Are you ready for the roller coaster of Holy Week? So often, our worship comforts us as a time apart from life. But in Holy Week, worship imitates life in the fast lane. Great mysteries are thrown at us, faster than we can notice or absorb them. It’s so confusing that we have a Thursday that sounds like Monday. “Why do we call it Maundy Thursday?”, the seven year old asked the tired priest. “Because,” he improvised, “nothing really happens on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
So what does happen this week? One emotion always bumps up against its opposite. The high spirits of Palm Sunday’s parade collide with a sense of impending doom. On Spy Wednesday, in a remarkable ritual, we watch hope fade as one light after another is extinguished, and the last light is hidden behind the altar, and the ritual closes with the short sharp shock of a rapping clapper. Maundy Thursday goes in every direction at once, with the overwhelming physical intimacy as Jesus takes off his shirt and washes our feet and leaves his bodybread and bloodwine to become the stuff of our own insides. The mystery is not that the bread becomes his body, but that somehow his body becomes the stuff of our bodies. And just when the evening could hardly become more physically intimate —
Bang, the betrayal! Good Friday: chaos in the courtrooms, quick justice like the kind we’re always wishing the system could provide, no one’s to blame, everyone’s to blame, each player only does their job, and it was meant to happen but it shouldn’t have happened, the condemned man has time to mutter seven final lines, but his death comes faster than usual, which is good, because it’s a holy holiday weekend.
Then — a Saturday of silence.
No time to let that sink in, however, because Saturday night we mingle fire and light and water and oil and listen to Bible stories in church with nothing but candlelight.
Finally, all the ambiguities of Easter. Despite the alleluias, the stories of Resurrection and Easter are not about happy endings but about ambiguous appearances where most of the players just don’t get it. And if you think you don’t believe in Resurrection, you ought to take a look at the stories because they do not make at all clear just what resurrection means unless . . . well, unless you come back for the next few weeks after that . . .
Are you dizzy yet? You’re supposed to be. I am. It’s all too much, and I honestly wish it were drawn out over two weeks. Yet the Church has no choice but to pass on this sense of overload. I found a diary entry from an Austrian woman, who made sense for me of my being overwhelmed. She wrote,
“Holy Week is beginning again, and here I am once more, feeling so . . . utterly inadequate . . . like Niagara Falls is thundering down, . . . and there I stand, with a thimble in my hand . . . I can catch next to nothing and I know very well that one step nearer and I’ll be caught up or swept away. But maybe this helpless state of just standing aside, this overpowering sense of not being able to do anything about it is the only sort of adoration I am allowed just now.
[You can] Close your eyes, [you can even] turn away — [but] this, too, is one way of [sensing] the immensity of this tremendous mystery, of paying reverence, . . .”
Thus far the Austrian woman. [Ida Görres, quoted without reference to source by Martin Smith in A Season for the Spirit, “Monday in Holy Week: What We Know”, p. 139 (original 1991 edition).]
So how shall we walk through Holy Week? I find three simple tips embedded in the rituals and the readings of this week. For one thing, pay attention to what hits you fresh in the rituals or readings and get beyond whatever has become a cliché for you. Whether you come to church, or stay home to let Holy Week work quietly on you, God wants to give you something new.
Even if you draw up a treasured old truth, God is giving it to you in a new way. This new thought or feeling may feel threatening, the way the stranger felt who was forced to carry Jesus’s cross. Or it may feel consoling, the way the beloved disciple felt when he could nuzzle his face against Jesus’s chest. Or it may feel just weird, the way Pontius Pilate’s wife felt when she wandered into court and said to her husband, “Look, I had a strange dream. Do the wrong thing for once. Stay home from work.”
So my first tip is — don’t expect all the old meanings and motions to be what they were. Holy Week is about things being never as we expect.
My second suggestion is to remember: Holy Week is not about what happened back then, it’s about what’s happening now — all around you. These vivid Bible stories are not meant to pull us into a brief tragedy two thousand years ago.
Jesus is not our best example of suffering and injustice. Rather, his story is meant to point us into the greater suffering and injustice all around us. Some cancer patients know as much pain as Jesus. Or, as a clergywoman pointed out to me, any woman who survives complicated labor knows as much pain as Jesus. In fact, Jesus got off a little easy: for most persons, death by crucifixion took two to three days. For Jesus it was over in a few hours.
As for injustice, people in New Orleans, Guantanamo, Darfur, and Iraq know as much about that as Jesus. Civil rights activists or violated women with no one to hear or believe them live through more injustice than Jesus did.
By the same token, Jesus’s suffering does not give us all the answers. Rather, it lets us finally ask the forbidden questions. Jesus gives us permission to fall apart and wonder whether God matters. Because the Gospel tells us that something new will happen whether or not we are faithful. God is at work whether or not we are faithful.
So look at the world this year as lights go out all around us one by one — a war without end overseas, murders without end in our city, human rights at a discount everywhere, a sick planet, and bone-crushing poverty that means nothing to most shoppers on Newbury Street.
Or look into your own personal desolation, your addiction, the bitterness you may never lose toward a parent or a former spouse, the anguish of a life that’s not going where you want it to.
Look at the world, look at your soul. It’s OK to say it, go ahead: my God, my God, why have you forsaken us?
We rehearse that dying question of Jesus so that it may become our own. We are not expected to have faithful answers. The point is to speak out honest questions.
So my third tip is simple: speak out your experiences together. What God wants to give us in Holy Week, God does not give us as individuals. Instead, God scatters it into a whole community, like a grandmother tossing a handful of coins to her grandchildren. Yes, God wants to give us wisdom and strength stronger than injustice and death. But if we really want it, God makes us find and share it amongst ourselves.
This will go against all our ingrained New England reserve. Can we take a simple minute to tell each other what was meaningful in these church services? My God, we spend enough time at them. It may not feel normal to tell each other what it means to us, but it is a crucial step in our spiritual growth. We need to tell each other what part of the story makes most sense . . . or makes the least sense . . . or where we felt moved during the service. This simple sharing is the way God dispenses holy wisdom.
That is the message of this beautiful painted terra-cotta sculpture that a jewish friend brought back to me from Brazil. [Show congregation the 14" x 8" sculpture.] By a holy coincidence, I was just writing this part of the sermon when she came over to give Glenn and me this cross. You can count fourteen little figures in native costumes shouldering the cross among themselves. You set it down on the table so the cross faces up as they carry it on their shoulders. See, here is each one of us — Carolyn, Don, Sarah, Berndt, Betsy and Frank, Diana, Bea, Ann and Elliott, Scott, Juliet (must be the one in the beret!), Fred, Pat — all of you. At the end of this sermon, I shall set it on the altar to symbolize all of us at this Eucharist.
Let this art work make the point. It shows us the only way we learn the wisdom of Holy Week and Easter — by carrying the cross together. If we each share what we have of the cross, it will become, as it does for these brave little folks, the thing that holds us together. Welcome to Holy Week, Emmanuel!