To God’s Beloved People,

Every Lent, I have a tradition of reading the book “Lamb” by Christopher Moore. Now before you take this as a blanket recommendation, please know that it is a very unorthodox take on the life of Jesus. The premise is that Jesus (known in the book as Josh)  instructs his best friend, Biff, to do “all the sins” so that Jesus can watch & know what they are like, without committing those sins himself because: he’s the Son of God and isn’t allowed to sin. Their adventures take place in the years of their childhood & Jesus’ public ministry.

It’s pretty crude, to be honest, what with Biff being really extravagant about some of the sins he commits for Josh, but if you like a bit of gritty realness in your novels & are comfortable with earthy characters: pick it up! If not: maybe just finish reading this letter and call it good.

The reason I read this book every Lent is because Moore’s depiction of the events of Holy Week abandons all the chaos, high-jinks, and crudity of the previous chapters and instead focuses in on the very real, honest, searing moments of Biff realizing his best friend is going to die, and there is nothing that Biff can do to stop it. Every year it stops me in my tracks because these pages make Jesus so human—a man who had friends, who had people he loved, who had people who didn’t want him to die (“Get behind me, Satan!”), people who’s lives were devastated by Jesus’ death.

The distance of centuries, the familiarity of the story, the sanitizing of religion has in some ways separated us from the events of Holy Week. We know the end, so the beginning has lost its impact. When we want to really “feel” Holy Week, we may indulge in gruesomely detailed descriptions of the process of crucifixion, but even that functions almost as entertainment because we know things that the people who lived through the events did not—we know how the horror ends! We know Jesus comes back! We know about all of it—the tomb, the morning, the women, the soldiers, the angels, the gardener, the road to Emmaus. All of it.

Biff’s experience of Holy Week makes it real for me in a way that nothing else has—in fact in the book, he commits suicide before Easter Sunday, unable to even consider continuing to live without Josh.  Christopher Moore renders Jesus’ incarnation real in a way that nothing else does—and for me, is well-worth the trip through the front end of the book to get there.  I see the events of Holy Week through Biff’s eyes. Feel his fear, his pain, his shock, his anger, his despair—taking me on a journey of deep gratitude that Christ has done this for me. And for you.

It's easy to go on auto-pilot. It’s easy to get in the rhythm of Holy Week. It’s easy to get caught up in the rush of the Three Days. My prayer for you all as we finish Lent and move into Holy Week is that something shocks us out of our complacency. That we see or hear or feel something that brings the “for you-ness” of Holy Week home in a way that takes your breath away and makes your knees weak. That you will understand in a entirely different way that God became human in Jesus Christ, for us. Our faith is not theoretical. It is real. Living and active. Provided by the God who gave himself for us.

Thanks be to God.

Bishop Kristen