In early January, I experienced whiplash for the first time. I was on my way home from the office and merging onto the bypass here in Charlottesville. Merging is the wrong word. I was waiting behind two other cars, inching up the on-ramp when someone slammed into my car from behind. I pulled over, got out, and was surprised to discover that the police were already on the scene. It took me a full minute or so to realize that it was a cop who had hit me. After gathering my composure, it was kind of nice to have the shoe on the other foot for once, law enforcement-wise.
Whiplash, as you probably know, is the rapid back and forth movement of the neck as caused by a collision. Muscles reflexively seize up, which can be painful. I’m happy to report that I’m fine and that the car, after a trip to the body shop, is good as new(-ish). Still, the accident was significant enough to cast Holy Week in a different light this year.
Even if you haven’t suffered physical whiplash before, I bet you’ve experienced the metaphorical kind. Have you ever gone from up to down in the same week? The same day/hour? Rapidly changing circumstances can produce whiplash but so can rapidly changing emotions. Sometimes I wonder if whiplash is simply the nature of our inner life. It’s certainly the nature of mine. A wise friend said to me once, “The thing about you, Dave, is that you’re a yo-yo; your ups are up, and your downs are down.” He was 100% right. And it’s not something to brag about. This yo-yo-ness makes me hard to live with, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
What I’m trying to say is that, for most of us, life isn’t defined by balance or steadiness so much as ricochet. And that ricochet, whether it be internal or external, hurts.
Holy Week might as well be called Whiplash Week. We move from the joyful celebration of Palm Sunday, to the deepest despair of Good Friday, then back to the elation of Easter in quick succession. There is nothing mild or moderate about these events. The pendulum swings fiercely.
Think of it from the disciples’ perspective: they enter the city of Jerusalem to great fanfare. Crowds shout “Hosanna” and lay down their palms in the street, the way they would for king. Yet Jesus almost immediately pours cold water on their excitement, reminding them that he is about to die. The twelve then watch as he is arrested, after which they scatter in fear that they’ll be lumped in with their teacher. They must have been both terrified and disappointed in the extreme. These men had given up careers and homes to follow Jesus, and now it appeared all to be for nothing. For his part, Jesus expressed little to no interest in defending himself, submitting to Roman authority and then going silent in front of Pilate. Highest hopes to darkest fears in a matter of hours.
The people on the outside, AKA the crowd around Jesus, fare no better than the insiders. We watch as they give a masterclass in ravenous groupthink, turning from Hail Him to Nail Him in a few short days and demonstrating that the human mania for punishment was alive and well long before Jack Dorsey got that Twitter twinkle in his eye.
How do we account for this whiplash of attitude, other than as part of the fickleness that runs through every heart? My sense is that they turned on Jesus as soon as they realized he was not the savior they wanted. Like you and me, the people in that crowd wanted a God who would solve their circumstances. They were jonesing for a political savior to restore their power and liberate them from Roman rule. They were happy to exalt Jesus as long as they believed his ultimate aim was to exalt them — in the manner and timing that they wanted to be exalted.
Thankfully our man had other plans.
If there is a hierarchy to the problems we face in life, those that relate to governments and economies are secondary. They’re important — hugely so! — but they’re also more easily addressed. Our ultimate problems are existential. By which I mean death, sin, suffering, and evil. Thankfully that’s the level of trouble where Jesus focuses his attention and rescue. He does not stay on the surface of human need but ventures beneath the skin.
In his exquisite new book Zero at the Bone, poet Christian Wiman writes about his beloved dog Mack. He describes Mack as “a black-and-white mutt who looks like a black lab crammed into the body of a beagle.” Christian and his wife got Mack from a shelter in Alabama when he was a few years old, and he had been a part of their family ever since. When Mack starts to experience some health issues, they take him to the veterinarian’s office. The vet makes an incidental finding in the course of his investigations. Mack, it turns out, has a bullet in him. Wiman writes:
I can’t overstate how disturbing this news was to us. It’s not just the obvious disgust: to think of some miserable man taking aim at this utterly docile dog and blasting away… What really disturbed us, though, and left us stunned and tearful is that he’d been carrying around this memento of that violent moment for all these years. All the life we had lived with Mack [including their daughters’ birth, Christian’s bouts with cancer, and several cross-country moves], he was dragging around unspeakable pain.
The pain is unspeakable, Wiman observes, not only because dogs cannot verbalize such things but because they actively hide it. At least, tough dogs like Mack do. The poet cannot help but see the illustrative possibilities of his dog’s predicament:
There is not a person reading these words, there is not a friend or family member from whom you feel utterly estranged, who does not have, festering somewhere, a bullet in them.
Holy Week not only depicts the devastating whiplash of life ‘under the sun,’ it reveals the bullet at the heart of human existence. Beneath the oscillations, there is a pain that each of us carries. A darkness which infects our days, gets into the blood, and eventually kills us. The Bible calls it sin.
Jesus does not turn away from that darkness. Unlike you and me, who hide our symptoms and blame others for our pain, who sometimes blast away at those around us or make a run for it when the going gets too tough. Jesus is unwavering in facing the darkness. He does not yo-yo as he follows it all the way to the bottom. All the way to hell.
Ultimately, this bullet requires more than better coping techniques. It must be dealt with. Mack the dog cannot expel the shell inside him by sheer force of will, any more than you or I can. We need a savior to accomplish this. No, not the kind we instinctively want but the kind that God in his mercy sent us. This one T.S. Eliot calls “the wounded surgeon,” who deals with the bullet, yes, by taking one himself.
Or as Wiman writes, in true Good Friday fashion, “It’s a wonder Jesus didn’t shatter from the sheer pressure of all those unspeakable pains around him. But then, eventually, I guess he did.”
COMMENTS
5 responses to “The Bullet Inside of Whiplash Week”
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… he gave up his spirit.
Amazing timing for me to read this now. Thank you
Dave – JUST the right way to enter Good Friday and Easter morning – THANKS!
Beautiful. Thank you.
Thank you for this message.