April 2009

As we come to the climax of Lent we remember again the last events of Jesus' life in Holy Week. With Jesus we ride again into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and receive the adulation of the crowd. On Maundy Thursday we remember how Jesus had his last meal on earth with his closest followers and gave them the Eucharist, "Eat this bread, drink this wine, in remembrance of me." From the upper room we move to the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prayed and went through an agony as he could clearly see what was coming. After his arrest there was the interrogation before the high priest and Pontius Pilate and eventually on Good Friday, crucifixion. There follows a period of waiting, when it seems as if the world stands still, until we experience the joy of Easter, when we celebrate Christ's resurrection from the dead.

These events are historical, they actually happened in a certain place at a certain time. However we miss the point if we come to services in Holy Week and simply remember these events as something that took place about 2,000 years ago.

Holy Week gives us the opportunity to live through these last moments of Jesus' life again and to experience them as contemporary. We cannot doubt the fickleness of crowds. We have experience of this in our own lifetime, adulation one moment and crucified the next. Deep sharing with close friends, as in the Last Supper and then being let down, even betrayed by people we trusted. The agony of prayer, when we wonder if anyone is listening at all. There is sometimes an inevitably about what is happening and we cannot seem to stop it and we ask ourselves, is there really a God at all? All we want is someone to watch with us and be with us and we seem very alone and not understood. Justice sometimes seems elusive and certainly there was the most terrible miscarriage of justice before Pontius Pilate, who represented the famed justice of the Roman Empire. Even in our own times, it sometimes seems that we do not always get a fair hearing or justice, which if we are not careful can cause bitter resentment. There can be no doubt that many people in the world suffer from injustice.

On Good Friday our hearts go out to the lone man hanging on the cross with his life ebbing away in terrible agony. We can identify with this when we plumb the depths of despair and experience a "bewildering night" when nothing makes sense and we cannot see any way forward. We also look around our world in utter hopelessness and a feeling of helplessness in the face of violence and war and innocent suffering.

All those forces which brought about the death of Jesus are still present in the world of today. Fear, seeking after power, avarice, greed, selfishness, insecurity, are all present in today's world.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead which offers us real hope is not a fairy tale ending to a terrible tragedy. It is a cosmic event which makes transformation possible. We know what it means to plumb the depths of disaster and despair and find a new way of hope and resurrection.

The guarantee of all of this is the love God, which surrounds us all even when we are unaware of it and it doesn't seem possible. It was this deep relationship with his father that enabled Jesus to live through these terrible events and pray in the last moments of his life, "Father forgive them, they know not what they do."

Holy Week once again offers us the opportunity to live through these events and grow in our understanding of reality and how relevant they are in today's world. It is not simply a remembering of the past but a journey, an entering into the experience of all the ups and downs of Holy Week, in order to share fully the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead on Easter Day.