourself in Judas’s place, what would you do?
The Crucifixion
In all accounts of the Passion, Jesus is alone, his followers have left him. The people who have been following him are nowhere to be found until John is at the foot of the cross with Mary. All the other disciples fled! Who helped Jesus, Simon of Cyrene was pressed into helping Jesus in carrying the cross.
What would you do? You are standing by the side of the road and you are forced to help a man who is being put to death. What would you do?
You are the guard who after Jesus’s death is the first to acknowledge “truly this was the son of God!”
There are so many more characters in the depictions of the Crucifixion, take some time and walk in their shoes.
What would you do..
- As a disciple in the garden?
- As the servant that had his ear cut off?
- As Mary, watching her son being put to death?
- As the women that were the only followers that stayed with Jesus?
Please share your thoughts or something that you are reflecting on. Please share it with all of us.
Generally, I love the laconic nature of Mark’s Gospel. The Passion narrative is very compelling in its starkness, with one exception.
“They pressed into service a passer-by, Simon, a Cyrenian, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross.”
Simon was just a passer-by, yet it seems unusual that we know his name, and not just his name but the name of two of his children. In recent years that has become an item for reflection for me. It would seem that the characters in the Scriptures (e.g., Zacchaeus, Bartimaeus, Simon of Cyrene) that we know the names of must have become part of the early Christian community. So, although he was just a “passer-by” Simon must have been moved to share his experience with his children and possibly the early community.
So often, I am just a passer-by in someone else’s struggle and Jesus often nudges me with a “Go, help him.” or “See what she needs.” I try to be Simon and lift as much of the burden as I can and realize that the experience is changing me as much as it changes them.
Blessed week to everyone!
Rom 16, 13 reads: “Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord; and greet his mother—a mother to me also.”
If this Rufus was the same as the one of Mark’s passion narrative (didn’t Mark supposedly write while living in Rome?), then, we could say that the meeting of the “passer-by” with Jesus, on the way to Calvary, was a moment of grace for him and his family.
I have never thought about the people that were named in the Gospels. I would agree that they may be named because they were active in the early Church. They may also be named so that they could bear witness to the actual events.
How Jesus nudges us in our everyday life would make a great Mindwalk.
Have a blessed Holy Week!