Holy Darkness
Holy Week sounds deeply spiritual, doesn’t it? It sounds like a week characterised by tranquility, reflection, depth, ascetism and piety. For many religious Christians throughout the world, perhaps; but it wasn’t so for Jesus.
The Passion of Jesus was really the culmination of a season of crisis. It wasn’t merely a trivial crisis that he went through. It was a life crisis that put him and his friends to the test. Two of the main things that were tested throughout this crisis were friendship and loyalty.
Crisis truly has a way of testing us and bringing to light the deepest motivations of our hearts. The deepest forms of selfishness emerge in the face of a crisis. The strongest anger lashes out in the face of a crisis. The most lethal vengeance is executed in the face of a crisis. Crisis mercilessly leaves us with no way to hide the secrets of our hearts. If on a normal day we are able to camouflage ourselves with props which exhibit deep devotion towards God, loyalty towards friends, and selflessness towards humanity, the true state of our hearts comes to light when crisis hits.
And so it was with those people who called themselves friends of Jesus.
When crisis befell them, very quickly, betrayal and abandonment took over. They started scattering themselves away from him and denying that they ever knew him. Understandably, they needed to survive in a world where reputation and security mattered. And perhaps, if this Messiah wasn’t strong enough to come up against the diabolical powers ruling the land, if he was going to suffer a disgraceful fate, then they would be justified for moving on with life and acknowledging that they had placed their bets on the wrong horse.
So, yes… after the deeply moving episode of the washing of feet, the vows to remain faithful to him even unto death, and the partaking of his body and his blood, they conveniently failed him and themselves when a crisis hit soon after. So much for all the claims to friendship and undivided loyalty.
Holy Week is a week of crisis. It challenges us to confront ourselves with the deepest motivations of our hearts. If all throughout the year, we’ve been professing religious claims of loyalty, piety, service and sacrifice, Holy Week confronts us with what we are actually capable of doing to God, to one another, and to ourselves when a crisis hits.
May we not be too quick to submerge ourselves into the resurrection joy of Easter. Before any of us actually thinks we’re already Christian enough in God’s eyes, let the reality of the Holy Week confront us and linger a little longer - so that we may see the true state of our hearts.
And if there, we see and acknowledge the capacity for bitterness, for abandonment, for betrayal, and for self-motivation that lies within us, this may just be a definitive moment of conversion for some of us.
To friendship...


I admire you deeply for your courage.
It’s easier to be nice than to love people.
Marriage is a reflection of the divine friendship of God. It is ordained that the joining of the lives of man and wife reflect the self-giving nature of the Holy Trinity.
Tonight, I've just been reminded of how you've amazingly chosen to love me despite knowing the many things you'll have to surrender for the cause of the Kingdom.
“I’ve known you for so many years, and yet you seem to have become closer to this other newer friend more than me.”
One of the realities I've noticed in the past years of living in a community which is intent on living out the life of the Kingdom is that people who don't consider themselves part of the community tend to form all sorts of perceptions about us. These perceptions range from those which look at us with great admiration as if we're exalted heroes of the faith to those which perceive us to be the disdainful freaks we admittedly sometimes make ourselves to look like.
We are created in the imago Dei (“image of God”). For centuries, it has been a point of debate concerning what the imago Dei really means. One speculation after another emerged from the time of the Patristics (who distinguished between the “image” and the “likeness” and posited that the image was retained at the fall but the likeness was lost) right up to the time of the Protestant Reformers (who held that both the “image” and the “likeness” are synonymous and that this image had been distorted at the fall).
Whom do you eat with? The table is a symbol of fellowship. It is where people sit and talk with one another, telling one another stories about their lives and how they’ve come thus far in their journey.
“Don’t let them get too close to you, otherwise they’ll step all over you. Always maintain a safe distance.”
You're doing something to me that no philosophy, no theory, no field of thought in all its splendour of abstraction has been able to do to me... you're making me feel. All throughout this life and faith journey, all these years, I've been fixated on how God must think and how we must think like him. Now you're driving me to experience how God must feel. You're driving me to a measure of vulnerability deeper than I could ever imagine I would experience.
Do you often meet people who seem to be interested in nothing more than small talk? They seem genuinely interested to be in touch with you, but the relationship often revolves around small talk. And even when you try to steer the conversation into something “deeper” by trying to talk about matters that matter, your efforts are flippantly ignored or pushed aside, and the small talk continues.
I've just returned from a weekend on
The gift of relationships is also a discipline of balance.
Me:
The contents of this post is a reply to Irene's letter: 
Without friendship, I have no theology to speak about. All I have is an ivory-tower conjecture of what God must be like. There will be no collective experience of God's presence in community, or how God works to shape my life through relational agents that I call friends. The Christian faith has always been a communal faith.
The implications of the recovery of friendship in the Christian life are inexhaustible. The previous posts that point out these implications constitute only a minute sampling of these implications. I invite you to reflect further on what this understanding of friendship might mean for you in your own faith journey.
It is difficult to find the friendship of God revealed in scripture when it is read in the way we have been taught all these years. It is not a problem with scripture itself, but rather, a problem with the lenses that have been given to us in our reading of scripture.
"Church" is a community of friends that is formed by virtue of its people being committed to following Jesus together. We follow Jesus, the Friend. And by virtue of our following him, we are a community of friends.