“Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such a thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness. … But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to the day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”

Henri Nouwen wrote that and the older we get the more we experience its truth. In this life, there’s no such a thing as a “clear-cut pure” joy. But that doesn’t make our lives less-worth living, it simply changes our perspective. Karl Rahner said a similar thing: “In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.”

What this means is that we aren’t restful creatures who occasionally get restless, fulfilled people who occasionally are dissatisfied, serene people who occasionally experience disquiet. Rather we are restless people who occasionally find rest, dissatisfied people who occasionally find fulfilment, and disquieted people who occasionally find serenity. We don’t naturally default into rest, satisfaction, and quiet, but into their opposite.

Why?

We too easily assume that we must be doing something wrong to trigger all this restlessness and disquiet. Sometimes that’s the case, but our deepest emotional aches and pains have their real root in what’s best in us rather than in what’s worst in us. Ultimately, our profoundest dissatisfactions take their root in what’s deepest inside us, the image and likeness of God.

As Christians, we believe that we bear the image and likeness of God inside of us and that this is our deepest reality. We are made in God’s image. However we tend to picture this in a naive, romantic, and pious way. We imagine that somewhere inside us there is a beautiful icon of God stamped into our souls. That may well be, but God, as scripture assures us, is more than an icon. God is fire – wild, infinite, ineffable, non-containable.

If that same fire is inside us, and it is, then there are divine appetites inside of us too, appetites that are not ever satiable in this life. There’s a divine restlessness written right in our DNA.

And that divine fire is at the root of most of what is problematic in our lives: grandiosity, jealousy, rage, egotism, our incapacity to be satisfied, our constant longing for more, our restless ambitions, our pathological complexities, our greed, and our propensity for addiction. It’s difficult to live in this world and be satisfied, humble, chaste, and not jealous of others. It’s difficult too to have to share this world with six billion others who are just as special as we are. Something in our very make-up wants always to stand out, to be recognized as unique, to own the world, and to be acknowledged as godly. No wonder there are so many jealousies and wars on this planet.

But this divine fire is also the root of all that’s good in us. When we have divine fire inside of us, it’s also impossible to be satisfied with mediocrity, with sin, with lack of meaning, with only this world, with what’s second best, and with anything less than a full surrender in love to all that’s good – others, the world, God. When we’re in the image of God it’s impossible not to go through life and be relentlessly driven to search for love and to search for God.

Being in the image of God is our greatest blessing and our greatest struggle. Because of it, we search for meaning, give our lives for each other, create magnificent works of art, and bow in worship to God. But because of it we also spend too many sleepless nights, are often furiously jealous of each other, and too often see others as rivals, give in to rage, and murder each other. It’s not a simple thing to carry infinity in a finite body and a finite world.

St. Augustine summarized it all in one line: “You have made us for yourself Lord and our hearts are restless until the rest in you.” Given the way we’re made, it’s hard to live in this world and settle for second-best – and, in that, lie the roots for both greatness and self-destruction.

When I was in high school we read an old German classic entitled, Immensee. It told the story of a love that never happened, but that should have, except that the tragic hero of our story was never able to express his love to the woman he loved. So he ended up alone, with an aching heart, full of regrets.

The book ends with him reminiscing about the woman’s last words to him. When they parted, years back, she’d said to him: “I know you’ll never come back!” He hadn’t realized then how prophetic those words would be. Now, recalling them, he is overcome with regret and his life feels empty. He’s deeply sad, but, after luxuriating in that melancholy for awhile, we are told, he went to his desk and, despite nursing a great heartache, he began again “to work with all the vigour of his youth.”

Thank God for work, sometimes that’s the only thing that sits between us and unbearable melancholy. Work is a wonderful, God-given, thing.

We lack a good theology of work. Too often work is seen as something that takes us away from God and prayer, a distraction to the spiritual life. Hard work is admitted to be a good, honest thing, but, even so, never a holy thing in itself, a gift from God so that we can be co-creators with Him.

In fact, in some theologies, work is seen as a punishment for sin, something introduced on the planet after Adam’s sin, not willed or intended by God ideally. In this view, except for sin, there would be no work.

Some of this, of course, is true. Work can be a distraction and an escape (both from God and family). It can be a rationalization against entering into the deeper things. As well, we too easily take our self-worth from our work so that we feel good about ourselves only when we are achieving something and are anxious always that, deep down, outside of our work and our achievements, we have little to offer. And so we work to try to prove ourselves and our work often becomes cancerous, something we can’t quit doing because our entire sense of self-worth is tied up with it. There are real dangers in work.

But there are dangers in everything. Work can be an excuse to avoid the deeper things, but it is also the deep, natural form of contemplation that God gives to us as humans.

We have to spend most of our waking lives working. That should tell us something, namely, that work must be the major avenue through which God wants us to journey towards the deeper things. Given the way we are built and the way life is shaped, God surely does not expect us to consciously think about Him most of our waking moments. God is not an egoistical tyrant, demanding our conscious attention, even while we have to work long hours amidst all the heartaches, headaches, restlessness, anxieties, fears, and preoccupations that impale themselves upon us every waking minute. If God wants our conscious attention every waking minute, then there is some fatal flaw in the way we are built and the way life is set up.

But there is no fatal flaw. God is the ground of our being, the ground too of our work and our relationships. In God “we live and move and have our being.” We know God not just in our conscious awareness and in prayer, but also in a deep inchoate way, by participating with Him in building this world – by growing things, building things, carving things, creating things, cleaning things, painting things, writing things, raising children, nursing bodies, teaching others, consoling others, humouring others, struggling with others, and loving others. Work, like prayer, is a privileged way to get to know God because, when we work, we are toiling in partnership with Him.

Jesus knew well both the feel of work and of tiredness. Here’s a little meditation from Caryll Houselander:

“Christ earned his living, with the joys, exultations, fatigues of other men. Had you gone to visit his home in Nazareth you would have found him like other men, but giving a significance to ordinary things that others often fail to do. Imagine such a visit. … you have come to supper. He is putting away his tools; unconsciously he smiles at the burnish on them; you see how he loves his tools. On the floor by the bench there are wood shavings, how clean and fine they are, curled like yellow petals. What a beautiful thing work is, seen from this man’s angle! He sits down in the doorway, you with him, you notice the signs of the day’s fatigue, good fatigue that seeps out of one in the evening. He wipes his face, his eyes are a little tired, they have the intensity of eyes that use the last rays of light. Yes, he works hard. He gives good measure.”

We are the freest people to ever walk this planet, at least in terms of opportunity. Our freedom is so great that, at times, it is almost a burden, an over-choice. We often find it difficult to commit ourselves to marriage, to a vocation, to a career, and to a friendship precisely because we are so free and have so many choices.

Freedom is a great gift. But it’s easily misused and easily becomes a destructive thing. We’ve all hurt others and ourselves through the misuse of our freedom.

But something doesn’t become bad just because it’s misused. Food remains a good thing, even when we over-eat. It’s the same with freedom. It remains always the greatest gift that God has given us, even though we don’t always use it maturely. Jesus came to bring us freedom. But it’s easy to lose that perspective and, today, it’s not uncommon to hear sincere, good-hearted, religious people speak out against freedom, as if it were an enemy, something that should be restricted in the name of God, church, and morality.

While that’s sincere, it’s also misguided. What’s needed today is not less freedom but more maturity. We don’t need to roll back freedom in the name of God and morality: we need raise the level of our maturity to match the level of our freedom. Simply put, we are often too immature to carry properly the great gift of freedom that God has given us. The answer to that is not to denigrate freedom in the name of God and morality, but to invite a deeper maturity so as to more properly honour the great gift that we have been given.

Our model here is Jesus, himself. Nobody has walked this earth as freely as he did. But he also had the maturity to carry such great freedom without ever misusing it. If we can believe the gospels, Jesus wasn’t afraid of anything – satan, temptation, tax-collectors, prostitutes, street people, rich people, poor people, church people, non-church people, moral people, and immoral people. He went into the singles’ bars of his time, but he didn’t sin.

And in that lies the challenge: To walk in freedom, but not compromise ourselves in doing so. Not an easy thing to do. There is always a double danger: On the one hand, we can be too timid and too frightened to use our freedom to take God’s presence and grace into places that are morally threatening, like Jesus did. That’s often where we, as church people, sell ourselves and our freedom short. We are so afraid of seemingly godless places that we simply stay away from them, fearing for our own safety. That’s sometimes a very prudent thing to do; it isn’t always an imitation of Jesus. He wasn’t afraid to go into godless places.

As well, there’s the opposite danger, namely, that we go into morally dangerous places and lose ourselves there. Like Jesus, we eat and drink with sinners, but, unlike him, we sin because we don’t have the maturity and moral strength to be in dangerous situations without falling.

But, dangers notwithstanding, the great challenge is to become mature enough to walk in the freedom of Jesus without compromising. Whenever we are able to do that, we become missionaries in the true sense, namely, we take God’s love and light into places that are devoid of them. But that’s not easy to do. We need models to help us.

Someone who can help mentor us on this, I believe, is Henri Nouwen. One of his great gifts was his honesty about his own moral and emotional struggles and the capacity to share that in a way that helps us in our own struggles.

Nouwen was searingly honest in admitting that he struggled. He shared that, even if you are sincere, prayerful, morally honest, and trying your best, it doesn’t mean that you won’t, at the same time, also be weak, complex, tempted, torn, discouraged, forever at war with certain parts of yourself, sinful, and subject to obsessions, addictions, and pathologies. Our desires are deep, complex, unyielding, wild horses, bent on their own path – and all of this co-exists with what’s healthy, good, and best in us. So it’s not easy to be whole, mature, and to walk into morally dangerous places and not sin.

Nouwen was so honest and humble about this that there were seasons in his life when he wouldn’t travel by himself, but always took along a companion, because he recognized that there are a lot more moral dangers travelling alone than there are when we have family, companions, and community along with us.

We aren’t all as mature and as strong as Jesus. Like Nouwen, we need to be honest and humble about our weaknesses, sometimes we simply don’t have the maturity to walk into dark places alone. We’re wise to take someone with us so that, in the strength given by family and community, our maturity can measure up to our freedom.

There’s a story told of a young Jewish boy named Mortakai who refused to go to school. When he was six years old, his mother took him to school, but he cried and protested all the way and, immediately after she left, ran back home. She brought him back to school and this scenario played itself out for several days. He refused to stay in school. His parents tried to reason with him, arguing that he, like all children, must now go to school. To no avail. His parents then tried the age-old trick of applying an appropriate combination of bribes and threats. This too had no effect.

Finally, in desperation they went to their Rabbi and explained the situation to him. For his part, the Rabbi simply said: “If the boy won’t listen to words, bring him to me.” They brought him into the Rabbi’s study. The Rabbi said not a word. He simply picked up the boy and held him to his heart for a long time. Then, still without a word, he set him down. What words couldn’t accomplish, a silent embrace did. Mortakai not only began willingly to go to school, he went on to become a great scholar and a Rabbi.

What that parable wonderfully expresses is how the Eucharist works. In it, God physically embraces us. Indeed that is what all sacraments are, God’s physical embrace. Words, as we know, have a relative power. In critical situations they often fail us. When this happens, we have still another language, the language of ritual. The most ancient and primal ritual of all is the ritual of physical embrace. It can say and do what words cannot.

Jesus acted on this. For most of his ministry, he used words. Through words, he tried to bring us God’s consolation, challenge, and strength. His words, like all words, had a certain power. Indeed, his words stirred hearts, healed people, and affected conversions. But at a time, powerful though they were, they too became inadequate. Something more was needed. So on the night before he death, having exhausted what he could do with words, Jesus went beyond them. He gave us the Eucharist, his physical embrace, his kiss, a ritual within which he holds us to his heart.

To my mind, that is the best understanding there is of Eucharist. Within both my undergraduate and graduate theological training, I took long courses on the Eucharist. In the end, these didn’t explain the Eucharist to me, not because they weren’t good, but because the Eucharist, like a kiss, needs no explanation and has no explanation. If anyone were to write a four hundred page book entitled, The Metaphysics of a Kiss, it would be not deserve a readership. Kisses just work, their inner dynamics need no metaphysical elaboration.

The Eucharist is God’s kiss. Andre Dubos, the Cajun novelist, used to say: “Without the Eucharist, God becomes a monologue.” He’s right. A couple of years ago, Brenda Peterson, in a remarkable little essay entitled, In Praise of Skin, describes how she once was inflicted by a skin-rash that no medicine could effectively soothe. She tried every kind of doctor and medicine. To no avail. Finally she turned to her grandmother, remembering how, as a little girl, her grandmother used to massage her skin whenever she had rashes, bruises, or was otherwise ill. The ancient remedy worked again. Her grandmother massaged her skin, over and over again, and the rash that seemingly couldn’t be eradicated disappeared. Skin needs to be touched. This is what happens in the Eucharist and that is why the Eucharist, and every other Christian sacrament, always has some very tangible physical element to it – a laying on of hands, a consuming of bread and wine, an immersion into water, an anointing with oil. An embrace needs to be physical, not only something imagined.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “There comes a time, usually late in the afternoon, when the little child tires of playing policeman and robbers. It’s then that he begins to torment the cat!” Mothers, with young children, are only too familiar with this late afternoon hour and its particular dynamic. There comes an hour, usually just before supper, when a child’s energy is low, when it is tired and whining, and when the mother has exhausted both her patience and her repertoire of warnings: “Leave that alone! Don’t do that!” The child, tense and miserable, is clinging to her leg. At that point, she knows what to do. She picks up the child. Touch, not word, is what’s needed. In her arms, the child grows calm and tension leaves its body.

That’s an image for the Eucharist. We are that tense, over-wrought child, perennially tormenting the cat. There comes a point, even with God, when words aren’t enough. God has to pick us up, like a mother her child. Physical embrace is what’s needed. Skin needs to be touched. God knows that. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist.

In her novel, A Good House, Bonnie Burnard tells the story of a relatively happy family. But even happy families have unhappy moments where bitterness chills an otherwise warm house.

She describes one such incident: A young couple, solid and trusting in their relationship, are having a rather intimate talk one afternoon when the woman’s instincts tell her that her husband is hiding something from her, not necessarily at the level of infidelity, but something that he, for whatever reason, will not share with her.

Instantly a door begins to close inside of her, her warmth and trust harden, and she feels the need to protect herself, assert some independence from her husband, and let him know that there are aspects of her life that he doesn’t necessarily know about either. Their intimacy, so warm and trusting just minutes before, dissolves for a while into a certain coolness and distance. What’s happened here?

What’s happened is what happens to all of us, spontaneously and daily, in virtually all of our relationships, particularly with those with whom we are most intimate. Such is our emotional metaphysics, the way our hearts try to protect themselves: We tend spontaneously to replicate the energy we feel around us and feed it back in the same way as we feel it.

Quite simply, whenever we feel warmth, mellowness, vulnerability, transparency, generosity, trust, and big-heartedness in a relationship, we tend to respond in kind, with warm, mellow, vulnerable, transparent, generous, trusting hearts. But the reverse is also true: When we feel coldness, bitterness, self-protection, jealousy, dishonesty, pettiness, or distrust, we tend to become cool, hard, self-protective, assertive, small-hearted, and distrustful.

It’s not easy not to do this. More than anything else, our hearts crave the warmth and trust of intimacy, but, precisely because these make us vulnerable, are hearts also tend to close doors rather quickly at the first signs of betrayal, distrust, or dishonesty.

Fear, especially, tends to do this to us. Most of our fears and anxieties arise out of a lack of confidence, from a poor self-image. Then, because we are insecure, we to try to assert ourselves, to prove that we are loveable, attractive, talented, and worthwhile. When we are afraid, we can’t risk vulnerability, instead we try to do things to show that we aren’t weak or needy. But, to do this, we have to harden ourselves precisely against the type of vulnerability that invites others into our lives.

Jealousy, especially of a person we love but whose love we can’t have, also creates that same hardness in us. That’s why we can be caught up in that strange anomaly where we are cold, distant, and perhaps even hostile, to a person whose love we badly want. Our coldness and feigned indifference towards that person is simply the heart’s attempt to protect itself, to cope with an intimacy it can’t have and the loss of self-esteem that comes with that.

The heart has its reasons, even for turning cold.

Given the truth of this, what makes for a truly big heart is the strength to resist this emotional metaphysics and remain mellow, warm, trusting, and present to others in the face of bitterness, coldness, distrust, jealousy, and withdrawal. More than anything else, this is what defines a great lover.

This is perhaps the greatest moral challenge Jesus left us: We all do pretty well in love when the persons we are loving are warm and gracious, but can we be gracious and mellow in the face of bitterness, jealousy, hatred, withdrawal? That’s the litmus test of love.

It’s also one of the deeper invitations towards maturity. Everywhere in our world – in our most intimate relationships, in our families, in our workplaces, in our churches, and in society as a whole – we forever find ourselves in situations where we meet suspicion, jealousy, coldness, distrust, bitterness, and withdrawal. Our world is often a hard, rather than an intimate, place.

The challenge is to offer a heart that creates a space for warmth, transparency, mellowness, vulnerability, and trust inside of hard places. The challenge is to offer our hearts as a space within which people can be honest, where nobody has to assert herself, where no games of pretence need be played, and where intimacy isn’t held hostage to the momentary fears, jealousies, hurts, and emotional acting out that forever assail us.

And, the more bitter and the more emotionally trying the situation, the more this is needed. When times are bitter, angry, cold, full of disrespect, and fraught with jealousy, when it seems everyone is withdrawing into his or her own world, when most everything seems a lie, and when we are feeling most hurt, taken for granted, slighted, and marginalized, what’s called for is not less, but more, attention to the quality of graciousness and warmth within our response. Bitter times call for, precisely, a deeper response of warmth, mellowness, transparency, truth, and compassion.

What’s needed most in a bitter time is a mellow heart.

Just before he dies on the cross, Jesus utters these words: “It is finished!”

What’s “finished”?

These words can be spoken in different ways: They can be words of defeat and despair (“It’s over, hopeless, I give in!) or they can be words of accomplishment and triumph (“I’ve done it, succeeded, I’ve held out!”).

Obviously, for Jesus, these are not words of defeat. He has triumphed, succeeded, run the toughest race of all to its finish. When he speaks these words, he’s like the winner in the Olympic marathon throwing up his arms in triumph at the finish-line; except in this case both his exuberance of spirit and his arms are nailed down so that his utterance of triumph is not like the pumped-fist of an Olympic winner, but like the cry of an newborn baby that’s finally succeeded in pushing itself through the birth-canal; a startling triumph, but one that, for a time, has you lying in blood, tears, and helplessness.

And his triumph here left him precisely in blood, tears, and helplessness. He’s won, but it’s cost him his life, tested his faith to the limit, lost him his popularity, scattered his friends, shrouded his life in misunderstanding, left him looking compromised, and isolated him in an unspeakable loneliness.

It’s not easy then to pump your fist in triumph, even when you’ve won, especially since your victory isn’t evident to anyone who isn’t journeying inside of this with you. To everyone else, this looks like defeat, the worst kind of defeat.

So what’s “finished”?

At one level, what’s finished is Jesus’ own struggle with doubt, fear, and loneliness. What was that struggle? The painful, lonely, crushing discrepancy he habitually felt between the warmth and ideals inside his heart and the coldness and despair he met in the world.

Everything inside of him believed that, in the end, always, it is better to give yourself over to love than to hatred, to affirmation than to jealousy, to gentleness of heart than to bitterness, to honesty than to lying, to fidelity than to compromise, to forgiveness than to revenge. Everything about him too was a testimony that the reality of God, immaterial and fanciful though it can seem, is in the end more real than the undeniable reality of our physical bodies and our physical world. And finally, everything about him pointed uncompromisingly towards the “road-less-taken” and revealed that real love means carrying your solitude and chastity at a high level.

But, for him, as for us, it wasn’t easy to live that out. As scripture says, sometimes it gets dark in the middle of the day, we find ourselves very much alone in what we believe in, and God seems far away and dead. Faith and love aren’t easy because they feel empty and fanciful whenever they’re betrayed and they only work and prove that they’re real when they’re persevered in.

Jesus, though, did persevere in them and when he utters those famous words:”It is finished!”, it’s a statement of triumph, not just of his own faith, but of love, truth, and God. He’s taken God as his word, risked everything on faith, and, despite the pain it’s brought, is dying with no regrets. The struggle for faith, for him, is finished. He’s crossed its finish line, successfully.

But there’s second level of meaning to his words. “It is finished” also means that the reign of sin and death is finished. An order of things (wherein we live our lives believing that, eventually, everyday joys give way to darkness and the underworld; that paranoia and sin unmask trust and goodness as naive; that the reality of the physical world and this life is all there is; that compromise and infidelity trump everything else, and that death is more real than hope) is also finished. It is exposed as unreal, as a lie, by love, fidelity, gentleness, trust, childlikeness, vulnerability, and the paradoxical power of a God who, in the deeper recesses of things, works more by underwhelming than by overpowering. “

It is finished!” Jesus uttered those words when he realized that, despite all the pain and sin in the world, the center does hold, love can be trusted, God is real, and, because of that, in the end, “every manner of being will indeed be well.” The forces of sin and death are finished because we can, in full maturity and utter realism, believe in the sun even when it isn’t shining, in love even when we don’t feel it, and in God, even when God is silent. Faith and God deliver on their promise.

Mohandas Gandhi, in a remarkable passage, once wrote: “When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.” Many things were finished on the cross, including rule of tyranny and murder.

[Fifth in a six-part Lenten series on Mystical Images]

What do we do when we’re depressed? What’s our temptation when a dream is shattered, when we feel betrayed, and when it seems like the trust we’ve shown someone was childish naivetŽ?

Generally the temptation is to gather what pride we have left and walk away, away from that person, away from that place of rejection, away from the humiliation, and away from our former dream, all the while saying to ourselves: “I’ll never trust in this way again! I’ve been burned, taken in, I now know the lesson!”

And, as we walk away from the place where we got hurt, what do we invariably walk towards?

We walk towards human consolation, towards compensation, towards something that looks like it will alleviate the hurt, soothe our wounded pride, or at least distract us from the pain. Sometimes, in fact, we’re so wounded that what we walk towards is simple bitterness and despair. We unconsciously turn our backs on energy, family, community, happiness, faith, trust, and God. Life isn’t worth living, why try!

In Luke’s Gospel, we see this in the story of two, dispirited, disciples walking from away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus on Easter Sunday morning, unaware that Jesus had risen from the dead. Luke writes that on the morning of the Resurrection “two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem toward Emmaus, a village some seven miles away, their faces downcast.”

Every word is pregnant here: For Luke, “Jerusalem” is more than a city. For him, it means the church, it means our faith-dream, and it means the place where Jesus was crucified (the place of pain, betrayal, crucified dreams, humiliation, and shame). On Easter Sunday, he tells us, two disciples were walking away from that, namely, they were leaving the church, leaving their faith dream, and walking away from the place where they felt that dream had ended in shame. Moreover they were walking towards “Emmaus”. What is “Emmaus”?

Scholars tell us that there were several places called Emmaus, but they suspect that the one referred to here was a Roman Spa, a resort of sorts, a place of human consolation, the Las Vegas of that day. Thus, these disciples were doing what we invariably do when we get hurt, walk away from the hurt towards human consolation, towards something will take the pain away or at least distract us from it.

And they were doing this out of depression; their dream had been crucified when Jesus died. Indeed, when they describe their faith to Jesus, they use the past perfect tense: “We had hoped.” Their dream is over, dead. So is their faith.

So this is the scene: Two dejected disciples are leaving the church and walking towards human compensation because their dream has been shattered by the shame and humiliation of the cross. Their dream is over and they are now walking inside the sadness that besets us whenever we feel betrayed, shamed, found to be naive in our trust.

It is because of this sadness that they cannot recognize Jesus when he appears to them on the road. Jesus walks with them and they can’t recognize him. Why?

The answer to that lies in the Agony in the Garden. In Luke’s description of this, when Jesus goes out into the Garden of Gethsemane to pray he tells his disciples: “Watch!” They’re supposed to learn something by watching him. What they were supposed to learn was what Jesus himself learned, or at least learned to accept, in Gethsemane, namely, that there is no other way to glory except through humiliation, no other way to new life except through death, no other way to intimacy except through unspeakable loneliness, and no other way to the light of Easter Sunday except through the darkness of Good Friday.

This is what Jesus had to accept, on his knees and begging for an alternative, in Gethsemane. But, as Luke tells us, after Jesus comes to accept this, he turns towards his disciples and finds them asleep, not out of simple tiredness, but “out of sheer sorrow”. They were too depressed to get the lesson.

This is a mystical image worth meditating. Like these dispirited disciples in Luke’s Gospel, we too, when faced with the kind of pain that brings us to our knees in agony and humiliation, too often are too discouraged and too disheartened to grasp the lesson that’s being taught. We “fall asleep out of sheer sorrow” and then, in our sadness and discouragement, we feel tempted to walk away from what’s hurting us and move instead towards some human consolation, towards something in the world that promises earthly compensation to replace our crucified dream of faith.

The good news is that Jesus finds us on that road and turns us around so that, like the disciples, we never actually get to Emmaus. Instead, after re-reading the scriptures and breaking the bread, we regain our vision and our idealism and find the courage to again return to our faith and to our church.

[Third in a six-part Lenten series on “Mystical Images”]

Anthropologists tell us that men and women have different congenital flaws. For men, it would seem that the flaw that’s more particularly encoded in our DNA is betrayal. We have a history of running away when things get tough, of not keeping promises, and of selling out in the face of temptation.

It’s not that women are immune from this, but as even the gospels highlight, men have a history here. In Mark’s gospel, for instance, all the men betray Jesus, without a single exception. Indeed, in his gospel, the final words that Peter, the head of the church, speaks are words of betrayal: “I do not know the man!”

Here’s how the gospels describe that betrayal: “Then Peter said, `I swear that I am telling the truth! May God punish me if I am not! I do not know the man.’ … At once, while he was still speaking, a rooster crowed. Jesus turned around and looked straight at Peter, and Peter remembered what the Lord had said to him, `Before the rooster crows tonight, you will deny me three times.’ And Peter went out and wept bitterly.”

What’s in this image?

A number things: First, Peter’s initial brash, over-confidence. Just prior to this betrayal, he had sworn that he would never betray Jesus, even if everyone else did. Second, he made this promise in utter sincerity, with deep love in his heart, fully intending on keeping his word. Third, he broke his promise quickly in the face of adversity. Fourth, perhaps most important, he wept at his sin when Jesus looked at him with love.

What’s to be learned from this? First, that sincerity and good will aren’t enough to keep us from sinning. Sin isn’t always the product of malice or hypocrisy. More often, we sin out of simple weakness.

Moreover, because we sin out of weakness, we have a tendency to rationalize: “It wasn’t so bad! There was nothing I could have done!” But sin is still sin, betrayal is still betrayal, and the damage we do is still real, even when we act out of weakness. Peter didn’t want to betray Jesus, he just wasn’t strong enough not to. And that’s generally too our problem when we don’t hold out against temptation, whether it be to bitterness, sex, gossip, slander, jealousy, hatred, or anything else we sell out to or run away from in order to get through an ordeal, a loneliness, an insecurity, a fear, a season, or a night. Even when we give in out of weakness we’re still betraying, still (in essence) saying: “I do not know the man!”

But while sincerity doesn’t necessarily save us from sin, it does help us hear the rooster crow. As long as we remain sincere, we will soon enough admit our sin and we will know too that God still looks on us with love, even in betrayal.

A very important part of this picture of Peter betraying Jesus is the look that Peter sees on Jesus’ face when he catches his eye in the crowd. The text tells us that “Jesus turned around and looked straight at Peter.” Whenever the gospels tell us that Jesus “looked at” someone, generally that means that he looked at the person with love and understanding, with a look that blesses. What Peter saw on Jesus’ face (in Jesus’ ultimate moment of humiliation and Peter’s ultimate moment of betrayal) was not, as we would expect, a look of disappointment and reproach (“How could you!”) but something Peter had likely never seen or experienced before in his whole life, namely, a look the holds you in warmth and understanding even when you sin and betray. No doubt this was a defining moment in Peter’s understanding of Jesus because, at that moment, he experienced something that releases a different kind of tears, unconditional love.

The tears we weep when we are loved despite weakness are very different from the ones we weep when we feel judged and humiliated by our weakness. To experience love when we don’t deserve it is the one grace that cleanses us of sin and gives us strength against sin.

The image of Peter betraying Jesus teaches us that we are loved sinners, all of us. Our sincerity and good-hearts don’t keep us from sinning. We still betray, break our word, and too easily give in to temptation. But, that’s not the whole story: What’s shown here too is that God doesn’t give us that look of disappointment and disapproval that we’re all too familiar with when we do this. God still looks at us with understanding and continues to hold us solidly in love and blessing.

However we struggle with both sides of this, namely, to admit we’re sinners and to recognize that we’re still loved. But appropriating both of these truths is the key to knowing Jesus and knowing ourselves.

As John Shea says: The false self will crack when the rooster crows. There many ways to wake up!