Today we enter the holiest week of the year. If we travel through it taking each day as it happens we are in for an emotional rollercoaster. But as we go through it we find that on each day there are some important connections to be made with how life really is for us.

Today we sing Hosannas in praise of a king riding on a donkey. Kings on donkeys may sound an odd illusion, after all donkeys are not animals we associate with pomp and great triumph. But to first century Jews the image would have been very clear. There is a psalm that refers to the king, the promised Messiah, riding on a donkey, a colt that has never been ridden, and this was the sign that he was the one they were looking for and longing for. The message is transparent. ‘You have been looking for the Messiah, the promised one, well here he is.’

We have the prospect of our hopes and dreams being fulfilled. We take the one who looks like they fit how we want things to be and are elated. But there is a surprise in store. Jesus doesn’t fulfil our dreams as we expect, he transforms them. So while we sing hosannas for the prospect of promises being fulfilled, in the distance stands the cross and our neat plans will be disturbed. We remember this in palm leaves, which were waved in jubilation, but are today bent into the shape of the cross. God refuses to fit our agenda. He fulfils in his own way and that is not how we expect, though it does exceed all that we could and do desire.

The Jews expected a great military leader and got a crucified king. They expected someone who would drive out the Romans and what happened was very different. His victory was over death and his kingdom everlasting without geographical or temporal limitations. But that is all in the future as we journey through this dramatic and most amazing of weeks.

We continue through the week. We see Jesus overturning money changers tables, a bit of revolutionary action, and this looks promising. The struggle has started. Well it has, but not in the way they were expecting. There is a celebration meal, a banquet fit for a king. Then in the middle of it he does odd things. Jesus takes a towel and starts washing the disciples’ feet. The top man does the lowliest job. The way of service and giving is how we imitate Jesus. We are not to lord it over others, concerned for our status, but are all to be imitators of this servant king. He takes bread and wine and gives them a new significance which we now know as the Eucharist, the Communion.

We have the agony in the garden. We see Jesus wrestling with something that he does not want to face and his anguish at coming to terms with this. It doesn’t take much imagination to find links with that.

Then it all goes down hill rapidly, or at least appears to. There is betrayal, a mob lynching as Jesus is arrested. Peter denies knowing Jesus to save his own skin. Everyone who should have stayed with him and stood by him runs away. He is left alone and isolated. Only the women and John are prepared to be identified with him, but only then when it is far too late and he is hanging on the cross.

We have Good Friday and the day he died. So many have found links with this passion. The mothers who like Mary have known the agony of a child’s death share her pain. The moments when we have felt that we have been crucified, that we have been broken by the actions of others, by the crosses they place on our shoulders that we can’t bear. There are the moments we fall and need a stranger like Simon of Cyrene to come to our aid; The moments of death and of something special dying. These are our Good Friday moments. Like the women who wept for Jesus, in truth we weep for ourselves. Death is part of life and we wonder at its mystery.

There is the astounding cruelty of those who devised crucifixion and those who carried it out. Sometimes human beings can act in ways that are so cruel as to defy our comprehension. The hatred and the sheer indifference to the sufferings of others can come in different guises, but it is always a denial of the image of God in which we are created. We can analyse the psychology of it but with each blow of the hammer we are forced to confront the darkness within.

There are the moments when we have seen something we thought was going to last for ever come to a sudden end. There are shattered dreams and crushing moments of utter desolation.

He dies and as he does we face the silence that is death. We also find that for some life goes on as normal. Some are untouched, some weep, some mock, some are ashamed. Some have jobs to do, some just stand and embrace one another for support.

Jesus is buried and there is a gap in the story. Nothing much happens. We jump from the burial to Easter Day, but the gap, what we call Holy Saturday, is an important day to hold. We tend to lose it because we spend it decorating the church for the Easter celebrations. But there is something about holding that day of neither dying nor rising, but being stone cold.

If some experiences are like being crucified and some like the joy of Easter where new life comes where previously there was death, then there are others, sometimes long ones, that are neither being crucified nor rising. They are the being flat and waiting for the Easter that will come. Jesus is with us in these moments as he is with the crucifying and also the jubilation and the elation of looking to promise being fulfilled.

The promises do not really feel fulfilled until we get to the Easter experience, whatever form that takes. But as we go through the others, they carry the promise of fulfilment and therefore its hope too because he is with us and we find connections between our story and his story.

This week is the most holy of all weeks. It also touches some of the most profound experiences we have and through that we are assured of God’s presence even when we might be tempted to think he is absent.

© Ian Black 2004

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