Easter this year is the earliest easter since 1913.  Easter won’t be this early again for something like two centuries.  What that means is that we are nearing the end of Holy Week.  Holy Week is not an easy journey; it is a journey from Palm Sunday into the Passion; a journey from celebration to brutality and the murder, it is a journey to the literal darkness of a long night of waiting, watching.  Today is Maundy Thursday; my congregation will be celebrating a Tenebrae service this evening.  In many churches, tomorrow will have a solemn, perhaps even grim, Good Friday service, followed by Holy Saturday vigil leading into easter.  Many congregations host foot washing services during Holy Week.

Holy Week is a difficult journey for many of us because it is a journey toward the grimmest reaches of the human soul, toward the most brutal instincts of humanity.  Good Friday is a day on which we are called to remember the execution of an itinerant preacher by a military occupation.  Good Friday services often re-enact the Last Supper.  It’s easy to see Holy Week as a journey of body.  The story of the week insists on physicality – we cannot escape the image of the battered body hanging, crucified, suffering, dying.  Holy Week – with its meals, its foot washings, its descent into organized murder.  The spiritual journey of Holy Week is a difficult one to truly live through.  Holy Week reminds us of mortality – others and our own.

It’s easier to rush through Holy Week and get right to Easter.  Easter is an easy holy day.  There’s no messy body stuff to deal with, no insistent reminders of our own mortality, just an easy and joyous celebration of resurrection. 

Our own dis-ease with the body makes us want to make the Holy Week journey quickly.

In a wonderful confluence, Hugo wrote a great post – No break from the “heavy beast”: on teaching the body and the danger of triggering.  Hugo wrote:

I’ve been talking about everything from Western mind/body dualism to the Mosaic law to Sigmund Freud. The basic case is simple: much of our culture, for a variety of historical reasons, teaches us the Gnostic notion that the soul, our truest self, is imprisoned in a corrupt and foul body. The “heavy beast” that is always with us is our flesh, but these voices tell us that the “real self” is somewhere deep inside, an ethereal spirit locked in a corporeal cage. The notion that the body, with all its effluvia and its frailties, is disgusting and offensive is deeply rooted in several strands of the Western tradition. And these strands all contribute to a contemporary culture in which self-denial becomes virtue. After all, to pick the anorectic example, a woman who starves herself to the point that her periods stop and her bowel movements become very infrequent has, in a very real sense, given herself an illusion of mastery and purity. If the body’s demands and emissions are dirty, then self-starvation becomes not only about self-denial but about ritualized cleansing and transcendence.

The whole host of unspoken taboos about the body – imbibed deeply without ever knowing – can suddenly activate with a glance, a comment, an experience.  Alienation from the body runs deep in our cultural experience – but alienation from the body is alienation from the self.

The Christian tradition teaches that God became incarnate in Jesus – that God was literally born into a person and experienced life as a person; Christian theology says that Jesus was fully human and fully divine.  To put it another way, Jesus the man of Nazareth, was a person who felt hungry, got cold or hot, sweated, ate food, farted, burped, shat and pissed, who felt sexual desire, whose body did what human bodies do – chances are good he got erections, had sexual thoughts, orgasms and lusted on occasion after someone known as Mary of Magdala.  In actual practice a great many Christians tend to gloss over or just plain avoid the implications of a fully human Jesus.  Jesus becomes the template onto which Christians project the idea of the perfect person – a kind of super Ken doll – always loving, compassionate, you can safely have a relationship with him, declare you love him, declare he loves you without fear of anything because a) he’s long dead and resurrected and gone to heaven and b) his body isn’t quite a real body so there’s no possible sexual component to him which makes him totally and completely safe.

Holy Week, with its stories and traditions, forces us to deal with the body.  Not just with the “body” as abstract concept, but with the real live human body in which we live.  You can’t go to a footwashing service without thinking about the body. 

All of our discomfort with ourselves and our own bodies.  I’ve written about the body in the past, about the way our culture teaches a deep distrust of the body and teaches us to be ashamed of natural bodily functions, but also treats any display of the body as inherently sexual:

Americans tend to respond strongly to nudity – often with shock, dismay, and horror.  I have heard Americans solemnly and seriously assert that allowing a child to see a naked adult is inherently sexually abusive; the practice of bathing or showering with one’s children is considered (marginally) acceptable up to a certain, usually quite young, age, after which it is considered outright taboo. 

In dressing and locker rooms, children are often shielded from viewing others by the bodies of their parents, who as often as not hide behind towels while changing . . .  The unclothed body, in American culture, is often considered inherently sexual and erotic.  When it comes to the body, especially the female body, our public stance tends to sexualize and eroticize the unclothed body.

The unclothed body of Jesus on the cross scares us – we know it’s not sexual, but we can’t look at the unclothed body without thinking of sex.  We want to hurry past the messiness of Holy Week and get right to the safety of the empty tomb and the risen Christ.  As we approach Easter, we hurry through Holy Week, our eyes averted from the body – riding the donkey, having its feet washed, eating a meal, being beaten then hung upon the cross – to get to the safe, empty tomb with the gleaming, unrecognizable Jesus.