Holy Week Reflections on Trans Day of Visibility

There's a detail in the Gospel of Mark I keep coming back to during Holy Week. Each evening that final week, Jesus left Jerusalem and walked back to Bethany to sleep. He didn't stay in the city overnight. He went back and forth. Temple in the morning. Arguments in the afternoon. And then the long walk back, probably tired, probably processing, knowing what the week was building toward.

I don't know why that image lodges in me the way it does. Maybe because it's so human. Or maybe because it makes Holy Week feel less like sacred tableau and more like someone living through a series of difficult, necessary days, one foot in front of the other.

I had one of those days today.

I had just arrived to the church office in the morning when I got a message asking me to head to the Boise City Hall. There, we gathered for a spur-of-the-moment flag-lowering ceremony as the mayor and city council lowered the Pride Flag outside the building. Just minutes before, the governor of Idaho signed a law banning the flag under an "emergency order." An emergency. That word is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and none of it reflects an actual emergency (unless the emergency is that queer people keep existing, and keep being visible, and some people in power find that intolerable).

There was something about standing there — clergy, council members, neighbors — watching that flag come down, that felt like a kind of witness. It didn't feel like a protest, exactly. It felt like sadness. It felt like sorrow. And being there to witness the flag lowering felt like a refusal to pretend the moment wasn't happening.

From there, I went back to the office to work on some things for the (many) worship services later this week. But before long, it was time to head to the front steps of the state capitol to join the crowd in celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility. People held signs. People held each other. The dome of the building rose behind us, indifferent and imposing, the way government buildings tend to look when you're standing outside one with a grievance.

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And then, after a quick hour in a coffee shop for some 6:00pm caffeination (which my body paid for later in a lack of restful sleep), I drove to a training session for nonviolent resistance — where I stood alongside so many others who are grieving the many harmful bills being passed in our state legislature this year.

Somewhere around mid-afternoon, driving between events, I found myself thinking: this is the sort of thing Jesus would've found himself doing in the week that later became known as 'holy.'

Not a flattering comparison to make of oneself. I want to be clear about that. I'm a white cisgender pastor driving my dream car between events I've chosen to attend. The distance between me and the occupied people of first-century Judea is vast. The stakes are not the same.

But the shape of what Jesus was doing that week? That part landed differently for me this afternoon.

He entered Jerusalem with a demonstration. He started flipping tables over, an act of direct confrontation with both religious and economic power. He argued publicly with officials who were trying to trap him. He taught in the temple courts, in public, surrounded by people who were watching to see if he'd go far enough to get arrested. He ate with his friends. He wept.

Holy Week is not a week Jesus spent preparing for a liturgy. It's a week he spent doing things — specific, embodied, sometimes risky things — in a specific place, at a specific moment, in response to specific conditions of injustice and suffering. The holiness wasn't something that descended from outside. It was present in the particularity of his acts.

I'm not saying the flag lowering ceremony was the cleansing of the temple. I'm not saying I'm Jesus. (My wife would have plenty of notes to prove that.)

What I'm saying is that with each passing year in Idaho, I have a better sense of why Jesus wanted to start flipping tables over. I'm saying that Holy Week observances are hitting differently this year. I'm saying that Holy Week seems less like a week of somber religious observance and more like a week filled with the sorts of things Jesus actually stood for.

Holy Week looks a lot less like candlelight and a lot more like showing up. It looks like showing up. It looks like standing with people who are being told they don't belong. It looks like learning how to resist, nonviolently, with your body and your voice, what power is trying to do to your neighbors.

And then driving home. And maybe sleeping in Bethany.

There's grief in this week, for me and for a lot of people I know and love. Grief about what's happening in this state. Grief that visibility itself has become a legislative target. Grief that we are still, still, still having to argue for the dignity of people who have always been here and always will be. People who have always been beloved and always will be.

But there's also something I can only describe as aliveness — the particular kind that comes from showing up to hard things with other people who are also showing up. Something that feels, on the best days, like the Kingdom of God is not only a future hope but a present possibility breaking through.

Jesus walked those two miles back to Bethany every night. And then he got up and went back.

​There's a reason we call this week holy. I think it's that one.

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