Holy Week

I hope you are having a blessed Holy Week. In many ways, this week is just like any week. Easter is coming and we are all busying ourselves with shopping lists and guest invitations, as if it were any holiday. All of the “church talk” around Holy Week can seem awfully abstract and seems perhaps less connected to what’s going on in our own day to day lives.

Yesterday, we shared a service of healing and reconciliation, a time to spend some more time in confession of our sins, and also some time to pray for each other individually. Tonight, we’ll tell the story from the Gospel of John, when Jesus washed his disciples’ feet as they met for their last meal together. Tomorrow is Good Friday—but of course there doesn’t seem much “good” about it, since it’s the day we remember the crucifixion.

Good or not, though, the truth of Good Friday is that it’s real. Suffering and death are real. Our liturgies aren’t museum pieces; they draw us into a deeper truth of our faith. They are in some ways a mirror of our own experience. Jesus Christ was fully human. Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself. (Philippians 2: 5) Jesus emptied himself and took on all of the uncertainty, pain, and suffering of human living. Nothing human is alien to the heart of God because of Jesus’ closeness to us. This week, Jesus enters the depths of human love, and also human grief and suffering. This week is about us, not just about God.

As he washed the disciples; feet, Jesus invites us to share the self-emptying love he showed in his ministry—wash each other, he says, as I wash you. He gives us an example to follow. But something else happens, too. “Wash each other,” our faith tells us, and as we do, we wash Christ himself. This week, we observe this sacrificial closeness God has to us.

But isn’t this all of this a little obscure? We all bathe regularly, so what’s the point of foot washing in church once a year? We all see the cross every Sunday, so what’s the point of going up to it and kneeling in front of it? Or, even more bizarre, kissing it? The answer, I think, is that it’s because liturgy helps us to enter the truth of that mystery of God become human, and was willing to suffer death. In our liturgies we have these very ordinary things that become extraordinary signs of God’s presence with us. Foot washing and reverencing the cross aren’t “sacraments” strictly speaking, but they are (if you’ll work with me a little here) sacrament-ish. Like the bread and wine of communion that satisfy fill hungers we didn’t know we had, the liturgies of Holy Week bring us into the mystery of Christ’s ministry and death in a bodily way that invite us into truths deeper than our own intellectual reflection. That reflection is a crucial part of the life of faith, but it’s not the whole story.

So I hope I will see you tonight and tomorrow.

On Sunday, we will celebrate the resurrection of Christ. The depth of our solidarity with Christ in his suffering now will also be the depth of our joy in rejoicing with him in the victory of life over all death. Thanks be to God!