Holy Week (1)

This is Holy Week for the Western Church, next week is Holy Week for the Eastern Orthodox Church; whenever it is observed, whether this week or next week in 2018, our focus should be on Jesus and not differences within the Church. Perhaps we could make the best of things by observing Holy Weeks? Hopefully those of us in the Western Tradition will pray for our Eastern brethren next week, and hopefully this week they’ll be praying for us. Won’t it be nice when we are all on the same page at Christ’s Coming?

While Paul does indeed teach that we no longer observe “days and months and seasons and years” (Galatians 4:10) as a means of self-righteousness or attempting to please God by our “works”; and while he also teaches that we are not to allow others to judge us (be worried about what they think?) regarding “a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day” (Colossians 2:16); Paul also writes (Romans 14:5 - 9):

“One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord, and he who eats, does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who eats not, for the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God. For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.”

So I think we have the liberty to live in an awareness of the calendar, of the cycles of life, and to pay particular attention to particular facets of life during particular times and seasons, after all, God said that one of the roles of the heavens above is to be, “...for signs and for seasons and for days and years” (Genesis 1:14). Let us employ our liberty in Christ Jesus in glorifying Him and being a witness to the world.

Holy Week begins on Palm Sunday (the day Jesus entered Jerusalem to the acclamation of the crowd) and concludes on Holy Saturday (the day before Easter) - this is the standard timeframe. I confess that I visualize Holy Week as an eight-day week, beginning on Palm Sunday and culminating on Easter - on the eighth day a new creation came out of the Tomb, a Second Man (1 Corinthians 15:47; John 12:24). As St. Augustine understood it, the experience of the Head of the Body is also the experience of the Body, the Head and the Body (the Church) cannot be separated. From Good Friday through Resurrection morning there is a particular continuum in Christ that we participate in, and this continuum, this organic identification in Him and with Him, is critical to the Gospel and to our life in Christ. Living rooted in Christ’s death and resurrection allows us to consider ourselves dead to sin but alive unto God (Romans 6:11).

“For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.

Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 6:5 - 11).

This is the way Christians are to think, and speak, and teach. And based on this we read:

“Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.” (Romans 6:12 - 14).

There is a sense in which Holy Week is a celebration of a New Creation, all things were created by and through Christ in Genesis (the first time), and all New things are created by Christ via His incarnation, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost (the second time).  To be sure this second creation in Christ is being visibly worked out in Christ through His Body, the Church - that which is already is not yet, but the “not yet” is being eclipsed by the “already”.

“In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us. In all wisdom and insight He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth.” (Ephesians 1:7 - 10).

The fact that we have “redemption through His blood” enables us to participate in God’s orchestration of chronos and kairos in Christ, through Christ, and unto Christ.

We may ask ourselves what it would have been like to witness God’s creation of the world in Genesis Chapter One, and many Psalms and other Bible passages give voice to the wonder of God’s creation, and it is indeed something to contemplate and meditate upon - for God speaks to us through creation.

But let us also ask what it would have been like to have been present at the Second Creation, to have walked this earth in Palestine during Holy Week; to have been present on Palm Sunday, to have been in the Upper Room on Maundy Thursday, to have stood on Golgotha on Good Friday, and to have been with the women on Easter morning and with the men that evening.

Beyond this, let us ask ourselves on which side of the Tomb we are living today. Are we living in the First Man (Adam) or the Second Man (Christ)? (Romans 5:12 - 21; 2 Corinthians 5:14 - 21; Galatians 2:20). The portal to the Tomb is the Cross, and we will not know what it is to see the stone rolled away if we do not know what it is to know Jesus Christ on the Cross. We enter the Tomb via the Cross, and then having been raised from the dead we live by the Cross in the power of His resurrection. We die daily as we live to Him - this is more than chronology, this is more than a series of events, this is a Way of Life in Jesus Christ, this is life in the Trinity.

This is the Big Bang that really matters, the Life of God in Christ exploding into the lives of men and women and forming a New Creation, His People, His Church, His Body - “the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:22 - 23; 2:19 - 22; 4:11 - 16).