What a week this has been for the disciples as we just heard in those two Gospel readings. The week began on Sunday with such joy as Jesus triumphantly entered into Jerusalem on a donkey, with a crowd cheering him on, waving their palm branches and shouting out, “Hosannah, hosannah, hosannah!” And then, in the course of just a few short days, everything changed, everything shifted as Jesus now exited Jerusalem carrying his cross. And that crowd was now jeering him and shouting out, “Crucify him!”
What a change. They moved from joy as Jesus was welcomed as a king, to pain as the crowd mocked him by calling him a king. They moved from a high that seemed that everything was going well, that everything was going to work out, that their vision was about to be made real, to suddenly, now Rome was executing Jesus. Not just killing him, but killing him in the most shameful, painful way possible. Killing him in a way that was designed not just to get rid of him, perhaps maybe not even primarily to get rid of him, but it was designed to send a message to instill fear in anybody who might have an alternative vision for this world, an alternative to the powers and the principality of this world.
What a shift. It is such a moment of emotional whiplash to move from such high highs to such low lows. I have always been intrigued by this. How is it that everything can shift so quickly? How is it the crowd can move from welcoming him so joyfully to being against him and trying to have him killed? How is it that the disciples go from the moment in which their very dreams are being realized to the moment when they are abandoning him? This person, this Son of God who they had left everything to follow, they have now abandoned in his moment of greatest need. How is that possible? How is it that Peter can be told on Thursday night that he was going to deny Jesus three times, which he denied. He said, “Of course I will never deny you.” Then a few short hours later on Friday morning before the sun rises, doing exactly that, denying Jesus three times. How could he have forgotten what Jesus had just told him?
I have always been intrigued by how everything can change so quickly. As I have been praying and meditating on Holy Week in order to get ready for it, I find myself understanding it, this change, this tectonic shift, in a new deeper, more visceral way as we go through our own great shifts as a society. It wasn’t that long ago when we were so joyful and happy, and life seemed to be going well, and now everything has been shut down and there is so much uncertainty about what the future is going to hold. A few short weeks ago, on a Sunday, we were playfully thinking about alternatives to handshakes, and playfully thinking about songs we could sing to help us wash our hands a little bit longer. But by Friday, we were cancelling everything, shutting things down as we started to social distance to greater and greater degrees. It was a huge shift when every single day things that we had been deciding the day before were completely obliterated by the news of the next day. It is an experience that makes this Holy Week experience of the disciples resonate so much more deeply inside of me when I think about the shifts they were experiencing.
As we enter into this Holy Week, as our lives and these great shifts, these great tectonic changes meet up with Jesus’s last week and those great shifts and tectonic changes, I find I understand it more deeply. I understand Holy Week more deeply, and I also understand this moment that we are living in more deeply. This Holy Week experience reminds me that in the great sorrow and pain and suffering and trauma of this world, there is Jesus. Inside of this moment that we are experiencing, there is the love of God found in Jesus Christ who went to the cross for us, who entered into our lives so fully that he even entered into the greatest pains and sorrows that we can experience.
The Passion reminds me of the love of God for us in this moment that we are experiencing as a society. In the midst of whatever happens, no matter if it gets harder and darker, no matter if it gets more painful, in the midst of it is God’s love for us, comforting us, surrounding us, being present with us, in solidarity with us in this moment. God loves us more than we can ask for or imagine, and we know that because we look to the cross and see the love of Christ emanating from it.
My friends, as we enter into this Holy Week, as our lives meet Jesus’s life, may we always remember that love of God that will never abandon us, that love of God that will always be with us, that love of God which is more than we can ask for or imagine.
AMEN
