Reflections

With Palm Sunday a few days away, it’s a great time to make sure our Holy Week services are down on your calendar. Holy Week begins Sunday and goes through Easter. Something I love about observing Holy Week – like all of Lent – is that it helps us make sure we don’t skip ahead to the ending. Instead, we get to acknowledge every part of what leads up to the joy of the resurrection – death and loss and betrayal included – in hopes that this will impress Easter on our hearts in a more meaningful way.

 

In a way, Holy Week holds up a mirror to our own lives. A belief in the resurrection and the saving power of God won’t keep us from experiencing the sorrows of life. We may know that “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28) and that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39) – we may know that with God the ending will always be wholeness, joy, life, and peace – and yet…we still live fragile human lives in a fragile world. In the present, we have to contend with the same kind of realities that make up Holy Week: violence and corruption and death and grief.

 

Sometimes we might feel pressure to rush ourselves to the end of Jesus’s story –– to always feel Easter feelings. But Holy Week reminds us that faith can persist even in the times that come before an “Alleluia.” If Jesus himself prayed anxious prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane, if Jesus himself felt forsaken on the cross, then who are we to expect ourselves to not feel anxiety or forsakenness at times?

 

I hope you will join us this Holy Week in experiencing the full spectrum of life and emotion that leads to the empty tomb, and I hope you will bring with you the full spectrum of who you are, what you feel, what you question, what you’ve experienced and known.