Holy Week

by Bob Setzer, Jr.
As this column is being written, the church is in the midst of Holy Week. But though the dark shadows of Good Friday yet loom, there is no doubting how the story will end. On Easter Sunday, Jesus will rise with the dawn to vanquish the darkness of sin and death, so on that blessed day we will gather to sing and shout our Alleluias.

The journey of Lent--the forty days preceding Easter--is a time to enter more deeply into Jesus’ suffering and passion.  During Lent, we revisit Jesus’ challenge to Jerusalem--and us--as he unmasks our hypocrisy, pride, and willful blindness. Seeing the escalating tension, we feel the tightness in our stomachs as the story rushes toward it terrible climax. On Palm Sunday, we leave the top of Poplar with heavy hearts. As one child told his mother, tears streaming down his cheeks, “They killed Jesus again!”

 But throughout the journey, however intense it grows, we know the story will not end at Golgotha but at the Garden. For there, through an opening created by an empty tomb, hope and healing will spill out to a broken world.

It’s a little like watching a classic movie we’ve seen time and time again. Knowing how the story will end does not prevent great drama from speeding up our pulse or bringing tears to our eyes. Rather, knowing how the story will end allows us to bear the disappointments and tragedies of the drama in a new way. We feel less fear and foreboding. We may weep, but ours are tears of sadness, not of desperation.

We are an Easter people living in a Good Friday world.  Disappointments, struggles, tragedies, and injustice assail people of faith like everybody else. The difference is that Easter people know how the story will end. Somehow, God will find a way. Somehow, God will bring new life in the face of every death.

The great Methodist evangelist, W. E. Sangster, suffered from multiple sclerosis. As his life neared its end, the progressing illness claimed the muscles in his throat. It was a sentence worse than death: an ardent preacher, unable to speak.  Refusing to be silenced, Sangster celebrated Easter from bed by penning these words: “It is a terrible thing to wake upon Easter morning and have no voice to shout, `He is Risen!’ It is more terrible to have a voice and not want to shout, `He is Risen!’”

Sunday morning, we will gather at the top of Poplar in full voice for we are an Easter people. Before every broken heart and shattered dream, we know to shout: “The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed!” Jesus lives! God is yet writing the end of the story.