The week before Easter is a special time in which Christians remember the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But what makes this week holy is something else. It is the fact that something happened back then and there, in space and in time, something so shattering that the grinding wheels of fate were stopped by it and death is now no longer allowed to have the final word… We are invited by this holiest day of Holy Week to believe beyond all doubt that… there is redemption in and beyond, though not apart from, suffering and pain, that decisions we make here and now can have consequences that will last forever, that time is a God-given opportunity to learn to love, and that love is the one thing we experience in time that remains in eternity.
I pray that as we enter into this Holy Week, you will discover the Christ event anew. From Maundy Thursday to Good Friday and to Easter, you will walk with Christ in his last days and discover his empty tomb. Jesus had gone to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover with his disciples when he was caught in the web of events that led to his death. While most Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah, the New Testament weaves the central events of this week into one overarching story of redemptive history.
As St. Paul put it, "For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed" 1 Corinthians But what makes this week holy? According to some scholars of religion, both the Jewish Passover and the Christian celebration of Jesus' death and resurrection should be understood as Middle Eastern variants of ancient agricultural festivals, springtime rituals based upon the fertility cycle of nature.
Jesus' death and resurrection is thus interpreted as yet another example of the many dying and rising savior-myths well known to ancient cultures and especially popular among the mystery religions of the Roman Empire. In this view, history is a great wheel, a never-ending cycle of night and day, springtime and harvest, bringing the eternal return of life.
Philosophically, this view says "there is nothing new under the sun," "there will always be a tomorrow," and "you can feel good about yourself because God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.
Witness too the relative popularity of Easter egg hunts and Good Friday services. But at its orthodox core the Christian tradition rejects this misreading of the seminal events of Holy Week. It presents a different view of history and a different view of time. It declares that the eternal God of creation has come into our world, has stepped into our time, in the person of a Palestinian peasant named Jesus. The events of Holy Week mark what T. Eliot called "the point of intersection of the timeless with time.
Holy Week is fast approaching. Palm Sunday will be here before you know it. The day commemorating when Jesus entered Jerusalem a hero, a Savior, the Christ. People laid out palms in front of Him. They praised Him and shouted accolades.
But soon He would be scorned, scourged, ridiculed and led to His death. We have to challenge ourselves to find ways in which we can really enter into Holy Week. Here are a few ideas you may want to consider. Open your bible and read Matthew 26 and But Pierre Teilhard de Chardin reminds us that the whole earth is our altar, that in this time of being homebound, we need only cast our eyes upon any surface — the dinner table, the bedside table, a backyard ledge, even a flat rock — to find an altar from which to worship God.
This week, you are invited to create your own home altar in order to mark the days of Holy Week. Find a space to make holy.
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