Motivation Monday - A Monday to Experience Holy Week Like Never Before
“Holy Week re-centers us.
Holy Week brings us back to Jesus.We can experience and connect to Holy Week, not in spite of what is happening, but through what is happening.
”
How are you experiencing Holy Week in 2022? This year we are able to gather. This year we are able to share the journey to the cross, and then to the empty tomb, together, in community.
But I wonder about my own individual epiphany of what it actually means to walk the Via Doloroso, to cry at his fierce hanging on the cross, not really knowing what it means when I wallow so much in unbelief. Or what it means that the tomb was empty and that the first to witness Jesus’ in that open tomb experience was a woman.
And I wonder how you are experiencing Holy Week. Perhaps this is the year to rediscover the suffering and the saving of the man who was also the Lamb of God. Perhaps this year you will experience individual and collective epiphanies that Holy Week is about more than walking through the story of what happened to Jesus.
Perhaps as you journey with Jesus from Palm Sunday with your Hosanna’s ringing loud and clear, to Maundy Thursday where he washed his friends’ feet and declared His dying love, to Good Friday and the scandalous Cross, into Saturday and the silence that fell across heaven and earth, and then witness His glorious Resurrection on Sunday, you realize that what is happening to you is of utmost importance as you track with what is happening to Jesus. It’s about giving thanks for and experiencing Jesus walking with you through the Holy Week of your life.
Just because you may still feel you are in the aftermath of a pandemic and a world in chaos, it does not present a barrier to Holy Week.
Perhaps the pandemic is and has been, our Holy Week.
We don’t need to try and make Holy Week “normal” or like previous years. We don’t need to grieve that just because we still may be fearful of physically washing each others’ feet, or breaking bread together, or singing,
‘the wonderful cross’ in harmony in church, we are any less able to participate in the most significant week of the liturgical year.
We don’t need to grieve that just because an evil ruler is trying oppress an entire country, that just because there is global suffering and inequity, that there are and will continue to be victims of abuse in the church, we are any less able to participate in the most significant week of the liturgical year.
Holy Week re-centers us.
Holy Week brings us back to Jesus.
We can experience and connect to Holy Week, not in spite of what is happening, but through what is happening.
Michael Marsh says it like this:
Look into the pandemic and you’ll see triumphant palm waving that has given way to loss and brokenness. You’ll see humble and selfless acts of love. You’ll see feet being washed even when shoes and socks are never
removed. You’ll see not only the deaths of people, but the deaths of life as it used to be, plans and routines, illusions, exceptionalism, and self-sufficiency. The peoples of the earth really have been made of one blood. You’ll see people waiting in the emptiness, loneliness, and darkness of Holy Saturday wondering, “How long, O Lord?” And who among us doesn’t know what that is like?
Look into the pandemic and you’ll see Holy Week. Look into countries at war. It has never been more real than it is this year.
With every illness, there is the possibility of healing. With every separation from friends and family there is the tie that binds us across physical isolation and distance. With every dying lies the possibility of resurrection life, of something new, better than was the seed that went into the ground.
Holy Week gives ushers in the opportunity for something new to rise in us.
Maybe this year our Holy Week will be a game-changer for all the Holy Weeks to come.
If death could not keep Christ in His grave, neither will a pandemic or a war bury us in ours.
We are created to live and then to be reborn. This can only happen when we surrender our lives to allow the Resurrection Life to live in us and through us. This can only happen when we are willing to die to all that keeps us stuck in a story of despair, so we can rise to rebirth into a new story where the last chapter is just the beginning.
Watch for it. Wait for it. Keep vigil. “It will happen in a moment, in the blink of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, those who have died will be raised to live forever. And we who are living will also be transformed.” (I Corinthians 15:52)
Endeavour to cradle each day like a Holy Day, starting today, and always. Notice it. Watch how the life breath of the Holy Spirit can blow fresh wind into your heart and carry you home.
John O-Donohue reminds us: “We seldom notice how each day is a holy place. Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens, Transforming our broken fragments Into an eternal continuity that keeps us.”
I pray that as you walk the days, hours and minutes to the cross and empty tomb with Jesus, you will find that He continues to do all things new in you and through you.
And I pray this scripture over you from Genesis 51:7
“Lord, create a Genesis week through the chaos of my life.”
May it be so.
I believe in you.
Cathie