Holy week finds me stuck in a hotel with my days been taking up learning the Dutch language. I am enjoying the challenge. Dutch is a very strange sounding language which can make you sound like you are angry or have a strong head cold when you just want to say good morning, “goede morgen!” But, I have to say, it has been fun learning the language especially when as a Scot I have all the guttural noises that I need to form and shape the words. My goal is by Christmas to be fluent enough to hold conversations about work topics and to confuse my children by issuing commands that they can complain they don’t understand (so, no change there). What’s also interesting is being reminded again how language really shapes how we think and how we perceive the world. Dutch people are who they are partly because of their language just like the Scots, just like Americans. There is a connection here that some philosopher understands probably but for me it just becomes wonder, sheer wonder, at the diversity of the world we live in.
I have many Holy Week memories. One strong memory is going to the lunch time services at St. George’s Tron Church in Glasgow with my friend, David. We walked along from the University and went to listen to the message as much for the break from class as for the spiritual uplift. My most powerful Holy Week memory though was at Crosspoint’s “Service of Darkness” a couple of years ago. We showed a video of Johnny Cash singing the Nine Inch Nails song, “Hurt”. I was stunned. There was this man, Johnny Cash, this legend, at the end of his life singing, “What have I become …….”. It was a moment of clarity. It really does all go away in the end. Every battle stops being fought, every achievement becomes nothing, every little victory just builds that “empire of dirt”. It all goes away and what are we left with?
Walking towards Easter through Holy Week is lonely for the penitent. Everyone knows the end of the story, everyone knows the verdict, everyone knows the debt, the burden, the worry, the scandal. What makes it lonely however it not that we walk alone, it is that we know we leave our companion on Friday on the cross while we go on with the lives he bought for us. We leave him there and we go on.
Yet we are not the same I think.
1“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. 2In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. 3And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4You know the way to the place where I am going.”
We leave Jesus alone at he cross but he does not forget us. That empire of dirt really is an empire of dirt. Even Jesus himself can’t give life on this earth more meaning ultimately than that. But he prepares a place for us, a place with him for ever, a place where our actions will mean something and our burdens are left behind and, I suppose, where there is no Dutch, English, Spanish or Swahili.