What's So Holy about Holy Week?

Holy Week begins. Holy? How can we call this holy. But pilgrims early on began to follow what would become in time Holy Week. Burchner has written that the word holy meant that the meark of God was there. Throughout it all carrying his cross up those cobbled streets Jesus fell not once but three times. Still he once again stood and shouldered that splintered cross and stumbled on . We know the rest of the story.

Holy I think means that God was in the whole thing. Isaiah had prophesied:’Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” And if this is true it means that Jesus is one with us too. Through it all: the hell, the madness, the depravity and evil so unbearable we have to turn away. Think Ukraine. I don’t know how they keep going. But even now desperate in every way—grief on top of grief—many of them hungry, ragged and frightened will enter some church or what is left of that church. They will kneel and look up at what is left of the wounded crucified.  And somehow they will shuffle out to the bombs and dead neighbors and raped women. Is this holy? How can this possibly bear the mark of God. 

And yet we call it holy still. But what if this holy week talk  is not about just one week. Could it be that this mark of God is on all of it. Which includes us too. I hope. I hope.

God did not take Jesus’ pain and agony away. Even when he cried:”My God, my God why?” he was one with us. So every hospital room and every prison cell and all those living under some bridge in a paper box is not left out. God, I think is there.

Amid the Palm and celebration in church today I looked up at my favorite stained glass window. The burning bush. Flames all over the tree. And I remembered Moses, murderer and reprobate tending sheep one day when God spoke. “Moses take off your shoes you stand on holy ground.” Moses must have thought he was losing his mind. Holy ground—there. There? With rocks and scorpions and stubborn sheep and back home a wife who gave him hell. Holy ground? A bad joke.

I leave a home or hospital room and wonder how they can make it—whatever terrible thing it is. But I see many of them a year later and they have more than survived. Isn’t this holy too? Maybe the gospel song is true after all: “We are (all) are standing on holy ground.” No wonder churches everywhere have picked the song up. For people know whatever thing that they bear and don’t think they can stand it another day just might be standing on ground that is holy too.

We want to box in this holy to church or synagogue or mosque. But that doesn’t’t seem to fit Ukraine or all those in every town that suffer…suffer….suffer. 

I leave you with a wonderful story. A.E. Hotchner wrote a biography of Ernest Hemingway.  He called it Papa Hemingway. Gary Cooper and Hemingway were good, good friends. And Cooper developed cancer and it got worse and worse. But Hemingway was having electric shocks treatments in Idaho and could not possibly see his friend. So he asked  Hochner to take Cooper a message.

So Hotchner went to Cooper’s room. And death was not far off.  Cooper was racked with pain. And when the pain had passed Cooper reached over and picked up a crucifix and put it on a pillow beside his head. “Please give Papa a message. It’s important and you mustn’t forget because I won’t be talking to him again. Tell him…that time I wondered about my baptism and doubted that I had made the right decision”—he moved the crucifix little closer until it touched his cheek—“tell Papa it was the best thing I ever did.”

Strange gospel really. Palms and alleluias and choirs singing their hearts out—ushering in this week we call holy. But let us remember if this is true no ground is not holy. And God is always there.

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com