Reflecting on the Passion

I have been reading Samuel Wells’ Hanging by a Thread, a moving, challenging and apt reflection on the events of the Passion, in which Wells looks to remind us of the sheer starkness of the events of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life. As he says quite bluntly, but accurately – the passion narrative is “horrifying reading”.

He points, among other things, to the fickleness of the crowd and the way in which they changed their tune in just five short days – “You can’t trust a crowd. You can’t place your faith in popularity. It blows with the wind.”

Wells readily admits that we are incapable of travelling through Holy Week without knowing that Easter Day is round the corner; but he stresses how different it was for the first disciples, and urges us to try and comprehend something of the despair and desolation.

Still, his title conveys a poignancy to which he keeps returning – that of our faith hanging by as thread. That is the wonder of the Gospel and allows us to experience that God is with us. “God didn’t just create us, didn’t just love us from afar, didn’t just work in history to rescue us and strengthen us and heal us. God’s real glory, God’s true nature, appears in the real, substantial, material, physical reality of Jesus among us, Jesus just like us, Jesus beside us. And beside us not just in joy and celebration, but beside in horror, in agony, in isolation, in abandonment.”