Let us not enter Holy Week with reserved minds intellectualizing our faith, but let us be full of emotion with the audacity to break into a party that we aren’t invited to and pour expensive perfume over the feet of Jesus. Let us not fast for restrictions as to think we could earn the grace of God, but let us sin boldly knowing that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. We cannot earn God’s favor. No purity of heart, no purity of doctrine, no purity of ecclesiastically practices — for our purity can’t save us. The grace of Christ Jesus is what saves us and how how lavish that grace is. How can we keep from dancing? How can we keep from singing? How can we keep from emotionally crying at the cross and sitting with the disciples in fear on Saturday? Let us have the faith of Mary to wake up early on Sunday morning and join the first preacher of the Gospel and proclaim in our own lives “The Tomb is empty!”

Blessed Holy Week to each of you. Do not hold back. Let the emotions flow. 

Help us to experience you, living Christ, and not just intellectualize our faith. Move us this week. Through your Spirit. Amen.

On A Theme From Julian’s Chapter XX, by Denise Levertov

Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot wood, the nails, blood trickling
into the eyes, yes—
but the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived till after the soldiers
had come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why single out the agony? What’s
a mere six hours?
Torture then, torture now,
the same, the pain’s the same,
immemorial branding iron,
electric prod.
Hasn’t a child
dazed in the hospital ward they reserve
for the most abused, known worse?
The air we’re breathing,
these very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid upon the sky’s
moody ocean, we share
with women and men who’ve held out
days and weeks on the rack—
and in the ancient dust of the world
what particles
of the long tormented,
what ashes.

But Julian’s lucid spirit leapt
to the difference:
perceived why no awe could measure
that brief day’s endless length,
why among all the tortured
One only is “King of Grief.”

The oneing, she saw, the oneing
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies
—sands of the sea, of the desert—
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when he took to Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:

within the mesh of the web, Himself
woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.