Lent – Year B – Mark 14:1-15:47
For the past few years, I have sensed death wanting to be my friend. You know the type. “Let’s hang out more,” she says, “get better acquainted!” But I already have plenty of friends, a busy life, and the truth is, I’m just not that into her. Yet there she is, shuffling along behind me, showing up when I least want her around, throwing her arms around my shoulders to show how close we are, how much a part of my life she already is. “Stop breathing on me!” I want to say, but she doesn’t seem to care. And I have to admit I’m starting to get used to her salty breath, her tattered edges, her constancy. I am almost fond now of her clumsy nearness. What might she tell me if I learned to listen better; what might I see in this crazy quilt of death in life, pieced together in haphazard patterns?
Today is the beginning of the end for Jesus. And the beginning of the beginning. Do you see the wholeness of his life even as death closes in? The fragments of his final week create a story that is dangerously familiar. Read it slowly this year. Walk alongside the other disciples, feel their confusion and fear, hear Jesus confront the powers, offer the wisdom of silence, give it all and then give some more, be abandoned and wait to be found. Pick up a fragment each day or two. Turn it over and over in your palm. Ask it for a blessing.
I think of Raymond Carver’s little scrap of a poem called “Late Fragment” written in his hospital room when he was dying/living/dying. Here it is, in case you have not yet learned it by heart:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
That’s all. A fragment, pieced into the quilt of his life because he had the courage to befriend his death. Keep some scraps of paper nearby this week. Listen for the fragments. What about you, Jesus? Did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? Are we, too, learning to call ourselves beloved, to feel ourselves beloved on the earth? Are the fragments making us whole?
