It sounds like a joke: “You know that film where Tom Hanks plays the ‘fixer’ for the Irish mafia in the Midwest? Never heard of it? Oh, it’s directed by the guy who directed the two Bond films,Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015) and features Paul Newman as the mobster, Daniel Craig as his spoiled son, and Jude law as a necro-pathic killer and photographer.”

During that first Holy Week everyone, it feels like, keeps asking Jesus “who are you?” “tell us plainly, are you the Christ?” "Who do you think you are?” An indeterminacy surrounds Jesus. In the brilliant obviousness of the mystery, we are indeterminate: who is he?

Why all this physical work? Isn’t it the case that what’s really important about Easter is the message of the simple Gospel? The idea? Has Easter become materialist? Didn’t Jesus come to liberate us from the crude trappings of the world and the flesh? Isn’t this the celebration of the victory of the spiritual over the physical?

The way we look at things matters just as much as, if not more than, the thing we are looking at. You can think of several anecdotal illustrations: the optical illusion (“is it a chalice or two people about to kiss?”); the Rorschach test (“what do you see in this inkblot?”); the fight between rivals (“he looked at me funny”); the offense between strangers on a bus (“hey, what are you lookin’ at?”).

Our impatience indicts us. We care little for “the fullness of time” —which is to say “eternity”. And the constant stopping-to-rest of the Lord of the Sabbath frustrates us. Such haste makes bad kings.

Both share in common a sharp reproach to all manner of disquiet and rapaciousness. Both speak to the kind of inner hunger that does not, in fact, desire satisfaction but only the distension of its appetite for an unqualified “more”. Hunger for the sake of hunger.

I was moved in this reading by the analogy that Putin-and-his-Plan models for leaders of communities who can also become so married to their visions for their community that they become blind to all else. Efficiency and Control are the two nodes in an endless feedback loop of imagined continual progress towards the ever-receding horizon of abstract power. And if this is true of leaders in general it is true of pastors in particular.

Remember Palm Sunday? “Hosanna” is what we cried, joining ourselves to the memory of the crowds that welcomed Christ as the Son of David; as the triumphant fulfilment of Ps. 118. And then, we hung them on Holy Week, just as our Lord was hung on a cross. We watched them dry, wilt, wither. They turned brittle in their battle against the passing of the year. They reminded us (or, at least, were supposed to remind us) of the story in which we find ourselves.

Elbows, hair, eyes, shades of melanin, larynx, colon, earlobes, fingernails, big-toes, and all the rest of it. God made this thing this way for his glory and called it good.

Carnival is a word composed to two other Latin words: caro [meat/flesh] + levare [to lift, to remove]. It is the count-down to Ash Wednesday when all of the “meats, sweets, and treats” are suspended, waved between heaven and earth like the shoulder of the ox in Leviticus. They aren’t gone, they are raised, lifted-up into the glory cloud of God before being given back to us as a better and more glorious meal. But, of course, while we may understand the divine purposes of their annual suspension during Lent, we still miss them.