Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ:
Holy Week focuses our minds and hearts. If we pay attention, the rites we observe will surely jar us out of any complacency we might have about the significance of Christian faith.
This is the week we focus on some deep questions. For example: Who can make sense out of the suffering of Good Friday, a commemoration of a horrific event of an innocent man, humiliated, tortured and executed by the authorities of his day?
And how do we make sense out of the miracle of Easter Sunday? The resurrection event is a challenge to what we know from experience. When we mourn those we love there is no way to avoid the seeming finality of it all. We weep because we don’t see, hear or enjoy them anymore.
Yet Christians make sense of the world with this drama of death and resurrection. We see it in so many everyday ways. Perhaps we’ve experienced it in our own families or in our own life: the widow who confronts grief and learns that life still holds simple pleasures; the divorced, who find a renewed spirituality after the end of a relationship that once defined their world; the struggling immigrant or the unemployed person who discovers that people of faith, even strangers, are there to offer a helping hand.
This week we are challenged to hear the ultimate death and resurrection story in a renewed way. The narratives we will hear and enact are filled with relatable characters. Think about the apostles who sleep in the garden while Jesus prays in anguish: Can we relate to them, reflecting upon our own weariness? Peter, the future leader of the church, denies Jesus three times. How often are we willing to say things to go along, to deny our own beliefs when they are unpopular? Women are the first witnesses to the resurrection. Why did Jesus reveal himself to those who were considered unimportant in his day?
We have so many opportunities to reflect this Holy Week. My hope is that the rites we will observe in our parishes throughout South Jersey will renew our faith. At a time when nature at springtime bursts forth with God’s creation, may we awaken to the miracle that this annual reflection by the church on death and resurrection is but a glimpse, dim images in a mirror, of the Easter glory we will one day experience.
May God continue to bless you and guide you.