It is not every week that you wonder what it means for the author of life to die.
Or what your private sin has to do with the Creator of all things.
Or what really happens when all of this comes to an end.
Sin that you might normally brush off might weigh a little heavier this week.
You might resonate with Jesus—feeling at least a fraction of what he felt. Your own sorrow will find company in his.
Good Friday
All this he did for you.
In a cold, dark, room somewhere abroad a small group of naked, tired, hungry, and defeated captives are huddled in the corner.
They’ve lost count of the hours, days, weeks, and years since they've experienced anything close to a normal life.
One night, in the middle of a monsoon, an explosion sends a wooden door, now shattered to pieces, across the room. Light floods the room in the form of half a dozen headlamps. Over the ringing of damaged eardrums, the captives hear shouted commands and see choreographed responses. In the blink of an eye, a row of uniformed men approach the huddled captives, shouting something familiar, but forgotten.
The soldiers are shouting, but the captives don’t budge.
“We’re here to save you,” the soldiers scream in as many languages as they can muster.
Still no response.
Maybe it was the shell-shock. Maybe it was miscommunication.
Or maybe, as another prisoner of war once recounted, these captives have been tricked before. Others have come, claiming to rescue them. Most of them have been defeated. Some of them were nefarious; disguising themselves as Navy Seals before beating their captives senseless for attempting to leave with the enemy.
Time is running out, but the captives have been down this road before, fooled by a would-be savior, and this time, they don't budge.
It may surprise you to hear this, but Jesus of Nazareth was one of dozens of young Jewish teachers to be put to death by the Romans in and around first-century Palestine.
When Jesus of Nazareth’s followers fled the scene and locked themselves in a room following his arrest, they did so because they, too, had been down this road before.
Ingrained in their collected memories were visions of other would-be saviors who amassed a significant following before getting cross with religious and political authorities. Each messiah figure’s life ended the same way: execution at the hands of the Romans, and arrest or worse for his followers.
In the world of the first century, a crucified Messiah is a failed Messiah. And on that Friday afternoon, the disciples began to realize that the past three years of their lives had been spent following a failed Messiah, one who stands in a long line of other failed Messiahs.
When Jesus of Nazareth’s followers fled the scene and locked themselves in a room following his arrest, they did so because they, too, had been down this road before.
And yet here we find ourselves, two-thousand years later.
A Jewish messianic figure publicly executed by the Roman government would not make the back page of a first-century newspaper; how in the world did we wind up here?
The cross has become one of the most universally-recognized symbols on the planet, and Jesus one of the most universally-recognized names.
Why? What made the crucifixion of this Jewish prophet so different from the crucifixion of the others?
On that Friday, the Romans did not nail a revolutionary leader to the cross.
On that Friday, the Romans did not nail a teacher born centuries before his time to the cross.
On that Friday, the Romans did not nail a traveling wise man and miracle worker to the cross.
No.
On that Friday, as one Roman soldier realized moments too late, the Romans nailed God to the cross.
And when God is nailed to a cross, we must respond.
We could respond with detached pity, feeling sorry for Jesus but not knowing what to do about it.
We could respond with debilitating guilt, like Javert who could not even begin to grasp the grace shown to him by Jean Valjean.
We could respond with noise, drowning out the uncomfortable reality of the cross.
Or we could respond with silence.
Good Friday services end in silence, and many Christians spend part of Holy Saturday in some form of silence, too. Not just to remember the silence of the grave, but to reflect on the meaning of the Cross itself.
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Back in our cold, dark, room somewhere abroad, with our small group of naked, tired, hungry, and defeated captives huddled in a corner, the soldiers cannot believe the captives aren’t moving.
The stalemate continues for what feels like hours, until one of the soldiers stops screaming. He lowers his gun, takes off his own clothes, and crouches down in the corner of the room next to one of the captives.
His fellow soldiers are stunned. The captives hardly notice.
Eventually, one of the captives opens her eyes, and sees what the soldier has done.
One by one, some faster than others, the captives stand and walk towards their rescuers.
Words matter, but not as much as actions.
Do you want to know what God is like?
Do you want to know what God thinks about you?
Do you want to know whether God has love for you, despite what you alone know about yourself?
Look to the Cross.
For you Jesus Christ came into the world:
for you he lived and showed God's love;
for you he suffered the darkness of Calvary
and cried at the last, 'It is accomplished';
for you he triumphed over death
and rose in newness of life;
for you he ascended to reign at God's right hand.
All this he did for you, child, though you do not know it yet.
And so the word of Scripture is fulfilled: "We love because God loved us first.”
Maundy Thursday
Learning from Jesus “on the night in which he was betrayed.”
In first-century Galatia, a small but powerful group of teachers insisted that anyone who wanted to become a Christian must show that they are truly Christian through some outward sign. A very specific outward sign, in fact: circumcision.
After dismantling this argument throughout his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul proposes his own outward sign of the Christian faith. In what has since been dubbed the “Fruit of the Spirit,” he lists several outward signs (fruit) of a life indwelled by the Spirit.
According to this list, what is the very first thing you should outwardly notice in the life of a Christian?
Love.
Maundy Thursday is a celebration of two sacred moments in the life of Jesus, both of which are wrapped in love. The name itself comes from the Latin work for command (mandatum), since Jesus gives his disciples a new commandment on this sacred Thursday:
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.
This new commandment is shared in two ways, both of which are celebrated each year on Maundy Thursday.
First, Jesus washes the feet of his disciples. Jesus taught that the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. And then he followed through by assuming the role of a household slave. Peter’s initial refusal to have his feet washed, followed by his request for Jesus to wash his entire body has always struck me as capturing my own posture towards Jesus: an oscillation between full embrace and keeping what I deem to be an appropriate distance.
After washing their feet, Jesus shares a meal with his disciples. Maundy Thursday is about foot washing, but it is also a celebration of the institution of this sacred family meal.
New Testament scholar N.T. Wright points out something about that evening that is worth considering:
When Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.
Jesus is instituting a very specific meal in the Last Supper, one that has been celebrated every single day somewhere on the planet since the earliest days of the Christian Church. But what is true of the Lord’s Supper can also be somewhat true of each of our meals by extension. I love the prayer below, taken from Every Moment Holy, about all meals and what they can become for us:
Meet us in the making of this meal, O Lord, and make of it something more than a mere nourishment for the body.
What is true of all meals is most true of the Eucharist.
But that Thursday, and this Thursday, are about more than just a meal. When the Last Supper is revisited in 1 Corinthians, Paul reminds his readers that all of this took place “on the night in which he was betrayed.” The cross was on the horizon even as bread and wine were being shared amongst friends on the first Maundy Thursday.
The Last Supper was the beginning of the three most important days in the history of the universe, and so Maundy Thursday is the beginning of the three most important days in our Church Year.
May God use these days to equip us to live out the new commandment he first gave two thousand Thursdays ago.
Holy Week
This is no ordinary week.
A quick note before this edition of the newsletter: Holy Week culminates in a final service on Saturday Evening: The Easter Vigil. If you happen to be in the Dallas area this Easter, come see us at Church of the Incarnation for what I find to be the most moving of all services of the Christian Year. I will be teaching a History & Traditions class at 7pm ahead of the service, which begins at 8pm. Let me know if you plan to attend; seats fill quickly.
Because of our sophisticated watches and our ability to schedule our days down to the minute with the push of a button, it is easy for us to misunderstand what time is and how it actually works.
We tend to think of time as being evenly distributed. There are 24 hours in a day—in every day. So it seems right that any given hour or day or week must be the same length as any other hour, day, or week. More often than not it appears to us that all days are created equal.
Not only is this technically not the case universally-speaking, it is certainly not true experientially.
Some minutes last 60 seconds. Others last what feels likea lifetime.
Time can fly, or it can stand completely still.
Some things in our world take a long time to change. But your world can change in a fraction of a second.
Not all weeks are created equal.
And this is no ordinary week.
Just over two thousand years ago there was a single seven day period of time that has proved to be the most important week in the history—and even in the future—of the universe.
And this is the week where we take that week from the past, and drop it into the present.
Holy Week is the week of all weeks.
This week contains within it all that you and I should expect to experience as Christians.
It has its false hopes. Moments, like Palm Sunday, where it seems that all has been made well, until lofty expectations give way to reality.
This week has the loneliness of Gethsemane, the betrayal of a loved one, the abandonment of friends.
But Holy Week also has its Mondays. The mundane.
Holy Week begins today, but you might not fully notice it until Thursday night. We have a relatively normal Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday ahead of us.
The mundane. False hopes. Betrayal. Loneliness.
Holy Week contains all of this.
This week, if you allow it, will take you even to the depths of sorrow as the Son of God is nailed to a cross.
But only so that you can experience the highest of joys: the defeat of death and the hope of the resurrection.
This is no ordinary week.
But here is the catch: It can be, if you want it to.
You can go about your business, maintain your standing calendar. Tomorrow can be, for you, just another Monday.
Or you can embrace this Holiest of weeks.
If you do, you can expect to experience a few things.
First, you will think things that you normally don’t think.
This is a week to think about things you normally don’t think about.
But you will also feel things that you normally don’t feel.
Finally, and most importantly, if you embrace this Holy Week, you will become a little more like Jesus.
Or you will at least want to.
This is the goal of the Christian life.
Have this mind among yourselves—says St. Paul—which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
Perhaps more than anything, Holy Week reminds us that the Jesus we follow as Lord and King is also a wounded Savior.
It is easy to talk about being the hands and feet of Christ in a broken world.
It is harder to remember that those hands and feet still bear the marks of nails.
In the first century, as the persecution of Christians in Rome was growing increasingly intense under Nero, leaders in the Church convinced St. Peter to flee the city.
They could die, but surely their Apostle and Bishop needed to survive in order for the Church to continue.
As Peter made his way out of the city, he encountered Jesus, carrying a cross, making his way towards the city.
Quo vadis, domine? “Where are you going, Lord?”
“I am heading to Rome, Peter. To be crucified in your stead.”
An early Christian history called The Acts of St. Peter tells us that Peter got the message.
He returned to Rome, where he was crucified upside down.
Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus.
There are countless examples of this—some more intense, some far less—between St. Peter and our own day.
Why?
A willingness to be the crucified hands and feet of Christ is there throughout Christian history and today because of the hope of the resurrection.
Because, through Holy Week, we know that death is not the end. That we have a Lord who has gone before us, who fought the battle we could not win, even to the very depths of hell.
And that he came back.
All of this is here in Holy Week.
So make plans to experience it.
Go to church on Maundy Thursday as Jesus shares his Last Supper with the disciples and is betrayed.
Experience Good Friday afresh, playing the part of the crowd who shouted “Crucify him.”
Embrace the quiet, dark tomb of Holy Saturday.
And then join in the Feast of the Resurrection of our Lord.
It is not convenient. It will throw a wrench in your schedule.
But Jesus is alive and ready to meet you again in new and old ways this Holy Week.
Amen.
Every Friday is Good Friday
The seven day week as a microcosm of the Church Calendar.
The Church Calendar, beginning with the first Sunday of Advent and concluding with the Feast of Christ the King, is an intentional re-living of the life of Christ year after year.
In Advent we anticipate his Incarnation that we celebrate throughout Christmas. In Epiphany we recognize the many ways he revealed his true nature throughout the Gospels. In Lent we enter with him into the period of fasting in the wilderness. Holy Week is a slow, purposeful walk through the final week of his life. Easter—the longest of the Holy Seasons!—is a feast celebrating the resurrection of our Lord.
To follow the Church Calendar is to re-live the life of Jesus every year of your life.
But there are some things worth doing not just every year, but every week.
For as long as the Church has been the Church, Christians have used the natural rhythm of the seven day week to be formed—week after week—increasingly into the image of Jesus.
The seven day week serves as a microcosm of the Church Year.
So what is the seven day rhythm of the Christian week?
The Didache is a first century text that describes many areas of life for at least one early Christian community. Here is what it says about fasting:
But let not your fasts be with the hypocrites, for they fast on the second and fifth day of the week. Rather, fast on Wednesday and the Preparation (Friday).
In this specific church manual, the reality that Christians were regularly fasting was understood. The Didache simply gives a prescription for when to do so: Wednesdays and Fridays.
Why?
It was on Wednesday that Judas planned the betrayal of Jesus, and it was on Friday that he was crucified.
Throughout the ages, certain days of the week have been given special treatment by Christians, and these days often come with a prescription of sorts.
Not every day of the week has a set purpose or practice. The same is true of the Church Year, too. There are Holy Seasons and Holy Days, but there are plenty of ordinary days throughout the year also.
After all, if every day is special … then no day is really special.
Habit to Adopt: Over the centuries, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays have held a special place in the lives of the faithful. This year, pick one of the days below to specially observe on a weekly basis.
Wednesdays: Fast. This can be a skipped meal, or fasting from a particular type of food, like meat, sugar, or coffee. Or you could avoid eating all day. As you fast, keep in mind that one benefit of fasting is that you are strengthening your moral “no” muscle, or what the ancients called Temperance. As you say “no” when it doesn’t really matter—skipping a meal, for example—you are increasing your ability to say “no” when it matters most.
Fridays: Fast, and remember the Cross. Similar to Wednesday, Christians have often fasted on Fridays. This is most culturally noticeable throughout the season of Lent, when the McDonald’s Filet-o-fish returns to prominence. A collect for Fridays is below, and would be a wonderful prayer to say throughout your Fridays.
Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Saturdays: Rest, and prepare for Sunday Worship. This could take the form of a day-long rest—like fasting from a smartphone or screens—or it could be a simple act of preparation, like reading the lectionary texts for Sunday’s sermon or setting out clothes and making a simple breakfast ahead of time in order to make the “get ready for Church” routine a little less hectic. A collect for Saturdays is below, and would be a wonderful prayer to say as you prepare.
Almighty God, who after the creation of the world rested from all your works and sanctified a day of rest for all your creatures: Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties, may be duly prepared for the service of your sanctuary, and that our rest here upon earth may be a preparation for the eternal rest promised to your people in heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Sunday: Celebrate the Resurrection, and launch into the week. While there are countless biblical topics covered in Sunday services and classes, the Sunday gathering of the faithful is chiefly a celebration of the Resurrection of our Lord. Similarly, it is our weekly celebration of the Resurrection that equips us for the week ahead. Two prayers help capture these things. The first is a general collect for Sundays, and the second is the Post Communion Prayer: the final words prayed by the congregation before the service ends. Whether your church says these prayers or not, consider doing so yourself as you seek to more fully celebrate Sunday.
God, you make us glad with the weekly remembrance of the glorious resurrection of your Son our Lord: Give us this day such blessing through our worship of you, that the week to come may be spent in your favor; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Eternal God, heavenly Father, you have graciously accepted us as living members of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, and you have fed us with spiritual food in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart; through Christ our Lord. Amen.