The Cross and the Transformation of Desire - Meditations for Holy Week on the Drama of Love and Betrayal

Sep 28, 2026

Upload by Bulrr

Explores Holy Week as an invitation to enter the Passion that transforms love and betrayal. Drawing on Isaiah and Matthew 21, it contrasts being invited versus already consigned to pain, grief, and despair in the vineyard of love and violence. It traces how familiar narratives and depleted Christian meaning can yield aversion, then insists redemption is resolved through waiting, undergoing, and entering the mystery rather than through argument. The text reframes divine judgment and divine love through Jesus’ apparent betrayal, unravelling, and cruciform reversal, culminating in the cornerstone rejected yet exalted.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryReligion & Spirituality

FormatPDF

Pages32

Reading Time1 h 21 min

AccessFree to download

Invitation

Reading: Matthew 21.33-46

Betrayal

Love

Horror

Humiliation

Forgiveness

Sacrifice

Death

Easter Day

grove spiritualThe Cross and theTransfomationof DesireThe Drama of Love and Betrayal Sarah Coakley Digitized by the Internet Archivein 2019 The Cross and theTransformationof Desire Meditations for Holy Week onthe Drama of Love and Betrayal Sarah Coakley Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity,University of Cambridge andHonorary Canon of Ely Cathedral Contents 1 Invitation……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………3 2 Gift……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………5 3 Betrayal………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………8 4 Love …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………12 5 Horror………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………14 6 Humiliation…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………16 7 Forgiveness…………………………………………………………………………………………………………18 8 Sacrifice……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………20 9 Death ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………24 10 Easter Day…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………26 Acknowledgments The Grove Spirituality Group wishes to express its gratitude to Professor Coakley, to the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral and to the Editorial Board of Fulcrum, for permission to edit and publish a reduced-length version of Professor Coakley's Holy Week and Easter addresses given in Salisbury Cathedral in 2013, the original text of which may be found on the Fulcrum website: http://www. fulcrum-anglican.org.uk The cover image is copyright C Grove Books Ltd Copyright Sarah Coakley 2014 First Impression February 2014 ISSN 0262-799X ISBN 978185174 892 1 # Invitation Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard. Isaiah 5.1 # Reading:Matthew 21.33-46 At this opening of Holy Week perhaps there is only one thing that matters:itis a question of invitation. Shall I accept the invitation this year to attend this drama of love and betrayal?Shall I bring to it all the anguish and ecstasy of my own loves and betrayals?Or shall I stand at a safe distance?Perhaps I can just be part of the chorus anddo some suitable garment-rending for the purposes of‘purgation of pity andfear'?¹Or is something deeper required—something that costs not less thaneverything?I hover at the edge,uncertain at the alternatives set before me. Some of us do not need to be invited,because this is a place to which we havealready been consigned.We have no choice.We are already at a place of pain,grief or loss.We are already in the vineyard of love and violence,where lifeand death contend,and meaning itself seems threatened with obliteration.The apparent contradiction of divine love and divine judgment has becomeunbearable to us.There is seemingly no escape from the stuckness of despairthat we already know too well.We are deep in the agony of the Passion,likeit or not. For others there is a loss of meaning in a different sense.The story is just toofamiliar.The regular sight of violence and death on the evening news doesnot even put us off our TV dinner.Our Christian meaning system has lostboth its power and its glory:we subscribe to it with our lips,but when askedto go up again to Jerusalem we find ourselves,this year,too tired,too busyand—underlyingly—too fearful to face it.There is indeed an escape via aver-sion—and we can choose to take it. Or perhaps we sense—this year?—that we stand at the edge of some newdiscovery,either because Jesus beckons us for the first time into the deepermeaning of his death,or because our narrative repetitions have broken downeven our most resistant inertia.Now the waters close over our heads and westand with and in the narrative of the mystery of redemption in all the dark- ness and hopelessness of those first disciples who loved Jesus just as muchas they also betrayed him.In this third way the pulsing chronology of despairand new hope are vitally related because they press us inexorably forward.The unbearable contradiction of divine judgment and divine love is to beresolved,not

FAQs

What does Holy Week invite a reader to do?

Holy Week is presented as an invitation to enter a Passion that ends all dramas, not merely to watch or interpret a drama from a safe distance.

How do the text’s readings from Isaiah and Matthew relate to desire and betrayal?

Isaiah is used to describe the primal love of God for Israel, while Matthew shows Jesus recalling these lessons with a new twist: the vineyard’s final betrayal culminates in the Son’s murder.

Why does the text reject resolving the crisis through argument alone?

The resolution is said not to come from clever argument or anticipated theological answers, but by entering, waiting, and undergoing the days of Passion and salvation.

Sep 28, 2026

Upload by Bulrr