Arrest and Desertion
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March 22, 2018“Then they laid hands on him and arrested him.” (Mk 14:46)
Then come the hands: irreverent hands, hands which are strangers to tenderness, the hands of sinners.
“Get your filthy hands off him!”
“…as though I were a bandit…” (Mk 14:48)
Am I a bandit, a criminal, an evildoer? Am I a murderer?
“O my people, what have I done to you?
In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” (Mc 6:3)
Does God’s presence offend you? Do you find him intolerable? Does his purity accuse you of wrongdoing?
“To us he is the censure of our thoughts;
merely to see him is a hardship for us,
Because his life is not like that of others,
and different are his ways.” (Ws 2:14-15)
We see goodness and our hackles rise: Are you trying to destroy us with your kindness and mercy, with your piety and reverence, with your pain? It is better to hate you than to be killed by your kindness. It is better to mock you and subtly demean you than to share your burden.
What we do to the righteous one is really a true sign of the state of our being. We who doubt our lovableness choose to abuse him in a thousand small ways every day. Those irreverent hands are ours. Mine.
“All of them deserted him and fled…. he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.” (Mk 14:50, 52)
This is complete desolation: without fidelity, without dignity, without decency. Our nakedness, usually concealed by circumstances, is revealed by a situation that shows us for what we are. To our shame, we are not heroes, not brave, not faithful, not true. We are “naked, insufficient, disgruntled and malicious” (Thomas Merton). We let him be taken. We left him. We saved our own skins.
Now begins the waiting and watching, as he who chose to bear our infirmities gives us back our dignity, at the cost of his own.
