Typically, the Toward’s Sunday email is to get us thinking about our time together on Sunday.
But not this week. This week is Holy Week! There is a lot to think about before Sunday.
This week is a time where we gather to remember what once happened in an upper room, in a garden, on a cross, and in the tomb. All before we get to Sunday.
And the dissonance is deafening.
To journey through Holy Week is to step, almost unwillingly, into a different way of thinking and being. To suspend our mindsets, to encounter something transcendent, something of revelation, something of mystery.
Maundy Thursday begins with intimacy.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus does not merely share a final meal; he kneels and washes feet. The one into whose hands the Father has given “all things” takes the place of a servant. In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the Passover meal is bound to Passover memory… liberation, covenant, deliverance, and the God who hears the cry of an enslaved people. Christian tradition has therefore long heard in the Last Supper both an echo and the liberation of Passover… a meal of remembrance, freedom, and divine faithfulness, now gathered up in Christ’s self-giving love. John’s footwashing intensifies the meaning of the night by showing that true Christlikeness is expressed in humble service of one another, not in domination or subordination.
This matters. This matters for you, this matter for me. This matters for the church.
Maundy Thursday is not sentimental. It is not “be nice to one another” with a meal. It is the unveiling of a new social order. The body of Christ is formed at the table and on the floor, in hospitality and humility, in the refusal of status or hierarchy, in the commandment to love as Christ has loved. To wash feet is to renounce fantasies of control. It is to refuse the theatre of prestige or personality and idolized leadership. It is to become a people who are not ashamed to serve one another in mutual love and care.
Then comes Good Friday.
Let’s rush past the horror of it. Crucifixion was not simply a painful death. It was a public, humiliating, political execution used by empires to terrorize, degrade, and make a humiliating example of the worst of criminals for compliance and control. Jesus is killed within the machinery of imperial violence and local political fear. Good Friday focuses us on a Christ who enters the full depth of the world’s violence, guilt, scapegoating, victimization, sin and suffering, bearing it in his own body on the cross.
Good Friday, therefore, asks more of us than private gratitude for the forgiveness of personal sins. It asks where is Christ being crucified now.
Where bodies are broken by war.
Where people are exploited for profit.
Where communities are displaced.
Where the sick are exhausted and unable to get care.
Where the lonely disappear in plain sight.
Where people sit at bedsides, in emergency rooms, in prisons, in refugee detention, in nursing homes, in homes marked by grief.
Holy week is an opportunity to lean into the dissonance of what this world is, of what our life is, of what our faith is…
Holy Week invites us as Jesus Followers to enter into a different way of thinking…
where bread becomes revelation,
where a towel becomes theology,
where a cross becomes the exposure of empire’s crushing power,
where a garden becomes the place of bewildered joy,
where tears and terror and wonder mingle.
where the old assumptions no longer hold,
where we begin to see that discipleship is not an “add-on” to ordinary life,
and where Easter is not simply a long weekend with the Easter bunny and chocolate.
So, what does it mean to be an Easter people right here, right now?
Let’s talk about it on Sunday.
~ Pastor Dustin
