God looked down from the holy height, from heaven the Lord looked at the earth, to hear the groans of the prisoners, to set free those who were doomed to die. (Psalm 102:19-20)

Today's reflection is by Joshua Anderson, member of the Lutheran Episcopal Ministry at MIT 

 Time and again in the gospel readings during Lent, Jesus has stepped in and broken apart the prison of societal roles based on people’s background and past choices. The Samaritan woman at the well, the man born blind, the woman whose pain lasted 12 years and who “had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors” (Mark 5:36, NIV). In disregarding or destroying society’s expectation, he brought these lonely, outcast people yearning for release into a relationship of equals and restoring them to full membership in their communities. There are times in my life when I’ve felt imprisoned by someone else’s narrative for what a person with my background and my characteristics should be or do. Like unnamed crowds who lived around the characters I mentioned, people around me would not have noticed that I felt trapped or would have felt that there was little chance of successfully articulating a new narrative. The disciples confront a similar feeling of helplessness in the face of society’s narrative as they watch Jesus’s arrest and trial. They didn’t know how to rescue Jesus from the role that powers benefitting from the Roman Imperial occupation had fit him into. Jesus’s death at the hands of the inexorable Roman Imperial system seems to confirm that the world has won. That there is no way to rescue this man who called his friends to live abundant lives of radical equality and justice from the literal and metaphorical prison in which society held him in his last days. That he will never get the experience he gave to so many others of being lifted up to a relationship of radical equality. Unlike the disciples, we know that God’s work on Easter is coming.