Getting Busy Living on the Lesser Days of Holy Week

When the Fourth Gospel describes the final days of the earthly life of Jesus, the author is at some pains to indicate that the festival of the Passover is just around the corner. It is a festival of the triumph of freedom over slavery, and of life over death. Yet in the gospel readings for the Monday to Wednesday of Holy Week, there is a prominence and inescapability of death that may jar with that wider Passover theme, certainly if we forget that Jesus himself is the spotless Passover Lamb of God.


On the Monday (John 12.1-11), we are placed once more in the home of Lazarus at Bethany, where Martha serves Jesus a celebratory dinner to honour and thank him for having restored her brother to life (John 11.1-44). Yet it is in death that the episode is steeped: first, there is the planned double death of Lazarus and Jesus, desired by the priests to put a stop to the flood of followers Jesus is attracting, not least in consequence of raising up Lazarus from the tomb; then there is the anticipation of death and burial seen in the anointing of Jesus in costly ointment by Martha’s sister Mary. As we saw on Passion Sunday, the stench of the tomb of Lazarus gives way entirely to the sweet fragrance of the perfume that is liberally poured on the body of Christ – that is, on Jesus, and on all of us who are called in baptism to share in his death and risen life.


On the Tuesday (John 12.20-36), death is explained to a bunch of inquisitive (and no doubt highly philosophical) Greeks, who are keen to meet Jesus and find out what he’s all about. It turns out that, if they wish to follow him, they must be willing to yield their lives, just as a grain of wheat is given to the earth in order that it may die, thus bringing about an abundant harvest.


And so finally to Wednesday (John 13.21-32), when Jesus knows that he will be betrayed by one of his closest ‘companions’; one ‘who did eat of his bread’, as the Book of Psalms puts it; one with whom he ‘took sweet counsel together’; and ‘walked in the House of God as friends’ (Ps 41.9, 55.14f). He is unsurprisingly troubled in spirit, as the mechanism of his own death is initiated, by his handing of a piece of bread at supper to Judas (‘Do quickly what you have to do!’), who walks out into the evil night to do his treacherous worst.


The light that was rapidly diminishing the day before is now challenged, though never overcome, by the darkness. We re-readers of the story naturally know that it must end in God’s explosive victory of the Resurrection but, if we are to avoid the cheap grace and easy triumphs attributed to God’s omnipotence, we must at least try to enter into the serious business of living with the Cross at the centre of all that we are.


To our great relief, this will prove not to be an exercise in grim survival or a mad masochism – a sort of leaping into briars and nettles, such as once was practised by an over-zealous Saint Benedict. It is, rather, a passage through the parted waters of Baptism into the lifelong drama of an exhilarating covenanted relationship with God, and with millions of our fellow-Christians across the globe, all committed to washing the feet of the world’s most needy, nourished and nurtured by the inexhaustible resources of Christian culture, and inflamed with the ever-creative joyful energy of the Spirit of God.


Like Lazarus, we expect to be set free from all that binds us, so that we might help set others free and launch them on the road that truly leads to freedom and to life. ‘I guess it comes down to a simple choice really,’ says Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption: ‘Get busy living, or get busy dying.’


In these days of preparation for the death of our beloved Lord and Saviour, it is to a vibrant and eternal life, bought by his Paschal, Passover sacrifice, that we commit ourselves utterly, ‘getting busy living’ as only he can teach and show and bring about through the ever-fertile gateway of his death.