Thinking on. I realise that i have spent a large part of this term railing against my university and the binds and rules that it as an establishment body asks me to adhere to. I guess this is what happens when you pick a rebel as your inspiration. Jesus has become a somewhat watered down rebel over the past century or so in art in Western culture, bizarrely pale complexioned, often blue eyed and blonde, generally he looks a bit wet, fit but wet. The Jesus i have encountered through research including deep meditation is nothing like that milksop. I don't think my Jesus is much like Tony Blair's or Theresa May's or the awful banker turned bishop, Justin Welby, who threw in his lot with the Conservatives at the last general election aware perhaps of how tied up the Church of England is with the moneyed elite. 
As I have walked the Via Dolorosa with Jesus these past few months i have found myself beside a man who took on the establishment, who spoke out against injustice, who was betrayed by Judas, who was betrayed again by Peter. I met the most celebrated women in his life, Mary his mother, and Mary Magdalen whose relationship with him is subject to debate. I met too his fearful father, not Joseph, tho' maybe Joseph, the man who married his mother but God the father. Who is this wicked character that would send his only son to suffer for the world ? Why do the strong always ask the weak to carry the load ? I think of priests buggering children, and those children silenced, carrying that rape as their crime, their sin. I think of the rich sitting on the backs of the poor. And i know that tho' i am not filthy rich like Branson or the Wetherspoons man, or the Tory cabinet, still my wealth, my wardrobe, my spanish strawberries, my kenyan green beans, my tea, my coffee, my so-on and so-on are the produce of someone else's underpaid labour. Is that right ? No. 
I came to the end of my stations meditation on Passion Sunday. The day given to mark Jesus riding in to Jerusalem to crowds lining his way, laying palm leaves before him so it is told. They wanted him to save them but he was only a man. The reason the images of the stations of the cross began in churches was because most parishioners did not have the money to spare to go on pilgrimage to Rome or Jerusalem and so these stood in their stead. I have been to see four sets in different churches, the fourth moved me to tears and i hope to return to look at them when England is open again. Journeying with these images has allowed me to feel the passage of christ's path to the cross. 
In Colm Toibin's Testament of Mary, which i wish i had a copy of, his mother gets thoroughly fed up with him. Its a reasonable maternal response to a son who is pushing his luck with the law and questioning and defying authority. Just as Jesus is depicted as being pretty fine with his suffering especially in recent years, his mother has also been made to be compliant and accepting. How convenient for the patriarchy as symbolised by God that these two take their punishment for existing so gently. 
Many years ago i made a nativity scene including, obviously, a Mary figure holding her baby, Jesus. As a link between my ASU unit and my SNU unit I asked Steve, one of the 3d workshop technicians, if she and another old made-by-me ornament could be printed on the 3d printer. One of the joys of this printer is that the objects can be sized up and down. Another is the scaffolding the object needs to be printed. Mary being fairly compact needed not so much, but the two figures in a sympathetic embrace needed loads. Why do i speak of these now, except as a link between my two units ? Why ? Because the scaffolding made me think about how much we take from the earth to support that which we raise above the earth whether that be high rise buildings, space travel or a billionaire lifestyle or aspiration to that lifestyle and worship of money. 
It seems to me that the bible is pretty clear that when man gets above himself and starts to live an insupportable life, God turns on man. Perhaps this is the moral of the story of Jesus. Here is a man named the son of God, as we all are sons or daughters of some kind of god i guess, if god is creation and not obliged to belong to a single faith or religion. This son of god, a man who had the courage to stand up and say "no", was prepared to die for his right to speak out. Why then are those who profess to follow him so abject in their worship of all that he seemed to abhor. Is the cross a choice we have to make ? 
Here as we stand at a crossroads, i am sure now that this virus will separate further humanity into those who believe that others should suffer for their comforts and those that don't. And of those that don't, those too will also divide in two as their response to catastrophes whatever they are. differs and leads them away from each other. Easter is close now. We as Jesus must prepare to carry our cross, the choice we make will be how we move into the future, so we need to choose wisely i think.