3 April 2020 | Out of control?

Until very recently, we have all been used to being ‘in control’. Advertisers used to woo us with the promise that their goods ‘put you in control’. The internet put vast powers at our disposal. With one click we could order virtually anything we wanted online. We could choose to be or do whatever we liked, from the cornucopia of choices available. If something needed fixing, we could get it sorted very quickly, at the best price, with a trusted trader. And when it came to our holidays, we no longer had to rely on travel agents – we could construct our own trips to far flung places.

You don’t need me to point out that much of that has now changed. Our sense of being in control of our life has evaporated. It’s easy to get alarmed that things have been spiralling out of control. Governments around the world are trying to control the spread of an invisible and very potent enemy that knows no frontiers. The hope is that, eventually, the world will be back in control, with effective vaccines, anti-viral drugs, and herd immunity. But, in the meantime, we ourselves may be feeling a distinct lack of control over our lives.

What a bleak subject for Holy Week! But there are parallels here with the last week of Jesus’ life. It all starts very dynamically with Palm Sunday. Jesus rides into Jerusalem to the welcome of cheering crowds. Yet, as the week progresses, Jesus gradually loses (or perhaps more accurately, gives up) control of his own life. On Maundy Thursday, Jesus is betrayed and arrested. He becomes a prisoner and is tried before the Jewish Council. On Good Friday, Jesus appears before Pontius Pilate, who hands him over to be crucified. Jesus is mocked and stripped and forced to carry his own cross to Golgotha, the place of execution. Then he is nailed in place on the cross, completely under others’ control. Jesus, the man for others, has become ‘the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief’, at the mercy of events.

Crucifix | S.Felice in Piazza, Florence | attributed to Giotto, c1308 |

© Philip Richter

I came to understand the meaning and direction of travel of Holy Week better when I first came across a brief but profound book by a remarkable Anglican priest, W H Vanstone (1923-99). He was a brilliant scholar, who could have had a stellar academic career, but chose, instead, to devote himself to parish ministry, mostly on big housing estates. He once famously claimed that ‘there is no promotion from the parochial ministry!’. In 1982, he published a book, called The Stature of Waiting, that has become somewhat of a Christian classic.

In this remarkable book Vanstone encouraged his readers to rediscover the dignity and stature of waiting, of being done to as well as doing. He pointed out that one of the oldest interpretations of Good Friday is that the Cross marks the victory of Jesus, his lifting up in triumph – at the very point when he comes to a full stop. As John’s Gospel puts it: ‘”when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” - he said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die’ (John 12:32-3). Jesus, the man of action, nailed to a cross, is divine love patiently bearing all for our sake. Vanstone puts it this way in one of the hymns in our hymnbook (Singing the Faith 12):

Drained is love in making full,
bound in setting others free,
poor in making many rich,
weak in giving power to be.

Therefore he who thee reveals
hangs, O Father, on that Tree
helpless; and the nails and thorns
tell of what thy love must be.

Thou art God, no monarch thou,
throned in easy state to reign;
thou art God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain

 © Mrs Isabella Shore 

Maybe, in these troubled times, we could do with rediscovering the ‘stature of waiting’. If the Cross of Jesus is a model for every Christian life, then we need not worry so much about losing control. In fact, it could help deepen our faith. In the latest issue of the Church Army’s Catalyst magazine, there was an interview with Mike Collyer, a retired evangelist, in which he was asked for advice gleaned from times in his life that did not go the way he planned:

Over the years I wanted to be in control. My philosophy, unconsciously, was: “This is what I want to do, God. Will you join me in doing it?” It wasn’t until I retired and suddenly had no agenda and nothing to get up for in the morning that I started to reverse that trend and started to pray: “Lord, it took all of those years to learn this lesson. I want to join in with you and do what you want me to do.” That was a fundamental change. (Catalyst, March 2020, p.16)

We may not feel particularly ‘in control’ this Holy Week and Easter, but that need not stop us trusting that, in the deepest sense, God remains in control, with a love that suffers alongside us to bring us to the joy and new life of Easter.  

Rosemary, Philip and Alan Jameson have written some reflections and other devotional material for Holy Week – available here.