You’ve Got to be Kidding Me

One phrase that often pops into my head when I get frustrated is, “You’ve got to be kidding me…”  Like when something breaks or doesn’t work as it should. Or when I pour a lot of energy into something and then don’t see much (if any) result. Or when I have some kind of interpersonal conflict with someone and I have no idea what’s wrong.

“You’ve got to be kidding me…”

This is the sentiment of the readings today. We hear some poignant lines from Isaiah, “I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength…” And then Jesus, with his “friends” for the Passover meal realizes that  (at least) one of them has likely been plotting against him and that some of the people he’d been with day after day in the temple area were plotting behind his back and never said anything to him directly.

Ugh. For me it just brings up a sickening feeling.

It just plain stinks to feel like we’ve invested time and energy into something only to have it seemingly fall apart (or undone by someone else). Or to feel betrayed by someone (or a group of people) or to know that they’d been talking about you behind your back and did not have the respect, courage or decency to just talk to you directly.

I know as a counselor, these are some of the hardest life events for people to make sense of.  We wonder, “Why did they do this?” And these wounds often take some time to heal.

We might all have stories we could tell that fit into the themes of today’s readings.

Holy Week offers us a chance to sit with some very difficult life events and unfinished spiritual business (What could be better!?!). 

I often think of what I imagine were Jesus’ frustration and discouragement that he had to come to grips with somehow. He spent YEARS teaching and healing and loving and gathering and feeding and traveling – just to have some of the people closest to him turn on him? He spent countless hours teaching and talking in public spaces to people who feigned respect just to have people secretly talk about him or plot behind his back?

As my college roommate used to say, “Thank you very little!”

The reality is that there will probably never be a satisfying answer to the “why” questions that we seek. People can be petty, vindictive, jealous, fearful, shallow, sneaky and outright mean (and that’s on our good days!). We all can.

Learning to release the pain and hurt associated with what others have done to us is a difficult process. Jesus shows us a way, however.

Maybe for today we offer God all of our “unfinished business” with the people (and institutions) that have hurt us, betrayed us, misunderstood us, talked behind our backs, plotted against us, disrespected us or demeaned us. We may not be prepared to forgive them yet, and that’s OK.  Just offer them to Jesus. He knows what it is like to face and release this kind of hurt. Let him minister to your heart.

(And on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps we can take a little extra time today for meditation and reflection on his legacy – in our country and in our own lives. He, too, understood the pain and hurt of rejection from people close to him and also experiencced serious self-doubt at times about whether all of his life and work were making the changes that he hoped would come about…yet he persisted in his mission and had to work through everything we’re talking about today…)