Day: April 13, 2025

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week. It is the beginning of one long liturgy which ends with Easter. In one sense we begin with joy and end in joy, yet there is a great difference. For between that beginning and ending is the spectacle of all our betrayals concentrated for us in the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity and fullness as proclaimed in the reading of all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion. “We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men”, Paul tells us (1 Cor. 4.9). But what kind of spectacle? One in which we are both actors and those who acted upon but in both senses through all of our disarray and disorder and in all of our folly and sin.

We cannot come to the greater joy of Easter without beholding ourselves as participants in the Passion of Christ, at once as those who cry “Hosanna” and those who then cry “Crucify”. And yet we are also those who going through the rigour of Holy Week may learn what the Centurion learned in contemplating the full meaning of sin and evil; as the end of the Passion According to St. Matthew puts it: “Truly this was the Son of God.” The point of Holy Week is that we are more than spectators, more than those who merely look on and then pass by, indifferent to what we behold and indifferent to everything else. We are the spectacle, meaning that we are what we behold. And only so can we be in Christ. It means beholding all that belongs to the contradictions in all our souls . We are in this story and in every way.

We go from joy and gladness to sadness and sorrow and then from sadness and sorrow to joy and gladness but with a greater intensity of both. While the beginning and ending of Holy Week seem to be the same they are not. There is a profound difference from the Hosannas with which we greet Jesus coming as King to Jerusalem and the cries of Alleluia at Easter. The difference lies in the spectacle of human sin and wickedness which this week unfolds in all of its dramatic intensity. “Your sorrow shall be turned to joy,” Jesus says. Only through the spectacle of sin and sorrow can we come to the joy and gladness of Easter.

(more…)

Print this entry