Sunday-Ps 118 is the psalm of Holy Week, so it keeps reappearing in the liturgies of the week. It fits well some of the events and response to it that it makes sense why the church seized on it as a lens for the week.This could well have been one of the pslams that Jesus sang with the disciples before going to the Garden to pray.So not only did the psalter give us a lens to read Jesus, ti could well be that the psalms formed the very template for the narrative aobut Jesus as well.
Monday-Tradition says that Henry Francis Lyte (1793-1847) wrote this touching hymn after visiting a dying friend, an experience that would have given a face to our need for God's presence. Lyte himself suffered from asthma and tuberculosis. His own longing for the presence of God, no doubt, added to the depth of his empathy. Who hasn't felt lonely, isolated, and in need of the near presence of Jesus? Haven't we all prayed, "Abide with me?" From God Pause
Tuesday-Unfortunately, we have the natural instinct to fix pain, to control it, or even, foolishly, to try to understand it. The ego always insists on understanding. That’s why Jesus praises a certain quality even more than love, and he calls it faith. It is the ability to stand in liminal space, to stand on the threshold, to hold the contraries, until you move to a deeper level where it all eventually makes sense in the great scheme of God and grace. (Richard Rohr)
Wednesday-"God of forever...The days of youth were filled with dreams and ideals when both body and spirit seemed invincible. Yet now, O God, for some and soon for everyone, invincibility fades and we grow weary.The days of adulthood move at breakneck speed as we move headlong into the fragile. Yet it is now, O God, in this glad day, when we have come to pray for the sweet gift of those things which remain:(James Lowry)
Maundy Thursday into each of our lives Jesus comes as the bread of life...to be eaten, to be consumed by us. Then He comes as the hungry one, the other, hoping to be fed with the bread of OUR life, our hearts loving, and our hands serving.(Mother Teresa of Calcutta)
Good Friday- I know that I reject the notion that God’s honor or sense of justice required the death of Jesus as some sort of propitiation to the divine. I am not nearly so good at making sense of Good Friday in a way that I find compelling and clear.For years, i have struggled with the theology of the cross (Luther, and in our time DJ Hall and Moltmann).Is it possible that we find God in the midst of a time when a practical atheism is in view? Do we see God’s nature more clearly in times of suffering than in times of triumph?
Holy Saturday-Every year, I try to read some of Alan Lewis’s book on Holy Saturday.”Can it be in the broken godforsaken of Jesus...he is showing us the fullest, deepest truth about his Father's nature also?” -(Between Cross and Resurrection, p.122) Lewis reads Holy saturday as a critical time where the credal dead and buried is taken to its depth. god in Christ was not only “incarnate but interred.” Nothing makes Easter more potent than reflecting on that awful reality to claim the fullness of Easter. Even in the grace, we can find God, or rather, god finds us.
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