When the hour finally comes
There are salient moments in a person’s life where one knows beyond any measure of doubt that the hour has come. That point where one would know the next step will be crucial to determine subsequent steps.
While it would not be fair to judge a person’s legacy based on a week in their life, the last seven days in Jesus’s life, which Christians around the world celebrate in the coming days, can be considered to be the point where the veil comes off, identities are revealed and hearts are sieved through the crucial events that make up Holy Week.
When one looks at how Jesus journeys through his last days, one captures two distinct yet complementary virtues – patience and courage. At face value they are considered mutually exclusive, even contradictory. The first seems to take stock, bide its time in an unnerving stillness. The second, having something exterior about it, beckoning to take action and move forward. In a human sense, when his hour comes, Jesus embodies them both.
Many sought to rush Jesus to bring his mission to fulfilment. Some of his own disciples wanted him to zero in on all that was wrong in Israel and establish in one big swoop the kingdom desired by many. “…Trust the hours. Haven’t they / carried you everywhere, up to now?” (Galway Kinnell, Wait). Jesus’s patience emerges in his capacity to wait for the hour, trusting that he is being led towards it in the midst of all uncertainties. “My hour has not yet come” was Jesus’s persistent claim to those who sought to rush things up. The ever so unpopular art of patience is that active disposition which knows that things need time to emerge, mature and become available to us. Patience, in the end, is that healthy relationship with the true rhythms of life.
“Let us go to Jerusalem,” Jesus says as he boldly looks at the holy city. When his hour had come, he enters the city of Jerusalem. At a certain point, patience seems to give way to courage. When we accompany Jesus into his darkest hour, we are witnesses to a courage that comes from a deepseated identity. The son who knows that he is not alone, marches on along “the road less travelled by / And that has made all the difference” (Robert Frost, The road not taken).
Like patience, courage – its etymology is the Latin cor – also reveals the quality of a person’s heart. Courage is not the absence of fear, disappointment or heaviness, all of which were most probably part of Jesus’s human experience in the passion. It is what is left behind when everything has been thought and spoken. Sometimes the only thing left to do is to take another step forward, to continue the journey.
“Secret lamp it is this that burns under our gestures / thus we walk lighted” (Galway Kinnel, The Orangery). In the end, this heart full of courage is outpoured. Like a grain of wheat, it is buried beneath the ground, only to emerge again prospering with life. Patience and courage, stillness and consummation. This coming week is the manifestation of both, the mystery reflects as in a mirror our personal journey.
ALEXANDERZAMMIT@GMAIL.COM