It seems every year I am learning something new about Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent (the 40 days leading up to Easter). That’s how slow a learner I am. So when someone asked me this week whether I’m ‘observing’ Lent I wasn’t quite sure what it entailed exactly. Therefore, I didn’t respond immediately.

But I attended Ash Wednesday service at our church this week as I’ve been doing the last few years. Liturgical services with standard repetitive congregational responses, like enforced rote learning, tend to put me off. But the depth of meaning, gravity and solemnity of Lent engenders a Holy sacredness to Ash Wednesday that only a liturgical service is able to capture. I find myself appreciating these sacred worship times more and more. This year I learnt about the relationship between prayer and a broken heart.

I decided thereafter to spend this Lent season reflecting on the shadows that followed Jesus Christ to that awful, necessary Cross.

The Shadow of Inner Agony

When one is on death’s bed, what goes through in one’s mind? So much to say, so little time left; so much to do, no time left to do them. When all’s well, one seldom considers time’s limitations. But when death becomes imminently close, we wish time would stop ticking until all that we need and/or want to get done or say is complete. But life seldom, if ever, comes in neat packages.

I remember distinctly the agony of my last conversation with my second brother two days before he passed away. I hated the telephone at that moment. We were thousands of miles apart. The anger that such a crucial time of anguish was reliant upon an impersonal instrument created a well of frustration within my soul. But I clung on to that phone line for dear life. It carried our voices to each other one last time. It conveyed the deepest things we yearned to share. His mind and body ravaged by cancer, my once funny university professor brother who loved historical facts despaired in halting words, “Liza, I can’t remember anything. I am losing my mind! I love you.” “I love you too, Bob,” was my tear-filled echo. So much to say and do, no more time left.

I wonder what was on Jesus’ mind when he knew that his death was just around the corner. The inner agony of leaving behind his beloved ones – family and friends, disciples and followers – to face the tumult and trauma of what they would soon be experiencing must have been palpable. No more time to assuage Judas Iscariot’s guilt, no more time to help sort his disciples’ confusion and bafflement about what he was telling them, no time to sooth his beloved mother’s pain and sorrow, no time to dissuade the religious leaders from their misguided mission. So much to say and do, no more time left.

The mental and emotional inner agony would have totally worn a lesser person down. And what about the thought of the physical agony of torture and the certainty of crucifixion? So much to say and do, no more time left. What did Jesus do?

“On reaching the place, he said to them, “Pray that you will not fall into temptation.” He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” (Luke 22:40-44)

Jesus took to prayer. And he urged his closest friends and disciples (Peter, James, and John) to turn to their heavenly Father. The shadow of his inner agony was so intense that “his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” as he poured it all out before his beloved Father. His heart was broken, his spirit spent, his human will on the verge of overwhelming him.

Alone in the eye of the storm - the struggle of his own will vis-a-vis that of God’s greater will – Jesus turned to prayer. There the shadow of his inner agony was displayed and dispelled in the sacred presence of the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent heavenly Father. Thereafter, he was strengthened and able to stand tall and stride out saying “Rise, let us go! Here comes my betrayer!” (Matthew 26:46)

In 2012, once again death visited our family. Once again, I hung on to the telephone as my sister clung on to dear life on the other side of the world. Her vital organs seized skin-tight by a fast-moving disease, she could hardly speak. In the wee hours of the morning, her son watched with despair the wasting away of his mother’s body before his very eyes. Led by the Holy Spirit to call, I was surprisingly connected straight-away to her. And in a broken voice racked with grief, I sang the poignant words of Psalm 23.

“Thank you, I love you,” she whispered back at the end of my tremulous singing. It was our unspoken prayer to each other in our final moments together.

The shadow of our inner agony was displayed and dispelled by those last precious sacred words we spoke to each other over the sound-waves of the telephone line in those few critical minutes.

When death is imminent and time together availed only in nano-seconds, what do we wish to display and dispel to loved ones we are leaving behind?

This Lent season I am learning that prayer is mysteriously and powerfully able to quell our deepest of inner agonies. I am ‘observing’ Jesus’ last days to better prepare me to live my remaining days on earth well.

Shalom