Getting Ready to Pray
We are beginning Holy Week with this liturgy of celebrating our salvation. We prepare by taking little “holy moments” to experience our need for salvation. We are freed, not only from eternal separation from God, but our being separated from ourselves, our better selves, and by that, separated from being united with others.
We can pray with the various daily invitations to be faithful to the crosses of our humanity and those of others. We can reflect as well upon our acts of grateful fidelity to our families and friends and our world in direct imitation of the whole life of Jesus.
Some Thoughts
TS Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month. (The Wasteland, I) It has so many changes of weather. In our part of the world we can experience the warm sun today melting the snow which may have fallen yesterday. We have April showers that can bring May flowers, but also can bring cloudy days within our spirits.
It is somehow fitting that the April begins with a “Fool’s Day,” the history of which is also cloudy. Here in the north, April is the start of the growing year, so it is a beginning not an ending. Spring is the new experience of time and of the life it promises.
It is a prayerful coincidence to be recalling a kind of new-year, new life’s coming. Jesus’ life can be seen as an act of foolishness. He did some strange deeds and said some things which made people laugh or usually sneer in anger. Love is foolish at times and does strange things and goes beyond the usual, the socially acceptable.
We have several couplets in our liturgy of Palm Sunday. There are two parades described in the Gospels for this Palm Sunday’s liturgy. One is a parade that leads into Jerusalem, with Jesus’ being welcomed and proclaimed. We could view him as doing a foolish thing as he enters the city of His arrest, suffering, and death. This leads to the other picture where Jesus leaves Jerusalem days later in disgrace and abandoned. The Liturgy of Palms and the Liturgy of the Passion bespeak this duality of our human response to God throughout history. Sometimes we welcome him in and other times we push him away.
The First Reading for the Eucharistic liturgy features a submissive prophetic figure who is given to speak, but suffers for what he knows. In the Gospel, we hear Jesus not rebelling, not turning back. The words are his personal truth and not a defensive argument. Jesus’ words are a handing over, of his teachings, his body in the Eucharist, his spirit on the cross. Judas hands him over as well, but refuses to take in that spirit.
The reading from Isaiah speaks of innocence and Jesus lives his own way of doing “no harm” while walking through the shame and guilt which surround him. This is the major contrast then, the gentleness of Jesus colliding with the human resistance to purity and truth.
We could just rest in the soft comfort of guilt and embarrassing shame; but that is too easy and too secular. We can more simply and personally be there and let it all be done unto each one of us again for the first time. We do not have the openness to take it all in at once, but we can allow some part, some word or action to embrace us this year. We pray with the words which Jesus must have spoken, “forgive them, for they know not what I am doing.”
Christ Jesus, though He was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.
Rather, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave.
(Philippians 2:6)
