holy week

A courtroom sketch shows former President Donald Trump in court for an arraignment in New York City on April 4.

A courtroom sketch shows former President Donald Trump in court for an arraignment in New York City on April 4. REUTERS/Jane Rosenberg

On Maundy Thursday of Holy Week, we remember how Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Passover meal, transforming it into what we now celebrate as communion. The word “maundy” originates in the Latin mandatum, in reference to the mandate Jesus gives his disciples that night: “A new commandment I give unto you that you love one another” (John 13:34). Just before the meal, Jesus engages in an act of loving service and humility: washing the disciple’s feet.

This selfless act contrasts sharply with the shameful spectacle that has dominated recent news: the indictment and arraignment of former President Donald Trump.

An illustration with a bright orange backdrop that shows a hand with dark skin touching the stigmata in the middle of Jesus' palm.

rudall30 / Shutterstock

IN 1633, THE Bavarian village of Oberammergau experienced a miracle. The villagers had promised God they would stage a reenactment of the passion of Christ if they were spared from the plague. They were spared. Nearly 400 years later, people continue to come from around the world to see these performances. But there’s a problem. Oberammergau’s passion play is one of the most antisemitic artworks in European history. Adolph Hitler viewed the play in 1930 and 1934 and recognized its propaganda value for his own plan of Jewish genocide.

Christians today may still perpetuate anti-Jewish racism throughout our passion narratives — particularly when the gospel of John forms the core of the lectionary. Unlike the others, John’s gospel frequently labels anyone opposing Christ as “the Jews.” Most of us realize that the writer is naming a subset of religious leaders. But when we repeat the phrase throughout Easter, we can subconsciously reproduce and amplify antisemitism found in the Christian theological imagination.

Recently, rather than ignoring the passion play’s antisemitism, the director worked with the American Jewish Committee to rid the play of anti-Jewish tropes. The 2022 Oberammergau passion play told a more complete Easter story. “The Jews” now include Jesus and his followers too. Jesus lifts a copy of the Torah to pray the Sh’ma Yisrael. Hebrew prayers were recited over the Last Supper. Mary is greeted as the “rabbi’s mother.” Significantly, the updated version calls Christians to repent for how we’ve failed our foundational sibling relationship.

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

Today begins the Paschal Triduum, the three days leading up to the celebration of Easter and Jesus’ triumphant resurrection. This year in particular, Holy Week is a reminder that we often have to linger in some suffering and struggle in order to fully appreciate the joy of Easter Sunday’s deliverance and liberation.

The growing uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic has left many feeling frustrated, losing hope and faith in God, life, family, love, finances, or something else. Even some of the most ardent believers in Christ will have moments when faith falters, when you’re lonely and exhausted, where grief grabs ahold of you, when all that you’ve believed feels empty, and when you can’t see beyond the pain to grasp hope. How do we keep moving forward when the resources on which we depended vanish? This Good Friday and Easter will be like no other. And even though the coronavirus has made planning our lives and Holy Week a bit more challenging, we must not lose sight that the Easter season is truly about hope.

Jim Wallis 4-09-2020

Photo by Bruno van der Kraan on Unsplash

Easter was never meant to go back to normal; but was, and still is, intended to make all things new.

For Christians, it means the proclamation of release over suffering, hope over despair, and life over death. Still, there is no special immunity from COVID-19 granted by physically gathering to worship God.

Jim Wallis 4-09-2020

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

We need to walk together, day by day, through the days of this holy weekend — in the midst of this modern plague. Here I offer my map for that journey.

Michael Conner 4-08-2020

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Our bodies, entombed and separated from each other by our social distancing efforts, will be stuck in Saturday. 

Rebekah Bled 4-07-2020

Credit: Shutterstock

Christ’s life among us has always included both his and our bodies.

Jim Wallis 4-18-2019

Smoke rises around the altar in front of the cross inside the Notre Dame Cathedral as a fire continues to burn in Paris, France, April 16, 2019. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer/Pool

Holy Week for Christians represents a dramatic movement from pain to hope. We deeply feel and lament the pain Jesus Christ endured for us, but we also feel our personal pain and the world’s pain. Then we rejoice as that pain gives way to the eternal hope that is always available to us through the resurrection—a hope that is not just for ourselves but for the world. We say “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!” with a joy that surpasses understanding.

Jamie D. Aten 4-12-2019

Each spring Lent is a season on the church calendar, beginning on Ash Wednesday and concluding on Easter, which prepares Christians for Easter. The believer prepares his or her heart to celebrate Christ’s resurrection by embracing practices of prayer and repentance. An important part of experiencing Lent is walking through lament.

Martin L. Smith 2-25-2019

THE SENSE OF SMELL is intimately enmeshed with memory centers in our brains. Humanity’s experience of the evocative power of scent is not fanciful. The bereaved hang on to their loved one’s clothes, to inhale their unique scent, to flood themselves with recollection.

As we celebrate Holy Week, we can evoke the memories created by Mary of Bethany when she anointed Jesus with luxurious nard, six days before his final Passover. “The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume,” we will read in John 12. Her lavish gesture, wasting this fabulously expensive Indian cosmetic, was to be ever linked with the excessiveness, the far-too-muchness, of Jesus’ own willingness to throw his life away on the cross. The theme of excess is taken up in John’s pointed note about the vast quantity of spices—a hundred pounds!—lavished on Jesus’ corpse before burial. When the disciples entered the empty tomb at dawn, the gorgeous aroma must have been overpowering. Perhaps the reluctance of so many to accept the empty tomb and the implications of the apostles’ testimony is related to a reductionist instinct, a recoil from divine excess. Judas was disgusted by Mary’s excess—and there are those who think that the bodily resurrection is incredible because it is over the top. Surely, they say, the idea of the exaltation of Jesus’ spirit, the resurrection as strictly metaphorical, seems more than satisfactory without anything actually happening to his corpse! But God exceeds through excess.

Guy Nave 3-29-2018

Image via Shutterstock/bakdc

As a follower of Jesus, I am acutely aware of the painful paradox represented by the fact that thousands of self-proclaimed evangelical Christians supported, and continue to support, our nation’s current president. These same evangelical Christians have historically resisted attempts to pass any sort of commonsense gun control legislation (although the tide is shifting).

Juliet Vedral 3-28-2018

I firmly believe that every aspect of life is designed in some way to draw us deeper into spiritual intimacy and give us a better idea — however limited it may be — of what God is like. As a single woman, I felt invited to experience God’s longing for relationship with humanity. When I was unemployed, I felt drawn into God’s deeper story that transcended the one I wanted to tell about my life.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Stefano Rellandini

Pope Francis used his traditional Easter Sunday message to call the bombing of a refugee convoy near Aleppo, Syria, a “despicable attack”, and urged world leaders to “prevent the spread of conflicts” despite mounting tensions in Syria and North Korea.

In his Easter blessing, known as “Urbi et Orbi” (“to the city and the world”), the pope urged the faithful to remember “all those forced to leave their homelands as a result of armed conflicts, terrorist attacks, famine, and oppressive regimes.”

Joe Boland 4-13-2017

Image via RNS/Catholic Extension/Rich Kalonick

When I asked Father Guy Wilson what the children of immigrant parents are telling him, amid the current inundation with media chatter, political rhetoric, and executive action on the topic of immigration, tears welled up in his eyes and one fell on his clerical shirt.

“It’s hard,” he said. “They are so scared.”

“Some of the teenagers have told me: ‘My parents are good people. They have never even had a traffic ticket. Why would anyone want to take them away from me?’”

Pope Francis washes the feet of some inmates at the Paliano prison, south of Rome, Italy April 13, 2017. Osservatore Romano/Handout via REUTERS

"We are all sinners. We all have defects," the pope told the inmates, in an improvised sermon broadcast by Vatican Radio.

By washing their feet, Francis told them, he was willing to do "the work of a slave in order to sow love among us". He urged them to help each other.

Two of the 12 are serving life sentences, and the others are due to be released between 2019 and 2073.

Joe Kay 4-12-2017

In God’s kingdom, everyone serves and everyone is served equally, no exceptions. Even the betrayer. Even the denier. Even the abandoner. Even the person who lives differently and believes differently. Even the person we simply can’t stand. Even the ones we consider unworthy.

Adam Ericksen 3-24-2016
Judas Iscariot. Engraving by Shyuble.

Judas Iscariot. Engraving by Shyuble. Oleg Golovnev / Shutterstock.com

One of the many things that I love about being a progressive Christian is the frequent emphasis that Jesus is our brother. He’s one of us. He took on the fullness of humanity.

The joy and the hope and the friendship and the love.

But also the pain and the anger and the grief and the suffering.

Jesus, the One who was fully divine was fully human. Our brother. Our friend. It’s a beautiful thing.

Indeed, Jesus is our brother, but what about Judas? This Maundy Thursday, let us acknowledge that Judas is our brother, too.

Eric Barreto 3-23-2016

Image via Valentina Calà/Flickr

In the space between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, between the acclaiming of Jesus as a king and his execution as a threat to the political order, I was no more ready to read the news this morning. The stifling, exhausting repetition of violence and terrorism is both all too common but still shocking. And yet, I hope that Christians in particular can draw upon the narrative arc that moves us from Jesus’ triumphal entry to his seeming defeat on Calvary.

Kylie Beach 3-23-2016

Image via /Shutterstock.com

"Instead of preaching, perhaps what is more appropriate is, in fact, confession of how hard it is to actually love our enemies,” says Pastor Jarrod McKenna.

Though this video reflection for Common Grace’s Love Thy Neighbour campaign was filmed a few weeks ago, its pre-scheduled release today goes right to the heart of enemy love and offers a Christian response to terrorism in the days after shocking attacks in Brussels, Istanbul, and elsewhere.

“This teaching is the most often quoted teaching of the early church, because it is the teaching that sums up the cross the easiest,” he says.