Wednesday Holy Week Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
HOLY WEEK WEDNESDAY...

...I remember as a child being fascinated with some really old Russian dolls. Made out of thin wood, they came apart in the middle with a satisfying squeak, revealing a smaller one inside. Then the next, and the next. Eventually you reach the smallest, a tiny little doll still perfectly formed and painted. You can, of course, set them alongside one another on the mantelpiece. But you can also put them back together and enjoy the knowledge of what’s hidden inside the one you can still see.

Many years later I came upon a set of Russian dolls that made a quirky political point. It was while Mikhail Gorbachev was in charge of the old Soviet Union, at the time when it was undergoing its astonishing transformation. So the outer doll, the biggest one in the collection, was Gorbachev himself. Inside him was Chernenko, and inside him Andropov (neither of whom ruled for very long). Inside Andropov was Brezhnev, one of the key figures in the cold war of the 1960s and 70s. Inside Brezhnev was Khrushchev, whom I remember from my young days. And inside Khrushchev (missing out Malenkov, a short-term and forgettable Soviet leader in the early 1950s) was the old man himself, Joseph Stalin, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of his own people. The point was starkly clear: they’re basically all the same. Open up one and you’ll find the others...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright