This Sunday is Easter for those of us who follow the Christian calendar of the Western tradition. Easter is a week later this year in the Eastern tradition.
Holy Week is the most sacred time of our year. Maundy Thursday commemorates Jesus' Last Supper with his disciples. That night he washed his disciples' feet, the act of a slave. During the meal Jesus took bread and wine, blessed it and gave it to his friends, saying, "This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me." Later that evening he was betrayed and arrested. On the following day, which we call Good Friday, Jesus was brutally interrogated, tried, convicted, and executed by nailing him to a cross to hang until he died. Friends quickly buried his corpse in a borrowed cave-tomb. When the Sabbath ended Sunday morning, his disciples, beginning with some women, experienced Jesus as risen from the dead. His risen presence has remained with Christians to this day, especially in our experience of the sacred ritual communion of bread and wine.
Christians see this week's story as our frame for understanding much of the nature of reality. We see God acting in and through Jesus. Jesus experiences extreme human pain, evil and death. He responds only in love. His friends betray and fail him. His religion and the government condemn him to death. And he experiences spiritual abandonment from God. Yet he maintains an unwavering trust in active love. Something about that love is eternal, stronger than death.
Novelist-intellectual Dorothy Sayers said, "God did not abolish the fact of evil. He transformed it. He did not stop the crucifixion. He rose from the dead."
Christians believe that God is always bringing about something new, something good. It rises out of death in all of its manifestations. Deep in the fabric of reality there is something good working to bring about new life. Therefore, we can risk for the sake of good. We repeat the cry, "Fear not!" We can trust that the moral arc of the universe is indeed bent toward justice, which is the social form of love. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we choose to trust in love. That trust is what we call faith and hope. Faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13)
"All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well." Those words are part of a revelation given to Julian of Norwich in 1373 as she received last rites while suffering the pangs of death. She recovered to write and reflect on her visions for decades that followed. She lived during successive pandemics of the Great Plague, the 100 Years War and frequent political upheavals. Death and suffering surrounded her. Yet she was convinced: "All shall be well." And she became a healing inspiration to her generation and even to our day.
I believe we need vision and faith in our generation. We need to trust in a love that is stronger than death. We need to be courageous and hopeful enough to face the evil and brokenness in our day and to return only love.
We live in a time that shares some of the same misery and suffering of Julian's time. Our modern plague of covid has killed 6 million already, and we don't know how it will mutate. The Russian army commits war crimes, and Europe is on the edge of nuclear attacks. Authoritarian political leaders wreak abuse on every continent. The virtues of reason and truth are under withering attack from structures of disinformation. I can't remember a time when our nation was more divided.
It is good to walk the way of the cross during Holy Week. We remember that God is with us now in our suffering. God understands injustice and the lies that perpetuate it. God is with us within the shadow of death. And God is always mysteriously bringing about something new. God brings new life out of death.
Our part right now is to not lose hope. Trust. Trust in love. Bring courageous love to this present darkness. Love your neighbors, yes, but also love your enemies. Martin Luther King taught us. So did Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama.
We can be beacons of light confronting lies with truth, suffering with faith, fear with hope and injustice with love. This is a week when we remember to re-light that Way.