"You only blinched inside," said Pooh, "and that's the bravest way for a Very Small Animal not to blinch that there is."
as a lapsed agnostic christian (I KNOW, right? like there are agnostic christians “in good standing?”), this might sound strange, but maundy thursday is a really important (obscure religious) holiday for me.
my (south glastonbury congregational) church held a somber candlelit service on maundy thursday evenings. they became a special thing i would do with mom. but what caught my heart wasn’t the sip of “wine,” the melancholy tone or the rare quiet darkness in church. what stays with me to this day is the abject humanity of jesus in the stories of the last supper, the betrayal, the denial and above all, in gethsemane. he’s human. he’s sad. he’s stoic and humble and passionate, as ever. but he also aches, and let’s us know. he’s alone… his closest disciples cannot even stay awake even though he’s admitted to them how freaked out and upset he feels about what is coming.despite his entreaties, they fall asleep repeatedly. he’s alone. he’s scared. and while he bears up in his particularly jesus-y way and goes on into the morning of the passion, for a moment he does blinch inside.
he’s asking to sit out the round. he’s asking for a literal passover (the last supper was a seder, no?) from the suffering he knows to be his fate. he’s all “look it’s cool, i’ll do it if that’s what you need me to do, but, um, err…”
it makes the parables and the sayings and the lessons so much more real. it casts into stronger relief the many stories that sound so ridiculously “holier than thou” that it’s hard for the average person to relate to behaving in the ways jesus modeled. the many many times he does not blinch. it makes me connect to the human being inside those stories with so much more credence and interest.
“sad superman”