Holy Week 2010

 

Palm Sunday has readings for the entry to Jerusalem or readings that leap into the dark scenes of the Passion of Jesus Christ. They certainly fit the highs and lows of life and those often are squeezed into a short period of time. It may even be a spiritual diagnostic test to see which ones we gravitate toward on this day, the triumph or the tragedy. What part of the palm Sunday story stands out for you in the different gospel versions? What parts of the Passion accounts stand in stark relief for you?

 

Monday-Calvin wrote on Holy Week: (Jn. 19:11) "we ought to be prepared for enduring the cross.Knowing that we must die, we should be prepared for death.The time of death is unknown to us, and the Lord permits us to defend our life with the defenses God has appointed.We must patiently endure diseases...yet we ought to seek alleviation of them...let this be fixed in our hearts, let the will of God be done."

 

Tuesday-Jinkins quotes George MacDonald (p.53, Called) "sometimes it seems I cannot pray for doubts and pain and anger and all strife....All things seem to be rushing straight into the dark. But the dark still is God." In the darkness of Gethsemane God was there. God is there in the midst of our worst struggles.In that knowledge, the light will emerge.

 

Wednesday-Grief and Holy Week have an uneasy equilibrium. Easter tends to blow the doors off our grief, but the events of the days prior are full of grief. the women weep as they visit the empty tomb. Nothing shows how well acquainted God is with our grief than in the cross. christian grief acknowledges the pain of loss that is always present, but it is softened by the Easter story and given wings in the hope that we will meet again in heaven.

 

Maundy Thursday I picked up a book of Communion sermons by Marice Fetty, The Feasts of the Kingdom. In the great banquet of Lk. 14, he says that (68-9) "Jesus was an outsider, rejected by insiders... Communion invites all of us, insiders and outsiders into the great banquet feast. This is the right invitation. This is a dinner party not to be missed. You are invited. Are you coming?"

 

Good Friday-Douglas John Hall wrote in Lighten our Darkness (117-9) "Luther wrote preach one thing, the wisdom of the cross...we are devoid of wisdom..our natural tendency is to regard ourselves as sufficient, autonomous, masters..theology is a broke statement on life's brokenness...we find God in the midst of peril..God is the one who manifest himself on the cross." It is a full extension of the Incarnation, of the human condition.

 

Holy Saturday-I continue to be touched by a posthumous work on Holy Saturday by Alan Lewis. At the end of the preface (5) he writes:" We relive annually the growing tensions of the climatic week; the grieving farewells, shameful betrayal, guilty denial, and agonizing fear of the night before the end; the long dark, deadly day of pain and forsakenness itself; an ecstatic daybreak of miracle and color, song and newborn life; and in between one eerie, restless day of burial and waiting."