Pastor’s Pen – March 22, 2024
This Sunday we begin the greatest week of the church year with Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion. It is the greatest week because it provides us with an extended and in-depth contemplation of what we celebrate every Sunday: the death and resurrection of Jesus, leading to the outpouring of his Holy Spirit. When we finally arrive at Easter on the following Sunday, the Church will take seven weeks to celebrate that Easter-Pentecost grace. But first comes this Holy Week, which seems to overwhelm us with images of agony, suffering, death and loss: this Sunday’s Passion, Holy Thursday’s Last Supper, Good Friday’s Cross, Holy Saturday’s vigil in darkness.
All this is not meant as a cause for depression and sadness, still less as a cause for guilt or shame. Rather the images and narratives of this Week can give us a spiritual means for dealing with the very real sufferings of our own world and our own lives. Today the people of the Holy Land of Jesus are overwhelmed with the suffering of violence, hatred, war and poverty. We cannot help but feel it ourselves, ponder the role of our own country and its government, and feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems. We can feel the same when we look at Ukraine, or at any other war-ravaged place, at Haiti, at the poverty of the nations or of our own city, even at the suffering of the animals and plants and our environment. We feel it when the losses of sickness and death and division touch our own families.
By prayerfully contemplating the sufferings and death of Jesus, his Way of the Cross, our “spiritual eyes” can penetrate through the darkness and glimpse the depths of God’s compassion (literally, “suffering with”), which leads ultimately, surprisingly, mysteriously, wondrously to the Gospel proclamation of the Risen Christ. This is the path to hope, to light in the darkness, to the wager of faith that there is a Love at the heart of reality whose “weakness” has the power to triumph over all. And more: that the Love in the Risen One fills our hearts with the Holy Spirit to inspire and guide our living with that same Divine Love.
If you are feeling weighed down or overwhelmed with the sufferings and hopelessness of the world – or with the challenges in your own life – come to the liturgies of this Holy Week. Let the words and images and rituals wash over you, wash you with the tears of God. Let them carry away your sorrows, and carry you to Easter. Let God’s Love work its wonders in you. “By your cross and resurrection, you have set us free.”