Until a few weeks ago, I was part of the clergy team at Coventry Cathedral, where my favourite place to pray was the Chapel of Christ in Gethsemane. It is separated from the retro choir by an iron grille shaped as a crown of thorns, and behind the small stone altar glitters a huge mosaic of the angel of the agony. That angel dwarfs even the tallest who stand there and the cup of suffering the angel bears seems big enough to contain all the pain of the world.
To preside there, and to lift the chalice at the point of consecration is to stand very firmly amid the tide of God's loving purposes worked out through history.
But in contrast to the glittering splendour of the angel on the other wall there is a tangled mess of greyness, another less glamorous mosaic that depicts a heap of sleeping disciples who are so easy to overlook that it's often necessary to take visitors up behind the altar if they are to recognise them at all.
They might as well not be there it seems.
Their presence adds no more to the art work than did the men themselves to the outcome of events on that first Maundy Thursday. Everything that needs to happen is played out as Christ wrestles with just what it means to surrender his own will to the will of his Father. The sleepong disciples are irrelevant
Except, perhaps, for people like us.
You see, that is the Chapel where I have struggled to stay awake as the minutes crawled in towards the midnight of the Maundy Watch. It is the Chapel where Christ, present in the Blessed Sacrament, lovingly leads me to acknowledge the myriad ways in which I have failed him, denied him, promised much yet failed to deliver. Like Peter I'm quick to jump in and declare my love, like Peter my passionate devotion is shortlived. I aspire to spend the night in prayer but find myself distracted by aching knees, or trying desperately to suppress yawns that are at odds with my longing to be holy. But I AM still there
That's when I'm glad of those sleeping disciples. Despite everything they remain part of the story, even as they doze on the edge of the action,.
These are the people who in just a few weeks time, filled with the Spirit, will set out to change the world.
And if God can use them, - well, it seems God can use us too.
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