Holy Week

Yesterday marked the beginning of Holy Week, the week where Christians celebrate the passion, death, and Resurrection of Christ.

The main days of the week are Palm Sunday, which we celebrated yesterday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and then Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night, and Easter Sunday itself. The Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, make up the liturgical season called the Triduum.

It is always fascinating to look at the liturgy for these days, and later on in the week I will tell you a little about the beautiful liturgies the Catholic Church will be celebrating. But for now I would like to tell you a little bit about what it means to me personally.

This week, I see Jesus at His most human. He experiences the cheers of the crowd at a time when it seems nothing can possibly go wrong, but we also see Him at His lowest, rejected, abandoned, murdered. In our own lives, we face situations where we experience comparable emotions. We feel like we are on the top of the world, everything is going right. And then things crash. We wonder where it all went wrong, why this is happening to us. It may seem that everyone has abandoned us, or worse, totally turned against us. We may even feel that this is the end. In some situations, people may even wonder what they have left to live for.

Jesus experienced all of this during the first Holy Week. He rode in triumph into Jerusalem, the people waving palm branches and cheering for Him, believing Him to be the Messiah, long-awaited by the Jewish people. However, by the end of the week, the cheers of “Hosannah” turn to shouts and jeers of “Crucify him! Crucify him!” The closest friends of Jesus, His Apostles, are nowhere to be found. He is forced to face His death completely alone. Where did it all go wrong? What did He do to deserve this? One moment He is at dinner with his disciples, and it seems like, the next moment, He is dying on a cross.

We can follow each moment of this week, and take the pain in our life, and we can unite it with His sufferings. The good news of all of this, as we know, is that the story did not end with His death. A far greater moment is yet to come. And we can pray and believe that it will come in our own lives, too. But we must travel with Jesus through all the pain to get there.