The Holy Week Experience

Holy Week is always a tough time of year for me. It is the busiest time on the church calendar, is arguably the central festival in the church year, and requires a lot of time, creative effort, rehearsal and preparation. I pretty much always come out this time exhausted - even though I'm now working in a much smaller setting than I have in previous years.

In the midst of all this intensity and energy, though, there is also a personal journey going on for me. Because I am the facilitator of worship for other people during this time, I am drawn to explore the story, the Scriptures and the meaning of it all very deeply. Each year I seek out a new insight, a new point of connection between this ancient story and my current experience and spirituality. Then I try to communicate something of this to the people who gather at all the different events to meet with God.

This year I have been struck, again, by the extent to which Easter is not just the story of Jesus' betrayal, trial, rejection, execution, death and resurrection. I have seen myself over and over again in these events. I have been faced, on Palm Sunday, with my tendency to squeeze God into my own agendas, and my fickleness when God refuses to be my pet deity. Tonight, my church enacts a Tenebrae drama I wrote called Facing the Shadows, and in rehearsal I have been confronted with my own Judas nature - my attempts to force God's hand, and enlist God to my causes - often resulting in a betrayal of the Christ of the Scriptures, of the purposes and mission of God as I see them revealed in the Bible. I have seen, like James and John, my desire to gain power and privilege by association with Christ. I have recognised in some small measure, the Peter in me - unthinking,outspoken, but ultimately cowardly when following the difficult call of Jesus leads me into discomfort or threat.

But, thankfully, this is not all I have seen. I have also seen the outstretched hand of Jesus calling me to follow him into service of others, and deep love of all humanity. I have been invited to stretch out my own hands, and allow myself to die - to release and destroy all that keeps me from being the "mini-incarnation" of Christ that God calls me to be. And I have been offered the hope that however much I may be forced to acknowledge the darkness and evil that lurks in my own heart, there is a resurrection in progress - there is a life that God has breathed into me that is infiltrating my being more and more each day, and that is transforming my darkness into light.

Holy Week is a time to revisit the ancient story and worship in awe and thanksgiving at what Jesus was prepared to endure for our sakes. But, it is also a time to journey into the darkest parts of my own soul, acknowledge them, bring them to light, and watch them be healed and transformed, and be brought, a little more, into the experience, here and now, of the eternal, abundant life that Jesus came to bring.

Thank God for this season. And may it be for us a very uncomfortable, a very challenging and a totally liberating Easter.

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