Dearly Beloved,
Here we are, in the Holy Middle. Given that the Sundays on either end are to a great extent joyous.
Palm Sunday with our shouts of Hosanna, with children waving palm branches, with remembering that holy parade of people marching through Jerusalem following a man on a donkey. I realize this last Sunday, we held some of the messiness of Palm Sunday -- the potency and potential of shouting and silence, the power of collective voices for wholeness and for harm, and the possibility held in silence to both refute the voices that need to be heard and also to hear the still small voice of Spirit speaking.
Easter Sunday when we celebrate resurrection -- the assurance that God knows our deepest suffering and is with us in it, the promise that not even death can separate us from God's gifts of life and love, and the good news that we are forgiven, that we are invited to begin again. And again. And again.
But, truly, we cannot understand either Palm Sunday or Easter without paying attention to the days in the middle. The Gospel according to Luke follows the telling of that Palm Sunday parade with an account of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem and Jesus cleansing the temple: "Then Jesus entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, ‘It is written, "My house shall be a house of prayer”; but you have made it a den of robbers’" (Luke 19:45-46). Jesus continues to teach in the temple, to offer wisdom through parables, to denounce the scribes, to comment on the widow's offering and to exhort all of his followers to stay awake and watchful (Luke 20 & Luke 21).
Then we get to Jesus and his disciples' keeping of the Passover meal -- a Jewish celebration of the Hebrew people's liberation from slavery, empire and oppression. We often associate Easter with liberation from sin, but the larger context is actually liberation from social and political oppression. We watch as Jesus includes his betrayer in the celebration of the Passover meal (you may note that Luke does not tell of Jesus washing his disciples' feet).
The story gets messy with disciples vying for greatness, falling asleep in grief as Jesus prays in the garden, cutting off the ear of the high priest's slave, betrayal, arrest, denial, mockery, and Jesus' trial. There is social and political intrigue, torture, and death.
Perhaps it is no accident that if we are simply attending church on Sunday, we need hardly pay attention to all of the betrayal, all of the violence, all of the weariness, grief, despair and pain of this week. Because it's hard to live in those spaces. We'd rather jump straight from Hosanna to Hallelujah! But we need these spaces for grief. These spaces to acknowledge that, like the disciples, we too deny Christ in our lives. Like the crowds, we too turn from "Hosanna! Save Now!" to "Crucify him!" That we, too are complicit in the death dealing power of empire. That we know the grief of losing someone we loved for whom and in whom we had so much hope.
So I want to invite you to pay attention to this messy middle, to all of the painful and difficult emotions and realities that this Holy Week holds.
And the promise that God is with us through it all. In the shouting of collective voices. In the weeping at the cross. In the silence of the tomb. God is with us.
I will be sending emails out each of the next three days, and I encourage you to engage with the scripture passages and reflections there, that you may journey more deeply in this middle space -- in the space between Hosanna and Hallelujah.
With love and hope,
Thandiwe
