Lenten Meditation Number 24: Fear

 

Readings:  Phil 2:5-8

Matt 26:36-41

What do you fear most? Snakes? Spiders? The dark? Being attacked and beaten up? Being in constant pain? Death? We all have fears of one sort or another that we have to deal with. We may try to push them out of sight and get on with life, or we may be overwhelmed by them and find they interfere with our lives. But fear is also there in order to help us, to keep us safe.

Too little and we get hurt;

too much and we are paralysed –

so we fear the dark,

the assailant,

fire, water, malevolence,

the unknown.

 

We fear our inner darkness too;

our own ability to harm and

the consequences of our actions.

Too little and we could go very wrong,

too much and we are paralysed.

 

The fear of God?

The great unknown,

all powerful Judge and Lord of Hosts?

Too little and we disregard

his righteousness and justice,

to our own harm:

too much and we disregard

his love and goodness

and are paralysed by despair.

 

And the fear of death?

We all face it,

The unknown, inevitable,

and final experience of life,

from which there is no coming back.

It is sometimes so sudden that there are no good-byes,

sometimes so prolonged and painful, could we endure it?

We are afraid.

What can we do about our fears? During Holy Week we try and enter again into the experiences of Jesus and the disciples during that first Holy Week two thousand years ago. We know the disciples were suddenly thrown into great fear and they all fled as Jesus was arrested. But was Jesus himself afraid? Was it fear that made him pray so intensely in the Garden? “My Father, if it is possible let this cup pass from me.” Then when he woke the disciples and complained that they had fallen asleep instead of keeping vigil with him, he said, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Was he talking from his own experience? He was fully human we believe, so surely he would have felt afraid to carry through what God was asking him to do. Yet he went through with it.

We tend to think that Jesus could do it because he was God incarnate. It was the God side of him, as it were, that enabled him to face death on the cross. Maybe Paul saw how he was able to do it when he wrote to the Philippians that Jesus “emptied himself, ….and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on the cross.”(Phil 2:7,8) Jesus didn’t cling to any of his own desires and status, but put his Father and others first, so he didn’t desperately try to save himself above all else.

Paul followed in his footsteps and gave up everything to spread the good news about Jesus. He endured persecution, imprisonment, being beaten up and left for dead. None of has been called upon to endure so much. He seems to be impervious to it all, yet he also became discouraged and afraid. We know this, because we read that God sent him a vision in Corinth, after he thought only rejection and suffering was awaiting him, and told him “do not be afraid… for I am with you.”  (Acts 18: 9)

We will always have fear because it is a basic human instinct, but remembering two things may help us deal with it: firstly, we are new creatures in Christ who have emptied ourselves of the old self and secondly, we now have the Holy Spirit in us, to give us all the courage we need.