A Message for Holy Week 2018

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

It is once again Holy Week, the most sacred, mysterious, and difficult week in the Christian year. Why difficult? Priests and other clergy will tell you it’s difficult because of the sheer number of services; it’s no accident that most of them take the week after Easter off, after having given services in some cases every night Monday through Friday, a Saturday night vigil, and several services on Easter Sunday.

But others might also tell you that the week is difficult because the subject matter is difficult and emotionally taxing. If you don’t know quite what I’m referring to, I’ll make it plainer: Holy Week tells a story, the central story of Christianity, known as the Passion Narrative—the word Passion derives from the Latin passio, meaning suffering.

So this is "Suffering Week," a week that recalls the following events, in brief: Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday triumphantly, being hailed as a King; but soon the story changes tone, as it becomes clear that Jesus’s disruption of the social and religious order will result in his execution at the hands of the Roman Empire.

He humbly washes the feet of his disciples on Maundy Thursday, leaving them with a new commandment, to love one another. He shares a last meal with them, blessing the bread and the wine and telling them that every time to remember him every time they eat the bread and drink the wine.

He prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, asking God to take away the cup of suffering he is about to undergo; he is betrayed by Judas, one of his disciples, denied by all of his followers, undergoes a hasty trial under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and, on Good Friday, dies a lonely and violent death on an instrument of torture the Romans had devised, using two crossed beams of wood upon which the victim was nailed to ensure a slow, agonizing death of asphyxiation.

Holy Week forces us to confront difficult questions, questions most of us would rather not face: why do the innocent suffer? What does their suffering mean? And, in this specific instance, why and how does the Cross become the central image of Christianity, one that somehow is transformed from an image of pain and suffering to one of devotion and love?

Ultimately, I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what the cross means. Theologians and scholars have spilt gallons of ink and reams of paper attempting to do just that. There are theories, postulates, scholastic arguments. It is difficult to tell, but it is easier to show.

It looks like a woman who cares for her mother, even in the midst of the ravages of Alzheimer’s, even though she can’t even remember that this woman is her daughter. It looks like this woman’s patience, her frustration, her anger, her sadness. It looks like her love.

It looks like a young person who takes time out of her busy schedule to visit a nursing home and play bingo with the elderly, to give them the time, dignity, and respect that they don’t often get in our culture.

It looks like gratitude, peaceableness, service, respect, humility.

It does not look like the violence, warfare, and hatred that, tragically and ironically, has been perpetrated in the name of Christ and using the symbol of the cross.

It looks like a man named Dom Christian de Cherge, who was the abbot of a Catholic monastery in Algeria in the 1990s. He and his fellow monks ran a medical clinic for the local Muslim population and assisted them in whatever way they could.

They shared in the life of their Muslim friends and neighbors, learning from them about their shared faith in the one benevolent and loving God, learning about but not dwelling upon the differences that were also present between their religions. They mourned when their friends mourned, and celebrated when they celebrated. Then, in the midst of a wave of radicalism sweeping the country, they faced a stark choice: to flee, leaving their friends and neighbors vulnerable, or to stay, risking the possibility of their own deaths in the process.

They decided to stay, a difficult decision but one they made together, as a community. They were eventually carted off, not knowing their ultimate fate, which indeed turned out to be death.

Dom Christian wrote a powerful last will and testament, a letter that demonstrates better than I ever could what I believe to be the meaning of the cross of Christ, of Holy Week, and of the redemptive power of love.

He says, first of all, that “If it should happen one day—and it could be today—that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church and my family to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country. I ask them to accept the fact that the One Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure.”

Dom Christian foretold the fact that his own death would be, perhaps, recognized and noted by the outside world, but he wanted to make clear that he stood in solidarity with all those whose “equally violent [deaths were] forgotten through indifference or anonymity.”

He praised the faith of his Muslim brothers and sisters, making it clear that the terrorists who had captured him had nothing to do with the humble, kind, and benevolent Muslims he had grown to love so dearly in his own community.

Finally and most strikingly, he addressed his own killer: “And also you, my last-minute friend, who will not have known what you were doing: Yes, I want this THANK YOU and this GOODBYE to be a ‘GOD BLESS’ for you, too, because in God's face I see yours. May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both. AMEN! INCHALLAH!”

Dom Christian and his fellow martyrs are soon to be made saints in the Church. Their willingness to open themselves up to a radical, life-changing love for their fellow humans, even those of a different faith, and even their captors and killers themselves, was inspired by the cross of Jesus Christ. They saw in that cross Jesus opening his arms wide enough to embrace the whole world. They lived the reality of Holy Week in a way that few of us would have the courage and grace to follow.

This kind of love is forgiving, nonviolent, risky, vulnerable, hopeful, and sorely needed in our world today. Wherever we find people with the courage to love those different from themselves, to sacrifice their time, energy, and resources for the betterment of others, to be servants of others, seeking their good rather than their own good: we find the meaning of the cross. It is indeed difficult to explain, but you will know it when you see it.

Amen.