Thought for the Week

by Mgr Kieran Heskin

Sacred Heart Church, Ilkley

Those who accompanied Jesus up to Jerusalem for the first Holy Week and Easter had lavish hopes, which he did not share. They looked forward to him restoring the Kingdom of Israel, to his becoming a most powerful messiah. His arrest and death however shattered all this and it led to their losing faith in him. They could not see how someone could be the Messiah who had been publicly scourged by Roman soldiers; who had been forced to walk the streets of Jerusalem carrying a cross like a common criminal and who was crucified as a wrongdoer on Calvary.

Jesus caught up with two of his dejected disciples on the road to Emmaus and although they did not recognize him he be proceeded to put the record straight for them. He went through the Old Testament and illustrated that his suffering as Messiah was entirely in accordance with the will and mind of God as expressed in the Scriptures. He powerfully made the point that he served his Father just as much in his days of suffering in Jerusalem as he did in his days of triumph in Galilee.

Many of us have had moments in our lives where we too have been downcast, when the Jerusalem of our dreams turned into disappointment. We may have had to cope with set-backs such as being passed over for job promotion; we many have had employment worries, money worries, health problems, relationship difficulties or the heart break of bereavement.

It is part of the folly of our age that time spent in suffering is often thought of as time wasted. Jesus tells us particularly through the final chapters of the gospels that that is not the case: his time of suffering was certainly not time wasted time: it was time at its most productive – at its most redemptive. He lost his life on Calvary but he found even greater life on Easter day.

A day will dawn for us too, perhaps not in this world but in the next, when we will discover that our most tedious and frustrating times, spent coping with our own difficulties or helping others through theirs, will have been the most fruitful and redemptive of our lives. The way of suffering and the cross was Jesus way to heaven; it will be likewise for some of us too.