Weekly Clergy Letter from Mother Anne Turner

Dear Friends in Christ,

 

“ . . . are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour?”

 

Jesus says these words (Mark 14:37) to his friends in the garden of Gethsemane the night before the crucifixion.  He also says them to us, this week.

 

It is tempting to sleep through Holy Week.  It’s a jumble of inconvenient midweek services with emotionally uncomfortable themes.  Even with the best of intentions, it’s hard to find the time on a busy Friday afternoon to think about pain, loss, suffering, and death.

 

Can we not keep awake?

 

Holy Week speaks with chilling clarity to our present moment. We read the story of Jesus’s death in its entirety not once but twice (on both Palm Sunday and Good Friday) so that we can hear how terribly familiar it is.  The passion story talks about the dangers of imperial power, the corrosive nature of racism and xenophobia, and the travesty of capital punishment.

 

Most difficult—and yet most important: the passion points to what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.”  Atrocities are perpetuated not only by extraordinary villains.  They are also committed by ordinary people who acquiesce to unjust authority.  The passion is full of bystanders who do nothing and crowds who echo the party line.

 

In our present moment, we cannot become those bystanders.  We cannot become those crowds.

 

I believe that one of the most important roles that church plays in our lives is to form us for moments of moral decision.  We come to Grace to learn to resist evil.  That lesson is urgent right now.

 

I encourage you to come for Palm Sunday, for Maundy Thursday, for Good Friday.  Come to be reminded of how quicky and insidiously evil can be normalized; come to be reminded of the one who stood on the side of the powerless in the face of unjust power.

 

Keep awake, Jesus asked.  Jesus asks us, still.

 

Yours in Christ,

Anne+