March 31, 2023
A Holy Week, a conclusion to a Holy Lent
Five weeks ago, I began a series of reflections on our worship services and elements of them. I started by considering how each season of the church year invites us to reflect on our life with God, ourselves, and our world as a spiritual discipline. The next week I reflected on how the worship service is led by your pastors on your behalf, enabling you to be the primary worshippers. The week after that, I explored the Lord’s Prayer and how it serves as a resource for our worship each Sunday and a source for defining the “why” and “how” of worship and prayer. Two weeks ago I reflected on the place of non-verbals in our worship. How signs, sounds, and actions—alone and with words—comprise an essential part of our worship of the God of creation and creativity. And last week I suggested that our participation in the narrative of a season, participation through its re-membering, becomes a reminder of the astounding promise of God in Christ: that we, redeemed by Christ and sanctified by the Holy Spirit, participate in the very life of God, as former North Park Seminary professor, Klyne Snodgrass, would say.
Which brings me to this Lenten season’s final offering on Holy Week. Holy Week arose first and foremost out of the fact that all four gospels spend over a quarter of their time telling the story of the last week of Jesus in Jerusalem. The week before Easter was dedicated to the telling of that story—from triumphal entry to betrayal, from crucifixion to resurrection. By the fourth century Christians in Jerusalem were enacting the stories in the locations they occurred in and around the city. This became so renowned that pilgrims would journey long distances to be in Jerusalem to spend that week there. These pilgrims took a lot of what they saw back with them to their home churches. Remnants of this can be found in the Stations of the Cross, as well the Holy Week services in Protestant and Catholic churches.
Then as now, this is a week in which the people put themselves in the place of the Jewish pilgrims in Jerusalem that fateful week for Jesus and his disciples. The people who cried “Hosanna” as Jesus entered Jerusalem, screamed “Crucify him!” by the end of the week. And so will we. Beyond words, we will have actions and symbols that connect us with the stories and the people involved. From palms to somber songs, from wash basins to cup and bread, from laments to full throated praise, we will re-member this story, reminded that it is our story too.
But it is more than a story; it is our hope. It is the very story that defines our faith and our identity in Christ. Praying through this week becomes a spiritual practice which forms a faith that, when encountering the betrayals and crosses of life, provides us with a deep-rooted belief that God has overcome it all in Christ. Nothing is hopeless, no thing or no one is beyond redemption.
Please accept my invitation for you to enter into this story beginning this Palm Sunday that will not end until Easter. It is all one worship service, stretched out over a week, though there will be a dismissal at the end of each service, the benediction will not be offered until Easter Sunday, the conclusion of the worship that week. If you cannot attend them all physically, please join them online, even if it is after the fact. Each day of next week, a reading from Matthew’s gospel describing that week, known as the “passion” of our Lord, will be in your email Inbox. All of this is offered as a grace, not an expectation or obligation.
My hope in all of this is that you will enter into this very familiar story with a renewed openness to the mystery of God’s great love and redemption for us and all creation. And that when the opportunity for resurrection to be celebrated arrives, I pray you will enter that moment with revitalized gratitude, praise, and confidence in the saving power of our God.
May God bless this holiest of weeks here at First Covenant Church. And may that blessing be upon all who join our services, whoever they might be.
Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Thanks be to God.
~ Pastor Todd