What's So Holy About Holy Week?
April 3rd, 2006
It is interesting to me that the week between Palm Sunday and Easter has come to be known as Holy Week. At first, it might be easy to dismiss this adjective "holy" as an afterthought that got tacked on later; Jesus died and rose again so of course that makes it holy. But as I thought about it, it occurred to me that this title "holy week" might mean something even more than what we usually assume.
Holy Week for Jesus begins on a high note. He enters Jerusalem to adoring crowds and waving palms. The mood is one of celebration and joy. At that point, it is easy to believe that Jesus can do anything. However, the mood is quick to change as Jesus clashes with money changers at the temple. On the following days, Jesus would return to the temple to teach, a scene that appears ordinary out of many such examples throughout the Gospels. On what we call Maundy Thursday, Jesus has a meal with his disciples. It is a bittersweet occasion, one on which Jesus is surrounded by friends and yet a time when he is anticipating the betrayal ahead. The sorrow spills over into the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus wrestles with the agonizing pain of loneliness and the reality that his death is near at hand. And then, of course, comes the suffering and shame of the cross.
In any given week, we might feel bitter, happy, expectant, disturbed, angry, disappointed, or satisfied. The reality for most of us is that life is a rollercoaster of ups and downs, good days and bad days, failures and successes. And perhaps it should give us reason to pause that on those seven days between Palm Sunday and Easter, Jesus experienced a similar week of ups and downs. I wonder if we might be able to see that, in its own way, that one week provides us with a kind of snapshot of holiness. In other words, maybe it is not just in the dramatic events of Jesus' death that we can glimpse what it means to be holy. Maybe we can also find peace and comfort and holiness in the everyday world of ups and downs where most of us live. Maybe there is holiness in the temporary triumphs, the secret hurts, the worries, and the hum-drum work that makes up each week of our lives if only we would be willing to look for it.
In coming as a human, Jesus allows us to see that God redeems us as we are, in the middle of all the commonplace things around us. In Christ, God reminds us of our original nature as we were created, that the separation between the "holy" God and the "unholy" things of the world is in fact one of our own making. It is appropriate then that Easter is both the culmination of Holy Week and the first day of the following week. We need the joy on Sunday that comes from knowing that we can move on from our past regrets and missteps, that the ups and downs of the previous week were only temporary. And we need the hope of new life in Christ on Sunday to remind us that we can move forward into the week ahead, because Jesus has redeemed all of our weeks and blessed them as "holy."