Holy Week at St. James: A Preview of Coming Attractions

This year at St. James, we are doing a few things differently in our observance of Holy Week.  Some of the changes are so subtle you might not even notice them.  I want to call them to your attention, so that you might be open to receive them and see how they land with you. 

 

The first change is on Palm Sunday.  In our liturgical year, this Sunday is actually called “The Sunday of the Passion:  Palm Sunday.”  The blessing and procession of palms on the Sunday before Easter began in Jerusalem in the 4^th Century and by the 12^th Century had spread throughout Christendom.  The earliest celebrations marked Jesus’ “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem.  Only later, for example in the 11^th Century Sarum Rite in England, was the passion (crucifixion) narrative added to the Palm Sunday celebration, anticipating Good Friday. 

 

This year, we will be returning to the early practice of focusing on Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.  In addition to the Palm Gospel reading (Luke 19:29-40) during the blessing of the palms, the Gospel reading for the Holy Eucharist will be Luke 19:41-48, which continues and concludes the account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.  Only in Luke’s Gospel do we learn of Jesus’ weeping over the city as he makes his way there.  This is an evocative scripture passage that we otherwise would never hear read in the Sunday lectionary cycle, and gives us a different vantage point on the beginning of Holy Week.

 

On Maundy Thursday, we will be observing the usual rite, including the ritual washing of feet following Jesus’ example recorded in John 13:1-15.  It is a beautiful reminder that, in the words of Cynthia Bourgeault,

 

Jesus is not particularly interested in increasing either your guilt or your devotion, but rather, in deepening your personal capacity to make the passage into unitive life.  If you’re willing to work with that wager, the passion begins to make sense in a whole new way.   (The Wisdom Jesus, p. 106)

 

As Jesus makes clear in his final discourse to his disciples in John’s Gospel, his voluntary suffering is in the service of transfiguring and transcending our ego-consciousness to embrace a larger consciousness of our union with God and God’s creation.  We are invited to imitate Jesus by living compassionate and joyful lives in recognition of our profound communion with reality in all of its mystery: abiding in love; even when to do so requires self-sacrifice (never the sacrifice of others).

 

To emphasize this note, we will conclude the Maundy Thursday service with a reading of John chapter 14 during the stripping of the altar:  beginning with do “Do not let your hearts be troubled” and concluding with “Rise, let us be on our way.”  I encourage you to read and meditate on the whole of John chapters 13 – 17 as the lens through which you interpret the meaning of Holy Week.

 

On Good Friday, the noon service will be the traditional Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday.  At 7 p.m., Pastor Ron Willis and Deacon Catherine Manhardt will be curating a meditation on the seven last words of Jesus through homiletic and musical reflections:

“Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”  – Luke 23:34

“Truly I tell you, today you shall be with me in paradise.” – Luke 23:43

“Woman, here is your son! ... Here is your mother.”  -  John 19:26-27

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – Matthew 27:46

“I am thirsty.”  – John 19:28

“It is finished.” – John 19:30

“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” – Luke 23:46

You will be invited to deepen your contemplation of the passion through engagement with several prayer stations.  Father Thomas Keating, in his beautiful meditation on the passion, invites us to consider the vulnerability of love.

 

The love of Jesus manifested itself in his sheer vulnerability.  The crucifix is the sign and expression of the total vulnerability of Jesus:  the outstretched arms, the open heart, the forgiveness of everything and everyone.  This sheer vulnerability made him wide open both to suffering and to joy . . . Divine love is sheer vulnerability – sheer openness to giving.  Hence, when it enters the world, either in the person of Jesus or in one of his disciples, it is certain to encounter persecution – death many times over.  But it will also encounter the joy of always rising again.  (The Mystery of Christ, p. 62).

 

May our observance of Holy Week deepen our capacity to realize unitive life through the vulnerability of love. 

Reflections on Observing Holy Week

We are drawing close to Holy Week, and I would like to share some reflections on how to enter more fully and freely into its observance.  It is the most important time of the Christian year.  It is also the most challenging time of the Christian year.  To experience this time meaningfully, we need to avoid its pitfalls and embrace its promise. 

 

Two Big Pitfalls

It is important to acknowledge up front that Holy Week lends itself to the worst kind of anti-Judaism.  While the Church has acknowledged that “the Jews” did not kill Jesus, our sacred texts and liturgies can still reinforce this idea if we do not handle them with care.  As one of my parishioners pointedly (and rightly) reminded me:  “We have to do better than just throwing the other team under the bus.”  If we come away from Holy Week believing that Judaism is the bad guy in this story, then we have missed the whole point. 

 

So, let’s be clear:  Jesus is a Jew, and his ministry was very much a reform movement within Judaism.  The texts of the New Testament are written primarily (perhaps entirely) by Jews, and they express 1^st Century conflicts among competing interpretations of Jewish faith.  Some Jews came to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.  Others disagreed.  This was very much an intra-Jewish debate.   Context matters and it is important to keep this context in mind. 

 

Jesus was crucified by the Roman Empire for sedition at the behest of some local Jewish authorities in Jerusalem.  John’s Gospel, properly translated, refers to them as “the Judaeans,” not “the Jews.”  Scholars like John Dominic Crossan have worked assiduously to separate out the historical kernel from the theological husk of the Gospel accounts. 

 

Theologically, Jesus’ death reveals the duplicity and cruelty of all human regimes of domination, and the veneer of religious piety within which it is hidden.  The Passion narratives rip away the political and religious justifications to reveal the violence at the heart of human civilization and the innocence of its victims.  Who killed Jesus?  We all did.  Human civilization did.  That is the theological significance of the Passion that the Gospels seek to convey.  The Passion is not a story about what Jews did to Jesus, much less to Christians, but rather about what humans do to each other.  Sadly, the history of what Christians have done to Jews only serves to underscore the truth of the violent human dynamic that the Passion story reveals.  Using this story to reinscribe the very “us” vs. “them” binary that Jesus seeks to overcome indicates just how seriously Christianity too often has misinterpreted it.

 

This leads to a related pitfall during Holy Week: the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.  It is the idea that Jesus’ died for our sins, bearing the punishment that we deserve to satisfy God’s demand for retributive justice.  Jesus did not die for our sins.  He died because of our sins, because of our collective enslavement to order based on sacrificial violence.  His death is liberating, not because it placates an angry God; but because it confronts us with the truth about ourselves, and makes it possible for us to consciously choose sacrificial love instead of sacrificial violence as the basis for human and ecological community. 

 

The theological meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the evolutionary leap in human consciousness that it inaugurates, unleashing an unlimited potential for growth in wisdom and compassion.  The Eastern Church understood rightly that salvation is deification, recovering the image of God within us.  Jesus died, not to liberate us from divine wrath, but from human wrath, so that we might reclaim our identity and our unity in divine love. 

 

One Big Promise

This is the big promise of Holy Week:  that by dying to the way of violence we can be reborn in the way of love.  We can partake of the divine nature by realizing the potential of our human nature.  There is another way to live. 

 

Holy Week is a dramatic rehearsal of the way of love.  Its practice is familiar to any good community organizer.  It begins with intentionally raising the tension in the system to make visible its violence and inhumanity.  It does so creatively:  a march on Jerusalem from Galilee with a symbolic entrance into the city that recalls prophetic hope for justice, a symbolic cleansing of the Temple in protest against exploitation, and a teach-in calling the authorities to account for their complicity with oppression. 

 

It continues with a kind of political ju-jitsu, confronting civilizational violence with a willingness to sacrifice oneself in solidarity with its victims.  Jesus refuses to deny either the reality of oppression or the humanity of everyone involved.  Conflict is heightened, not through reciprocal violence (sacrificing other people), but by raising consciousness through a willingness to make sacrifices in the service of truth and reconciliation (risking vilification, arrest, punishment and even death).  Sacrificial violence is opposed by sacrificial love, so that that the binary of “us” vs. “them” is overcome.  There is only “us.”

 

Sacrificial love escalates the confrontation by expanding the circle of community embracing the path of love.  The “them” keeps getting smaller and the “us” keeps getting larger as we realize and manifest the flow of mercy in tune with the beating heart of God at the center of reality.  The promise is resurrection: life lived from this center.

 

May we honestly and carefully navigate the pitfalls of Holy Week as we journey together to claim its astonishing promise.  May it become the pattern of our collective life until the promise is fulfilled.