Powerless

Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.

– Luke 22:42

The Wild Reed’s 2024 Holy Week series continues with a second excerpt from Joyce Rupp’s 2023 book Jesus, Companion in My Suffering: Reflections for the Lenten Journey.

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How agonizing for Jesus to admit an inability to sidestep his coming Passion and death. In the past, he demonstrated so much strength as he guided his ministry and life. Now he humbly submits and acknowledges that he cannot change this dreadful situation. And so, in the last hours of his physical life, Jesus again enters fully into our human condition.

Whether we want to admit it or not, none of us has complete rule over how our lives unfold. We try everything possible to preserve our self-reliance and be in control. We do our utmost to make things turn out the way we want – only to find that at some point we, too, are unable to have our journey evolve in a way that completely satisfies us.

Author Chris Anderson reflects on this reality in Light When It Comes. He suggests that powerlessness can be a source of profound personal transformation: “Sooner or later we have to face the suffering and emptiness and apparent randomness of the world and of our powerlessness before it. And until then, we can’t be healthy. That’s the paradox. Until we admit our need, we can never be happy. And that’s what Christ did. He embraced the emptiness so completely and lovingly he transformed it forever. . . . The story of Jesus is the story of the letting go and the giving up we have to do every day of our lives.”


Vulnerable Leader,
your ability to admit to powerlessness
gives me the courage to acknowledge my own.
When it is time to release what I cannot control,
be at my faltering side. Strengthen my intention
to yield what is impossible for me to change.


Today: I unite what I cannot change with the experience of Jesus.

– Joyce Rupp
Excerpted from Jesus, Companion in My Suffering:
Reflections for the Lenten Journey
Ave Maria Press, 2023
pp. 98-99

NEXT: Feeling Abandoned


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• In This In-Between Time . . . of Both Loss and Promise
• The Two Entwined Events of the Easter Experience
• “To Die and So to Grow”
• The Way of the Wounded Warrior
• Suffering and Redemption
• A God With Whom It is Possible to Connect
• Jesus and the Art of Letting Go
• Within the Mystery, a Strange and Empty State of Suspension
• An Expression of Human Solidarity
• No Other Way

Image: BeardyRanksArt.