HOLY WEEK
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son? It says, “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son.”
–Hebrews 12:1-6
Today marks the beginning of the seven holiest and most significant days of our lives. Today we begin a walk with our Lord that will lead us from Bethany, across the little hilltop which peers down onto to Jerusalem, and on to the Upper Room to break bread with him, to Gethsemane when we fall asleep during his agony, to the courtyard of the High Priest where we deny him and flee, and then we watch him at a safe distance as he carries his cross alone through the streets of Jerusalem to a gruesome place just outside the city gates called Golgotha.
We can never understand Easter Sunday until we understand the events of Holy Week, and how each of us denies our Lord, betrays our Lord, and perhaps, worse of all, are indifferent to our Lord.
We start our Holy Week walk with Jesus today. We do so for a clearer discernment about ourselves–about the state of our discipleship. Holy Week is the one week during the year when we can go on a quiet pilgrimage to deepen down and to gaze upward. We go on this pilgrimage, in the suggestive words of H. Richard Niebuhr, “to pass through territories not our own…seeking something we might call completion…or perhaps the word clarity will do as well, a goal to which only the soul’s compass points the way.”
Let’s admit that being on a spiritual journey with Jesus is the most difficult journey we will ever take. Only the committed will begin the trip, and only the determined will stay with it. It is difficult because the prerequisite for taking it is that we must face our own inadequacies and imperfections. Our imperfections are the cracks in our armor that lets God in. As Meister Eckhart wrote almost seven hundred years ago: “To get at the core of God at his greatest, one must first get into the core of himself at his least.”
A preacher put this question to a class of children: “If all the good people in the world were red and all the bad people were green, what color would you be?”
Little Linda Jean though mightily for a moment. Then her face brightened and she replied: “Reverend, I would be streaky.”
The Bible teaches us that we are streaky, that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The Bible teaches us that we were born a little lower than the angels, and have fallen a little lower ever sense. To be human is to be streaky, sinful, finite, less than God.
Yet, to be human is to be capable of more–more wisdom and love. To be human is to yearn to be Christ-like, to overcome our limitations, to faithfully walk the way of the Cross with our Master.
And so here we are today, at the outset of Holy Week, caught in between–between grit and grandeur, between darkness and light. Both the best and the beast dwell within us.
I want to suggest a simple exercise for these next seven days of your own personal pilgrimage, because you surely have the time in this season of home-stay. As a link to these events of Holy Week, I want to suggest you take the New Testament passage, printed above and read Hebrews 12:1-6, and meditate on it. Read it at least once a day. Let the words wash over you, seep into you, and circulate throughout your system.
As we begin our pilgrimage through Holy Week, we are surrounded– or to use the lovely words of the King James version– “encompassed”– by so great a cloud of witnesses, all the Christian people from all times and places who have walked this way before us and walked it well. There are our mothers and fathers, Christian parents to whom we are unpayable indebted….and there are others in that great cloud of witnesses…Mother Teresa, and Mary, mother of Jesus; John Calvin and John Knox, Teresa of Avila and Mary Magdalene. They are all above us and around us as we run this race of faith.
And what is our task in this journey: we are to lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily besets us. Each or us has something, our own thorn in the flesh, which we have to wrestle with. Pity the person so unconscious that he doesn’t even know what that sin is. You can ask his wife and kids, and they will tell you, that’s for sure. Pity the person so blind to her own affect that she has no inkling of how she affects others. It was said about one woman, “she never swore, but she made everyone else want to.
The sin that clings so closely. What is that for you?
The Rabbi of Lelov said to his students: “A man cannot be redeemed until he recognizes the flaws in his soul and tries to mend them. A nation cannot be redeemed until it recognizes the flaws in is soul and tries to mend them. Whoever permits no recognition of his flaws, be it man or nation, permits no redemption. We can be redeemed to the extend to which we recognize ourselves.”
But that redemption we seek lies beyond our own personal effort. It is offered to us by Jesus Christ. We find that redemption as we lay aside every sin which so easily besets us, by “looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” To try to go it alone is to rive the very self from itself. With Christ no longer at our center, we fall apart and lose track of ourselves.
The author of Hebrews tells us that as we run our race, as we make our pilgrimage, we should “consider Jesus.” I take that to mean that as we keep our eyes upon Him, we keep on track. I also take that to mean that when we avert our eyes from him, we begin to spiral downward out of control.
Consider Jesus. Put him at your side for the next seven days. Consider him.
For a moment think with me how influential the life of Jesus Christ has been upon human history.
Consider the lives that he has mastered, the deeds he has inspired. Consider the institutions that owe their founding impetus to him.
Consider the power of his name as it has been sounded in hospitals, at cemetery grave sites, in prison cells, in services of marriage and baptism.
Consider the affects of his presence–on the weak to make them strong, on the proud to make them humble, on the greedy to make them generous, on the evil to make them good, on the upright to make them loving.
Give him the test of absence. Imagine the poverty of a world without Him; without carols to herald His Nativity, without the impact of his life and the impress of his words, a world bereft of His cross and unsupported by the hope that issues from his resurrection.
As we launch out into Holy Week, consider Jesus. We see in the life of Jesus Christ the highest and best which anyone can achieve. And in seeing him, we aspire to rise a bit higher.
Prayer: Inspire our hearts, O God,
to follow where Christ walked,
Let us all take new willingness
to carry our cross
and be led through sacrifice and suffering,
but also to the glory and triumph
of the Risen Life of the Savior.
Grant us all your good graces,
Amen.