Motivation Monday – A Monday to Experience Holy Week Like Never Before
“Just because we are in a pandemic (still), it does not present a barrier to Holy Week. ”
Holy Week will not happen in every church this year, at least not like it has in previous years. But here’s the thing, Holy Week never really did happen in the church as much as it happened in the lives of people in the church.
Perhaps this is the year to rediscover that. Perhaps this year we experience individual and collective epiphanies that Holy Week is about more than walking through the story of what happened to Jesus.
Perhaps as we journey with Jesus from Palm Sunday with our 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, we realize that what is happening to us is of utmost importance as we track with what is happening to Jesus. It’s about giving thanks for and experiencing Jesus walking with us through the Holy Week of our life. We all experience more than one Holy Week every year.
Just because we are in a pandemic (still), 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 cannot physically wash each others’ feet, or break bread together, or sing, ‘the wonderful cross’ in harmony in church, we are any less able to participate in the most significant week of the liturgical year.
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. 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 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.
“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.”
― John O'Donohue,
I believe in you.
Cathie