Into Holy Hands

It is Holy Saturday and I am quietly resting in the turn of the season, finished with the tensions of Lent and Holy Week, awaiting the dawn of Eastertide in the morning. Something shifted in me yesterday when I heard the words of Jesus: “Into your hands, I commit my spirit…it is finished.” I realized how much anxiety I had been holding these past 40 days and more. This year the pain and sin of the world has seems all the more present; the suffering of Jesus for the suffering of humankind has seemed more excruciating; the feeble words and deeds of the people of God have felt more futile. Yet even Jesus knows when the end of all this comes; poet and priest Malcolm Guite says,

This is ground zero, emptiness and space, with nothing left to say or think or do.

For me this is a relief, it has been done, everything that could be done. It is in the hands of God.

I love the images of the Holy Hands of God that are contained in the sacred texts that Jesus knew: the strong hands that created heaven and earth, the sustaining hands that the Psalmist trusted, the gentle hands that led little ones into ways of safety and peace, the loving hands on which are carved the names of the beloved ones. They epitomize the character of the Mystery we call God–trustworthy, capable, compassionate. Even as Jesus knew that God had given all things into his own hands as he washed the feet of those gathered in the upper room, and on the way to the cross, he knew that what seems like the end still belongs to God.

Yet the Holy Hands of God are not just a safe container for the griefs and sorrows and seemingly failed efforts of the world. The Hands of God are deft and creative agents of the new thing that will become clear at daybreak! There is Resurrection, a new imagining of Life! There will be new Light, new Energy, new Vision, new ways of being! And it is God’s doing, not mine. What will the Holy One bring as the new creation breaks forth?

The stories of Eastertide limn the new contours:

“Mary, do not hang on!” “Peace be to you! Receive the Spirit.” “Blessed who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” “Cast the net to the right side of the boat” “Feed my sheep.” “…what is that to you? follow me.” New words for a new reality!

And it is in God’s hands, hands that guide and teach us these new ways. I do not have to take up the bread of anxious toil again to try to figure out what the Resurrection means; the Spirit, God’s creative, hand-on presence, now lives in me and in the community to teach us everything we need to know and to empower our intentions to incarnate it. Easter shows me that there are no final defeats, that I do not need to give in to fear, that there is wildly hopeful and helpful intention that God has for  the world in which I can participate!

Let him easter in us/ be a dayspring to the dimness in us/ be a crimson cresseted east! Gerard Manley Hopkins

Amen! Hallelujah!