This coming Sunday, we will begin our walk through Holy Week with Jesus toward the cross, and like the long-ago crowds in Jerusalem, our joyful procession will quickly turn toward his passion. The cheerful refrains of “All Glory, Laud, and Honor” will move into the more mournful tunes of “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” As Old Testament scholar Kathleen O’Connor has written of Holy Week services, they “somehow perform in word and deed, in song and in silence, in ways beyond mere thought, the most confounding mystery to which we Christians cling – that in the midst of death, God bestows life.”
Holy Week invites us to journey deeply into that mystery to which we cling: the truth of God’s incarnation. God is revealed to us in the person of Jesus, who joins us in everything that makes us human, including pain, loss, suffering, and death. To acknowledge the depth of God’s love, revealed on the cross, can raise our spirits to new heights at Easter’s dawn.
In these volatile days of change, uncertainty, instability, and fear, the liturgical movement through Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday is a poignant reminder of God’s presence in the valley of the shadow of death. It is an invitation to remember that God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ is never just about us and our individual lives but about how we live together in community and in the world.
English theologian and writer Janet Morley captures the invitation of moving through Holy Week to the joy of Easter’s dawn in this prayer:
When we are all despairing. When the world is full of grief.
When we see no way ahead and hope has gone away:
roll back the stone.
Although we fear change, although we are not ready,
although we’d rather weep and run away:
roll back the stone.
Because we are coming with the women.
Because we hope where hope is vain.
Because you call us from the grave and show the way:
roll back the stone.
I hope that you will heed the invitation of BMPC’s Holy Week services to worship before the depths of God’s suffering love for the world as you prepare to stand in awe before the joyful hope of resurrection.
